About THE STUDIO
EL NIDO: A curatorial and artistic practice
El Nido is an artist-led curatorial and research practice based in Los Angeles.
Founded as a space for exhibition and exchange, El Nido has evolved into a more intimate and sustained inquiry—where writing, conversation, and artistic practice unfold in relation to one another over time.
The program is guided by a commitment to slow looking, close reading, and the exploration of landscape as lived experience—inner, outer, and relational.
Exhibitions are presented seasonally, emerging from an ongoing process of research and reflection. These presentations are not conceived as isolated events, but as moments within a larger unfolding—where ideas take form in space, and where artists, texts, and materials enter into quiet dialogue.
Between exhibitions, El Nido remains active as a site of study, writing, and exchange.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Victoria Chapman is the founder of El Nido and VC Projects, artist-led curatorial platforms based in Los Angeles.
Thank you for landing on this page and, in some small way, into my life. Curiosity has always felt like a beautiful place to begin — the start of conversation, connection, discovery, and sometimes even transformation.
I was born in England and later moved with my family to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Since then, I’ve lived between different landscapes, atmospheres, and cultural rhythms — between England and America, the East Coast and the West Coast — experiences that quietly shaped how I understand place, memory, perception, and the role of the creative life.
My work exists somewhere between curatorial practice, writing, conversation, and artistic research. I’m interested in the spaces where art intersects with philosophy, literature, landscape, consciousness, and the human condition. Over time, I’ve come to think less in terms of exhibitions alone, and more in terms of creating environments for reflection, inquiry, and encounter.
As an artist, my early work moved through painting, sound, writing, and performance. I painted on long facsimile scrolls, composed music through drawing, created field recordings, and performed experimental sound works with fellow musicians. I also wrote experimental theatre and long-form textual pieces exploring language, repetition, atmosphere, and perception. Looking back, many of these early explorations continue to inform how I curate and write today — particularly my interest in process, rhythm, intuition, and interdisciplinary dialogue.
Before founding VC Projects in 2014, I spent many years working within museums, galleries, and creative environments devoted to the arts. I curated collections and spaces for the hospitality industry before later working as a gallery director, experiences that deepened my understanding of how art can shape atmosphere, emotional experience, and everyday life. I also contributed to institutions including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Laguna Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, and departments within the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. For seventeen years, I served as Art Director for Daniel Fine Art Services, curating collections for luxury hotels and private spaces.
In 2014, I founded VC Projects, an independent curatorial platform devoted to interdisciplinary dialogue and artist-centered collaboration. In 2021, I founded El Nido by VC Projects in Los Angeles — a private art space functioning as an evolving studio, salon, exhibition space, and site for contemplative exchange. Through exhibitions, essays, interviews, gatherings, and long-form conversations, I aim to cultivate slower experiences of looking and thinking within a culture that often asks us to move too quickly.
My writing moves between contemporary art, art history, literature, spirituality, and lived experience. I’m deeply interested in how artists sustain a creative life over time — how practice becomes not only production, but also a way of seeing and being. Certain ideas continually return to me: alchemy, atmosphere, silence, perception, memory, devotion, transformation, and the poetic potential of everyday life.
Italy has become an important part of my ongoing creative life. Through collaborations with Casa Regis: Center for Culture and Contemporary Art, Villa Emma, Villa Cernigliaro in Biella, and Villa Magnani in Valle Cervo, I’ve continued developing projects centered around artistic exchange, retreat, conversation, and site-responsive thinking. These environments — mountains, forests, historic villas, gardens, shared meals, and long evenings of dialogue — have profoundly shaped my understanding of creativity, attention, and presence.
I’m also interested in how different creative disciplines intersect and nourish one another. Through ongoing collaborations and gatherings, including Tea with HILMA — a theatre company based between Los Angeles and Toronto — I continue exploring the shared space between visual art, performance, literature, conversation, and atmosphere.
Alongside curating and writing, I regularly participate in close reading courses with Enclosure Academy, studying texts that move from the medieval world into modernism and beyond. Working with Professors Stacie Vos and Jeffrey Stuker has been a meaningful catalyst for reflection and expanded ways of thinking — less centered on rigid criticality and more attentive to resonance, interpretation, and the poetic dimensions of language.
I continue to be inspired by language and its many forms of communication, regardless of medium — whether through literature, conversation, sound, visual form, performance, silence, or the subtle atmosphere a work of art can create.
Day to day, my life is often quieter than people imagine: meditating, reading, writing notes, visiting studios, editing texts, long conversations with artists and friends, walking, observing light, rearranging books and objects, preparing exhibitions, drinking tea, listening deeply, and remaining open to whatever unexpected thread appears next.
In many ways, everything I do returns to one ongoing question:
How can art help us remain awake to ourselves, to one another, and to the mystery of being alive?
1028 1/2 N. WESTERN AVE, LOS ANGELES, CA 90029