Nikki Pike is an artist who moves easily among multiple media– printmaking, sound, steel, wood, concrete and more, she deliberately chooses materials to match her ideas. Often humorous and always insightful, Pike explores both our relationship to the environment and to one another by making work that demands interaction and response. Her early Sound Totems began as guerilla art with a series of solar-powered music boxes. Each had a small, inviting door that, when opened, played songs by local musicians. In 2017 she began an on-going series of large sculptures
made of tree bark in various shapes from oval to geometric. Suspended overhead, or on the ground, and sited outdoors in Colorado, Kentucky and California, she describes these pieces as “echoes from the forest”. It’s a poetic description that mirrors what viewers feel when confronted by these monumental, but human-made, objects constituted from the outermost skin of trees.

By the mid twenty-teens, Pike was observing a profound social shift, a growing
climate of resentment towards immigrants, women, people of color, LGBTQ, and
non-Christian religious groups and she began incorporating words into her work. In
a nod to Woody Guthrie’s radical ballad, she made a neon light piece that turned his
title into a question, asking is this land your land. In 2019, Pike responded to a call
for artists to create temporary sculptures on an empty monument base in downtown
Denver. Instead of creating a physical object, Pike used her funding to pay local
artists to perform on top of the empty plinth. At the conclusion of her piece, the city
didn’t want an empty base left in a public space, so Pike responded by creating WE,
her first word piece made of steel and designed as a monument.

During this period, Pike was particularly moved by Yoko Ono’s late 1960s
installations created during an earlier era of social turmoil. Struck by Ono’s Ceiling
Painting which consisted of a tall ladder that precariously led viewers to a small ‘yes’
inscribed on paper near the ceiling, Pike felt that now again, a public stance against
negativity was needed. She began making a series of prints on paper with the
statement Yes Means Yes as a declaration of positivity towards oneself and others.
For this large, steel piece Pike stripped her earlier phrase down to its simplest
component–YES. It is a response to our current, very troubling times of alienation
and division. The artist acknowledges that “YES is utopian. It’s aspirational—a
permission and an imperative: yes, to equal pay, equal access and equal treatment.”
She adds, “I want to offer the yes after years of no because yes gives consent; it
implies opportunity and collaboration.”

The sculpture is a potential antidote to xenophobia, both a call to action and a
reminder that the affirmative and the welcoming is something as innate to us as our
fears. As a social cue, writ large and placed in the downtown center of Boulder,
YES is needed now more than ever.

Frances DeVuono May 4, 2026