Maison Nandi

Maison Nandi is the fine art house of textile artist, painter, and jewelry designer Nandi Makala. Founded on a desire to nourish emerging artists, Maison Nandi fosters interdisciplanary collaboration between artists from disparate historical, artistic, and cultural backgrounds and explores how ancestral craft and visual culture inform contemporary art.

A graduate of the National School of Fine Arts in Angers, France, and LISAA Fashion School in Paris, Nandi Makala began her artistic career by creating works that blended traditional textile practices, such as embroidery, stitching, and crochet, into works that question the weight of tradition on present generations. Her work centers on a deep love for her Congolese and Cote d'Ivoire ancestry and how memory survives in an increasingly globalized world affected by complex, often chaotic geopolitics. Makala's diverse use of materials and interest in synthesizing textile arts with contemporary questions of heritage and identity naturally attracted the attention of other artists transcending their lived experience in unstable environments through art, resulting in the creation of Maison Nandi.

Ousseini, a jeweler from a large family of Tuareg artisans in Agadez, Niger, is Maison Nandi's latest collaborator. Like Makala, Ousseini draws from a rich familial and cultural history to create artworks that honor ancestral memory through the modern, free-spirited interpretation of form, color, and material.