Laura Nugent / Palmer Falls

Laura Nugent is a Kansas City-based artist whose work explores color, pattern, and the transformation of everyday materials through painting, drawing, and installation.

She holds a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at AIR. Gallery in New York and Mana Contemporary in Chicago, with commissions for Hallmark, the DeBruce Foundation, and Pinnacle Bank. In 2026, she was a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellow at Art Omi’s Visual Arts Residency in Ghent, New York. She was also nominated for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women to Watch 2027 exhibition.

Time leaves its traces in the things we make, the materials we use, and the histories we inherit.

In Palmer Falls, Laura Nugent transforms salvaged industrial paper into cascading expanses of color and pattern. Dyed, painted, and joined with tape and pins, its fragile surfaces take on the warmth and richness of woven cloth. Each

piece carries the marks of its previous life alongside the patient labor of the artist’s hands.

The exhibition takes its name from a waterfall on the Hudson River that once powered a paper mill where generations of Nugent’s family worked. The material that sustained their lives now occupies her own, connecting the rhythms of industrial labor with the slow, repetitive gestures of drawing and painting.

For Nugent, time is both an inheritance and a finite resource, measured in generations, working hours, and the uncertain future of the spaces where art is made.

Throughout the exhibition, she will continue drawing in the gallery, bringing her studio practice into public view.