The Art Studio
A Creative Collective
The hand-painted bags and accessories in the Déjà Nu collection are born from an ongoing conversation between artists of different generations, different practices, and different vantage points. These artists are all united by the Déjà Nu creative ethos: that beautiful things deserve to be made with intention, and that the best work happens when people who see the world differently make something together.
The Makers
the hands behind every piece
NICOLE NAGEL-GOGOLAK
Artist · Roaring Fork Valley
Nicole Nagel-Gogolak has spent her career making work that resists easy description. An MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, she creates large-scale sculptural relief installations from organically shaped local wood and encaustic medium. Her layered, meditative pieces draw on sacred spaces encountered from the Roaring Fork Valley to the trails of Nepal and Tibet. She is an Adjunct Professor of Drawing and Painting at Colorado Mountain College, a Summer Art Intensives Instructor at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, an art instructor at Aspen Country Day School, and the owner of GogoArts, a gallery in New Castle, Colorado.
What draws Nicole to Déjà Nu isn’t fashion, it’s the questions, curiosity and conversation. A piece of heirloom silk with decades of history in its surface. A canvas that already means something. She brings her painter’s eye and her trust in intuition to every piece she works on, and the result is always unmistakably unique.
ERYN BRETTMANN
Artist · New York / Aspen
Eryn Brettmann came to this work from multiple influences including art school studios and a childhood spent watching her mother pull extraordinary things from the overlooked and the forgotten. Now studying Fine Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York with a focus on painting, drawing, and sculpture, she brings a young artist’s fluency with color, form, and the painted surface to the collection’s bags and accessories. Her work sits at the intersection of fine art instinct and an eye shaped by fashion, and the pieces she contributes to Déjà Nu carry both.
MALIKA LABOSSIERE
Artist · Aspen, Colorado
Malika Labossiere arrived in Aspen from Georgia and found, in the landscape, exactly the kind of subject that rewards a patient eye. A self-taught artist, she spends her days working in landscape design for the City of Aspen and her hours outside of that making paintings that translate the valley’s most familiar scenes into something unexpected. Her scenes carry a graphic energy that makes them feel joyful and kinetic. The mountain is her subject, but the interpretation is entirely her own.
Malika brings that same Déjà Nu eye to canvas bags and nylon accessories. Her pieces become small paintings you carry. Each one is a creative piece of Aspen that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
The Déjà Nu creative ethos isn’t a job description.
It’s a shared way of seeing — that what already exists is often more interesting than what’s new, and that the right hands can find the story in almost any material.