Nichole M. Gray is a mixed-media artist based in Bronxville, New York. She studied English and art at Wesleyan University and received her MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1994.

Gray’s work brings together color, texture, photographic imagery, pattern, and rhythm to explore Black history and culture, memory, family, pride, love, and connection. A storyteller and educator, she is particularly interested in the ways stories and histories are carried forward—not only through images and words, but through pattern, repetition, and music. From field songs and drum rhythms to blues and jazz, music informs her work as a language of memory, survival, resistance, celebration, and joy.

Her visual language was shaped early by her grandmother’s upbringing in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and by the art, sewing, and decades-old collection of fabrics that were part of her grandmother’s life. Those materials and memories became part of Gray’s understanding of pattern, inheritance, history, and family, and continue to inform the layered surfaces of her work.

During the 1990s, Gray exhibited and taught in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Her early projects included the solo exhibition Reaping the Roots at Anne Arundel Community College, public art in Baltimore, and curatorial work for Baltimore’s Artscape, including the 1998 exhibition Secrecy. She also served as an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Howard University and taught at other colleges in the region.

After stepping away from the gallery circuit for many years, Gray continued working creatively through bridal design, writing, and education. She has since returned to a sustained studio practice and to exhibiting her work. In 2026, her solo exhibition, Stardust Is a Map, was presented at the Tamar Hendel Gallery at Create Arts Center in Silver Spring, Maryland