New Energy + Local Legacy = Standout Talent

This Week In Focus: Nicole Lachele + Chris Levitt

Nicole Lachele is an artist based in Southern Colorado whose work explores themes of resilience, transformation, and femininity, often drawing on her own personal struggles and inner conflicts.

Drawn to anime, video games, and everything mythical from a young age, she developed a passion for art that continued into adulthood. Building on this foundation, she returned to art full-time in late 2024 with renewed purpose, recognizing it as essential to her well-being. At that time, she began learning and working in watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.

Her work today combines contemporary portraiture with illustration, pop art, and fantasy, exploring a variety of mediums as she develops her own unique style.

Nicole’s Artist Statement:

This series reflects a period of transformation, drawing on imagery from Sylvia Plath’s writing, most specifically The Bell Jar. These paintings explore the experience of choosing later than expected, yet making a choice nonetheless, and committing, imperfectly, to a new path despite uncertainty and fear.

I first encountered The Bell Jar and Plath’s fig tree metaphor during a time of major change. Though I had achieved many of the things I had long sought out and dreamt of, I realized I had no clear sense of who I was outside of being a mother, wife, sister, or daughter. Always something to someone else, I felt I had no identity of my own.

Plath’s image of the fig tree, with each fruit representing a different possible life, captured a fear that had been difficult to articulate: choosing one path meant losing all the others, and waiting too long could leave you nothing at all. I had made my choice long ago, and now could neither reclaim the past nor step into the future.

Realizing how closely I related to her work, and knowing how her life ended, forced a shift in me. I could no longer stay suspended in possibility. The longer I ruminated on the past, the longer I would remain there, doing nothing, wishing I’d done more. As important as being a wife and mother is to me, I felt an all consuming need to pursue my dreams as an artist, so I ate the second fig.

Chris Levitt

If you’ve been around the gallery you’ve encountered the work of incarcerated artist, Christopher Levitt. He is a self-taught Michigan-based artist whose work in graphite, colored pencil, and acrylic paint reflects both technical skill and lived experience. He began making art in 2010 while serving a life sentence in the Michigan Department of Corrections, developing a practice rooted in discipline, expression, and transformation.

From 2021 to 2024, Levitt’s work was featured through the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a longstanding program supporting incarcerated artists. In 2021, he received an honorable mention in the 25th Annual PCAP Art Exhibition, further recognizing the strength and impact of his work.

In Pueblo, Levitt has become a respected and familiar name. His piece “Hard Rock” earned first place in Colorado State University Pueblo’s Black History Month Student Art Show, and in 2023, the sale of his artwork helped raise funds for incarcerated students through the first annual CSUP Levitt Fund Scholarship Art Exhibit and Fundraiser.

Beyond his own studio practice, Levitt is deeply committed to mentorship, helping other incarcerated individuals learn to paint while continuing to advocate for greater access to art and arts education through his ongoing work with CSUP.

Chris’s Artist Statement:

As an incarcerated artist, I create art that exposes the injustices by the American Criminal Justice system against those who populate its so-called correctional institutions. In this effort, each of my paintings brings to light unique narratives that would otherwise remain unseen behind the fences and concrete walls that conceal state propagated violence, rape, drug trafficking and forced labor. In the creation of these paintings, I utilize a hybrid style that emphasizes the real but abstract nature of the incarcerable experience to create images that are confrontational, provocative, defiant and telling.  

To capture the raw emotion of these unique narratives, I ask my fellow incarcerated brothers, trans sisters, and non-gender conforming comrades to tell me their stories as I paint. As they speak, my hands go to work giving their words form through the manipulation of acrylic paintings with brush, pallet knife and fingers. I depict them as solitary figures and use body language and nonverbal signaling to give voice to their individual stories. I also invite them to take part in the creative process. I encourage those I paint to pick up a brush, palette knife, or finger in protest for their own right to freely express themselves creatively and to leave their mark on my paintings. My goal here is to help them feel human in an inhuman place by validating their feelings and experiences through creative expression.  

As an incarcerated artist, I also create art to help expand incarcerated persons’ access to art and art education through such initiatives as The Levitt Fund. This is a scholarship created by me in partnership with CSU Pueblo that helps provide a safe, encouraging space for incarcerated students to find, exercise, and develop their creative selves. This scholarship is available to incarcerated persons through CSU Pueblo’s Independent Studies. This scholarship is funded in part by proceeds raised through the sale of my art.

New works of Christopher Levitt and Nicole Lachele will be on display beginning First Friday April 3rd, 2026. Opening from 5pm-8pm. Free to the public.