Nick Cassway is an artist-in-residence at the Tacony LAB, and he’s experimenting with some pretty neat stuff in the historic neighborhood. Read on to learn about Nick’s artistic philosophy and the exciting work happening in and around the LAB.

Carly: I’d love to start out by hearing about you as an artist: tell me about your style and your path.

Nick: I’ve always made stuff, and I come out of a creative background. My mom is a painter, my dad’s an architect, so all I ever wanted to do as a kid was to draw and to go to art school – which I did, and I graduated from Tyler School of Art in 1990 with a BFA in painting.  I studied abroad in Rome for a year, which was awesome, and since graduating from art school in 1990, I’ve lived in Philadelphia and have been steadily involved in the art scene in the city, making my work and showing my work.

I started an independent curating group called Dissentia, and we called it a “guerilla curating group” because we did all kinds of unusual projects – like stuff in a Uhaul truck, a show in a bathroom, and a show where you could steal all the artwork. I was involved as an artist and then, eventually, as the executive director at Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, which no longer exists, but was Philadelphia’s oldest co-op artist group. I was a director for 6 years, we moved from Old City up to the Crane building then did some really fun programs, like a pirate radio station. I like doing projects like that, pushing boundaries.

My inclination as an artist is always to do something bigger and more involved, a lot more conceptual. Which takes me to the present, where I’m actively developing experimental surface design, like wallpaper and textiles.

I also teach design, graphic design, editorial design, and brand identity full-time at Drexel University’s Design and Merchandising program. My artwork is very heavily influenced by design, and I see myself as a painter and a designer. Part of my artistic vision and my artistic philosophy stems out of this need to communicate, which is kind of taken from the world of graphic design. With my students and the clients that I work with, I focus on who are you speaking to and what are you saying. When you’re working with clients it’s usually a little more straightforward, but when I’m working for myself it can be a lot more freeform, but my philosophy still is that it needs to resonate. There needs to be this acknowledgment that someone is going to look at it, even if it’s just one person. It needs to resonate on some level, and it needs to have some kind of meaning. Everyone goes “what does it mean, what does it mean?” but it needs to have meaning and that’s a component of my artistic philosophy.