For artist Nicole Charbonnet, painting serves as a metaphor for the phenomenon of recollection. She attended the University of Virginia for her B.A, where she also had the opportunity to study studio art in France. Charbonnet received her M.F.A from Boston University in 1991, before moving back to her hometown of New Orleans, where she is now based.

Charbonnet appropriates Americana and art historical imagery as a way of stimulating cultural memory. Each of her paintings are layered by collaging, sanding, scraping, carving, and re-painting. The superimposition of textures, images, words, washes of paint, and veils of translucent fabric and paper creates a visual threshold. Her process of painting mimics or simulates the process of memory with its numerous layers and textures, resulting in paintings that both illuminate the past and encourage interpretations that function as starting points in and of themselves.