Meet Gabriela Noelle

Thanks for sharing your story with us Gabriela. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was born and raised in Miami, Florida and always had an interest in art – my family is very artistically inclined from my interior designer mother and architect father to my great grandmother who juggled running her father’s potato farming business in Cuba while painting avidly. In middle school and high school, I enjoyed art classes and became intrigued by the idea of how to turn painting from something of a hobby to something profitable. At age 14, I began painting on tote bags, gifted a couple to friends and before I knew it, sold over 300. I invested those profits into a successful jewelry line carried by local boutiques, salons, gyms and trunk shows. It was the accessibility of these art pieces that I enjoyed and the connection I made with my community while selling them. This entrepreneurial spirit led me to Parsons the New School of Design in New York where I studied strategic marketing and management and graduated with a Business Administration degree.

Upon returning to Miami from New York, I launched a furniture collection with my mother – my indoor lucite and Tibetan lamb swing among the most popular which was featured in various national publications. After five years of creative direction, production management and traveling to various trade shows, I began focusing on the development of fine art, mostly through the medium of laser cut and CNC-routed acrylic (lucite). My first solo show, Imaginary Friends, with LNS Gallery in Coconut Grove in 2018 featured over 40 unique works and told a story from the perspective of a child from the future excavating fossils of extinct species and recreating them in synthetic materials to share his discoveries.

Today I consider myself a multi-disciplinary artist. I create sculptures but I’m also very passionate about creating functional art, artistic objects, and furniture that create opportunities for play for the user.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
When I was in Parsons studying business plans, branding and marketing, defining a target audience..etc. I thought starting a successful business would be as easy as following these guidelines. I felt inspired and began a streetwear line called REX which featured a dinosaur logo on hats, chains, t-shirts pins and other accessories. The mission was to “indulge the inner child” and inspire people to “respect existence” by looking back at our planet’s past species. I dove right into production and had thousands of hats and packages made, attended multiple events wearing my hats, made cold calls, sent my line sheets to countless stores and invested in a website hiring two web developers from my school while micro-managing every detail. The brand just didn’t take off, at least not how I expected, and the inventory became a disheartening symbol of my failure. In retrospect I realize I didn’t leave any room for spontaneity and forgot to enjoy the process and even practice what I was preaching – I forgot to play along the way and indulge my inner child.

Maybe it’s because I am a Capricorn, but I’ve found that I tend to take things pretty seriously, especially when it comes to my goals and ambitions. I’ve grown from taking myself too seriously and setting rigid plans to truly going with the flow and enjoying the process. Today in my work, I focus on being as open as possible so that when an idea, possible collaborations or opportunities come my way I can embrace them with excitement even if I don’t know where they are going to take me.

Tell us more about your business.
My business is two-fold. I specialize in fine art, specifically three-dimensional sculptures featuring acrylic, Tibetan lamb, terrazzo and varied cord as well as found objects. The other aspect of my business is Gabriela Noelle Studio in which I design objects for the home such as vessels (vases) inspired by Memphis Design, furniture such as side tables, pedestals, and indoor and outdoor swings also made from acrylic, Tibetan lamb, terrazzo and cord and my latest two pieces a ladder (for a bunk bed or treehouse) and an acrylic indoor seesaw designed for both children and adults.

I am most proud of my first commissioned public art installation I completed at the beginning of this year at Nashville International Airport for the Bonnaroo music festival. It’s titled Radiating Positivity and features over two-hundred suspended lucite flowers in a mobile that is over 28′ by 12′. My favorite part of working with acrylic is the beautiful shadows and reflections it produces so this was especially exciting since the piece was positioned under a large skylight where the shadows can extend far past its physical presence – an homage to the energetic quality and transformative power of music.

I am also proud that as I continue to develop as an artist and designer, I am able to focus more and more on my mission to create opportunities for play. I believe that the fearless, curious, and imaginative nature children have innately should be reignited and encouraged in adults. I think this focus sets me apart from others.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Additionally to my first public work at Nashville International Airport, I am also very proud of my first solo show titled “Imaginary Friends” at LNS Gallery. I felt I was able to tell a thorough story, experiment and push the boundaries of what art can be and present the work with a carefully designed catalog that featured inspiration, research, process sketches and images and poetry by my talented friend Lauren Gomez.