Nico King
Email:
nking@ucsd.edu
Website:
https://cargocollective.com/nico-king
Biography:
Nicole Theresa King is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose practice bridges modern landscape history, design speculation, and materialist ecological thought. Her current work examines the environmental aesthetics and crisis imaginaries of Southern California in the twentieth century. The research asks how horticultural design, leisure infrastructures, and colonial ecologies produced a modernist design paradigm that fused image and infrastructure into environmental imaginaries. It examines how these forms unravel the politics of nature in the Anthropocene amid contemporary ecological distress.
Nico’s research challenges landscape as medium, material, and infrastructure. Publications include articles and book chapters on post-industrial mining landscapes (jovis, 2014; IUAV, 2012), crisis technologies in Southern California gardens (ifk now, 2025), and the culture industry of horticulture (Metroverlag, 2014), and parks as monuments, social design ideals, and political dimension (Callwey, 2015; Edward Elgar, 2018; Stadt+Grün, 2018).
Trained in art- and design-based research, Nico holds an MLA/M.Sc. in Landscape Architecture from BOKU Vienna (2012, with distinction of excellence), where her thesis examined Johannesburg’s post-industrial gold mine dumps as novel urban infrastructures, tracing their material and symbolic toxic legacy within apartheid urbanisms and conceptualizations of nature. A second master’s thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (MA 2012, with distinction of excellence) investigated the spatial politics of Shoah memory in post-Nazi Austria in comparison to Israel. Whereas postwar Austria reconstituted itself as victimized nation despite its role as perpetrator, Israel emerged as survivor state. This contrast provided a lens for analyzing how the presence and absence of evidence shapes public monuments and materialities of memory.
Prior to arriving in San Diego, she received the START Award for Young Architects and Designers from the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2017-18). Her residencies include SOMA Mexico (2019) and at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2016-17). Nico is a current ifk Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies at the University for Art and Design Linz (2025; 2025-26), and was a Wilbur R. Jacobs Fellow and a Mellon Fellow at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (2023–24) and the recipient of a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in Landscape Architecture from the Department of Fine + Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (2020-21). In 2025-26, Nico is an ifk Junior Fellow abroad and a visiting scholar at Humboldt University Berlin’s Matters of Activity. Image Space Material Cluster of Excellence and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Munich University.
At UC San Diego, she is currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice. As a specialization student in the study of human origins at CARTA, she explores the role of plants and gardens in the evolution of human habitation. She received the Annette Merle-Smith Fellowship (2020-21) for performing at the highest level in the Graduate Specialization.
