Daily Inspiration: Meet Nicole Leth

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Leth.

Hi Nicole, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I was born in a sleepy town in Iowa and started creating art and writing as a way to navigate a traumatic childhood. From the very beginning, art was my healing process in visual form and it was a way I could tangibly learn about creative resilience and practice creating beauty where the was none. In a lot of ways, I think creating art from a young age gave me tools to digest the world and understand self-reliance and self-parenting.

I lost my father to suicide when I was 17 after a long and immersive battle with addiction, mental illness, and codependence. That life event became a catalyst and created the trajectory in which my art practice became a career. I moved away from my sleepy hometown, enrolled in art school in Kansas City, and made a promise to myself that I would spend the rest of my life trying to put art into this world that made real humans feel love and compassion, and strength.

I’ve spent the past decade researching the human healing process and creating public artworks, writings, community events, speaking, and teaching to create soft spaces for real human beings to heal and face trauma with compassion. My art practice has looked like a lot of different things, but the intention has always been to leave this world a more compassionate place than when I found it.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
When I create work, I rip my heart open and share it with the world because that is what feels real and important, and meaningful. My art has taken the form of many different projects over the past decade and some of those projects allowed me to find a lot of success and exposure while still very young and naive.

Some of the biggest struggles for me have been experiences of trusting the wrong people and getting hurt, stolen from, and taken advantage of professionally and personally. Some of the biggest struggles for me have been learning that letting people hurt you, steal from you, and take advantage of you is not “love”.

I’m getting better at compassionate boundaries in both business and personal life. These struggles have given me more agency, awareness, and resilience and I’m grateful for that.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My work involves creating public Affirmation art and posting it anonymously around the world.

This initially started when I was 17 as a direct response to my father’s suicide — I would take spray paint and go paint affirmations on abandoned buildings around my hometown. It felt purposeful and important and beautiful to put compassion into the world when I was grieving. It helped me cope with my trauma and heal. Every time I painted new words I hoped it would help someone else hurting, too.

I kept working on this and realized that I wanted to do more with it. It slowly grew to me creating Affirmation stickers and leaving them places, and then postcards, and then fliers. In June of 2019, I rented a billboard in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and posted an Affirmation I had written on it. I didn’t tell anyone I was going to do it, I just did it. It felt real and important and raw and I hoped that it would make a difference in the life of at least one person.

Since then, I have put up over 600 different Affirmation billboards worldwide with help from donations and corporate sponsors. I have flown Affirmation airplane banners and semi-truck bulletins around cities. I hand address and send out 5,000+ anonymous Affirmation postcards in the mail to strangers around the world every month. I paint Affirmation murals, take out Affirmation ads in the newspaper, post Affirmation wheat-paste posters around cities, make Affirmation quilts for communities, and design Affirmations to float around coastlines on billboard boats.

I’ve started working for hire to create Affirmations for businesses, start-ups, and corporations to implement into their workplaces and branding. I work with schools, prisons, rehab facilities, and community centers to create Affirmations that support their communities. I do all of my public Affirmation art anonymously — my name, or any company name, is never on these Affirmations. I want them to exist as random acts of kindness that are accessible and available for real humans in this world who need them.

I work on this project as my full-time job now, and I feel like I’m finally doing what this life wanted me to be doing all along. In June 2020, I won a lifetime achievement award in honor of my Affirmation Billboard project, and I think that is what I am most proud of.

Who else deserves credit in your story?
My teachers, therapists, friends, co-workers, partners. Everyone who has been part of my human experience deserves credit — they impact me and love me and heal me and teach me, and this work is not possible without them.

Contact Info:

• Email: hello@soft-studios.com
• Website: myaffirmationproject.com
• Instagram: @affirmationbillboards

Image Credits
Caroline Adams, Joe Carrota