Nesting

Conceived during the artist’s residency at Sugar Hill Museum and shaped by her experience of pregnancy, Nesting leans into the biological impulse to build, adorn, and protect—a drive shared across species, histories, and homes. Birds, with their flamboyance, musicality, and instinct to create shelter, are a key inspiration. For Wood, the nest becomes not just a place of comfort, but a method of worldbuilding.

Nesting presents sculpture, painting, and installation that collage real and imagined spaces where humans, nature, and creative processes intersect and take root. Wood’s sculptural installations, made from found and fabricated objects, frame nesting as an ongoing negotiation between interior and exterior life.

Wood’s dreamlike paintings imagine lush, surreal interiors animated by plants, animals, and human presence. Separately, she draws inspiration from The Nest, a historic Harlem jazz club that welcomed non-segregated audiences and became a haven for Black expression. There, music and costume transformed performance into collective shelter—improvised, relational, and alive.

Grounded in the integrated vision of Broadway Housing Communities—which brings together affordable housing, early childhood education, and the arts via The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Wood invites us to consider how we create spaces—both physical and emotional—that hold vulnerability, care, and transformation.

Across these works, Nesting blurs the boundaries between the intimate and the social, the bodily and the ecological—inviting us to imagine how we make space for life, for inspiration, and for one another.

Natalie Collette Wood is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of nature, memory, and the built environment through sculpture, installation, and collage.

Wood creates public art and installations that incorporate organic materials such as moss and flowers as well as found objects, utilizing traditional craft to address contemporary ecological concerns. Her tactile process—layering natural elements with cast forms, digital prints, and recycled materials—produces whimsical, immersive environments that invite viewers to reflect on cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. Using materials that are both ephemeral and long lasting, Wood questions how humans inhabit, shape, and in turn are shaped by their environment.

Wood has had solo exhibitions at Freight + Volume Gallery, Andrew Freedman Home, and Montefiore Gallery. She has shown in numerous group exhibitions including those at Bravin Lee Programs, New York Botanical Gardens, Wave Hill, Lehman College, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Nesting is Natalie’s first museum solo exhibition.

Jesse Bandler Firestone is an independent curator and writer based in New York. His work explores conceptual art, emerging trends, queerness, institutional critique, and exhibition-making as a form of social practice. He has produced over seventy commissions across installation, performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

He currently serves as Curator for Residency Unlimited’s NYC-Based Artist Residency Program, working with artists investigating the forces shaping contemporary life—from planned obsolescence to sex work and the gig economy. He is also Curator and Community Affiliate at Kunstraum LLC and has upcoming curatorial projects with Below Grand.

Previously, he was Curator at Montclair State University, where he reimagined the university’s exhibition program to emphasize interdisciplinary academic engagement. From 2017 to 2019, he was part of The Shed’s founding curatorial team, where he developed commissions for its inaugural Open Call program.

Firestone’s writing has appeared in Sculpture Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Slate, and in catalogues including a recent monograph on Jwan Yosef (Baron Books). He holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the School of Visual Arts.