I first met Nicole Iverson when she reported for work in my life drawing class in 1995. She describes herself as “a deep feminist, raised by deep feminists.” Having grown up in the suburbs of New York City, Nicole was accustomed to a far more diverse demographic than one found in Old Dixie. Her thick black hair and bronze complexion seemed exotic to pallid southerners.
“Coming from New York, I had just never seen only black and white and no other shades of anything. People would ask me, ‘What kind of Mexican are you? What kind of Indian are you?’ And I’m like—”The kind that eats ravioli? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of us . . . I just felt so completely out of place. I’d ask them, ‘What’s your background, what’s your ethnicity?’ and they would say ‘I’m a white American’. And I’m like, ‘That’s a cheese. That’s not an ethnicity.’ They just didn’t grasp it at all. It was interesting. When I was a kid, I got called an ethnic slur, but nobody I knew did that because there’s a derogatory term for everyone.”
Nicole later entered a graduate program in the Rocky Mountain west, where she continued to work as a nude model at universities, and for artists in the region
“I worked with a photographer who taught a nude photography class. I hung some photos of me in my bathroom. People would see them and say, ‘Oh . . . you model nude. Isn’t that uncomfortable?” And I would say ‘not for me.’ It never has been. I love an all-over tan and prefer to swim in the nude. My favorite beach is at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. What am I covering up, and for whom? When society tells me to cover up—it’s sexualizing my body, at a time and a place where I don’t feel sexual—so don’t view me as a sexual object. . . I love the work that I’ve done, and I’d love for it to be seen. And if people aren’t into it, well . . . there are plenty of people who’ll approve of me, and plenty who won’t. I’m okay with that.”
