Nancy Good and Fashion Show Las Vegas prove to F1 racegoers that art is everywhere
- Victoria Hernandez
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 41 minutes ago
The whole city of Las Vegas gets involved when F1 comes to town. Fashion Show Las Vegas, a popular upscale shopping center, commissioned local artist Nancy Good to create a painting to celebrate the race and the city’s culture.
The vibrant piece is called “Where Love is in Fashion.” Good utilized her signature abstract style to portray the energy of the race, a message of thoughtfulness, and the beauty of Las Vegas sunsets. It features a bright pink background with dizzying lines of green and blue, and swirls of checkerboard. A closer look reveals several little dots and waves throughout the design.
"Art is fashion. Art is always, for the most part, filled with love," Good told Kick The Concrete. "My visual language incorporates a lot of love layered, sometimes visible, sometimes quite overt. (The piece is) also wanting to represent the excitement of the race, because it is very exciting. It transforms our whole city, really, even though the race itself is overlaid over The Strip, but it does get the whole city excited and the whole valley excited.
"... I love anything that I can throw in as an Easter egg into a work of art is something that's fun to me. Because it's like we're storytellers as artists, but we don't have to be completely serious about every story. We can have playful moments and things that get people scratching their heads and wanting to look deeper."
Prints were given to customers throughout the month of November leading up to race weekend as part of Fashion Show Las Vegas’ Gift With Purchase program. If patrons spent $500 in one day, they could show their receipts and receive a signed and numbered print. The initiative was part of their race-inspired festivities called “Fueled by Fashion,” which also included a sweepstakes and highlighted their HUGO and BOSS stores, brands that have partnerships with Formula 1 teams. Throughout the year, FSLV has an art walk, touring exhibits, and more that showcase creativity beyond clothing.
“Pulling together that fabric and just exposing, having an opportunity to highlight international, domestic, and then really, in this instance, local art is just something that we love to do,” Jayne Sherr, Senior Marketing Manager of Fashion Show Las Vegas, told Kick The Concrete, “as a means to sort of pull people together and create this community and hub space within this shopping center.”
Good is a well-known artist in the Las Vegas community. Her art is known for its bold colors and mesmerizing dots and swirls. She has been featured at the Las Vegas City Hall, UNLV, the San Diego Museum of Art, Nashville International Airport, the Life is Beautiful music festival, and in the Las Vegas Meow Wolf location.
The marketing department of Fashion Show Las Vegas has been building a relationship with Good over the past few years and thought her eye-catching style and involvement in the community were a perfect fit for this collaboration. Good is a member of the local First Friday Las Vegas collective and has spent time as a teacher and a gallery owner, using her gifts and insight to give back and uplift other artists.
"We're so excited to work with her this year because she has just such a distinctive artist's voice and vision," Sherr said. "She's very thoughtful and design-driven. And through this program, we really like to highlight the vibrancy of our local art community. Nancy is really truly at the center of that with her own art and mentoring local artists as well. It just was a great opportunity for us to spotlight everything that she does and bring all of that vibrancy to hopefully show people visiting Las Vegas for the race, what a dynamic art scene we have here."
How F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix is an expression of art
The F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix is in this third year. It has been controversial among locals for interrupting the city's infrastructure and among motorsport purists for the spectacle that creates hype outside of the racing.
Good has been a casual fan of the motorsport series in the past and has friends that race off-road and motocross. She appreciates how F1 is an example of how art is everywhere.
“Everything has the core and a root cemented in art,” she said. “Designers of vehicles, those are artists. Designers of helmets, those are artists. The uniforms and clothing that they wear that are branded with their teams, are artists that are creating this. The art of driving. It is a very fine art. It's physical art, but it’s then also, intellectual, mental art. … And I love that sports such as this and other ones that come to this town, there will always be a solid component of art.”
While F1 has had a rocky road in embracing personal expression, the drivers are now considered some of the most influential pop culture stars on the planet, largely thanks to Lewis Hamilton. The seven-time champion has broken barriers in music by having a feature on a Christina Aguilera song, and fashion by serving as a co-chair at the Met Gala. Others have followed his lead as Charles Leclerc has released songs where he’s playing the piano and Daniel Ricciardo is keeping fans hooked on his Enchanté brand.
Las Vegas has been booming in the sports world with the addition not only of the F1 race, but with the relocation of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, the addition of the NHL’s Golden Knights, the success of the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces and the upcoming relocation of the MLB’s Oakland A’s.
Sherr said that she doesn’t “follow the teams, necessarily,” but explained what having the F1 race in town has given her a further appreciation for.
“As we're here for year three, it is really interesting to see what it brings to the city,” Sherr said. “So I'm a fan to the extent that it's really just sort of opened up a new sport for me and to see that coming together, of fashion, art, sport, I think that's really interesting.”
Nancy Good creates art with intention
Good has lived in Las Vegas since 2011. She is originally from Texas and spent some of her childhood in Japan. Her adult travels have taken her to Australia, Africa and Vietnam. Her own heritage also informs her art as she has French, Middle Eastern, North African, Scandinavian, Italian, Greek, English, and Welsh in her DNA.
Similar to how Formula 1 is an international sport unified by a passion for speed and excellence, Good uses her art to show a message of unity.
"I'm a big observer of our humanity, our human condition," she said. "Of course, current events and contemporary culture affects us all, but it seems like so much of contemporary culture focuses on division, or what's negative, what makes us mad, frustrates us, whatever. We need to get back to the basics, the lowest common denominator of what connects us all. And so all of my work tends to incorporate some level of that as a concept, an interpretation."
Good has synesthesia, a sensory condition that Pharrell, Billie Eilish, and other popular artists have. This informs how she creates her art and what she hopes viewers get out of it.
"I'm also a musician, so everything vibrates to me. Hence also my color palette, the repeated lines, repeated dots, thoughts, factor prevalently," she said, "but they also become moments of intention, moments of prayer or thoughtfulness that act as a reminder for myself. But then when I'm able to talk about that to others, then it hopefully opens up an idea in somebody else that, oh, yeah, I can practice mindfulness or intention or prayerful moments. They don't have to be thousands of tiny dots, but they can be just a moment to breathe and think about what we're grateful for."
Good is thankful for her artistic vision being executed with excellence by Fashion Show Las Vegas.
"The collaboration does bridge a gap between artists and the wider community, but bridging that, creating access in that way also immediately minimizes the gatekeeping that's often seen in the greater worlds, more established art markets," she explained. "There's so much gatekeeping that goes on, and so for FSLV to step up and pick good artists ... it shows to the rest of the world that they don't have to go outside of our city to do a remarkable work of art in conjunction, in collaboration with the race week."
Sherr was sure to explain how working with local artists isn't a charitable endeavor, but helps elevate both the local art scene and Fashion Show Las Vegas.
"It's a program that allows us to offer something that's meaningful and special that guests can take home beyond just the general shopping experience itself," she said. "Being able to work with just such amazing artists like Nancy, I think it's really meaningful to us to be able to provide people with something that's collectible and special and reaching new audiences. I think it's very much a win-win from our perspective to be able to give something to our guests and also highlight the really vibrant community."
The Gift With Purchase program didn't only give guests a collectible print, but also diffraction glasses. The glasses diffract color by wavelength. Cool colors recede into the background and warm colors come forward, creating a layer effect.
“The diffraction lenses finally let me share with the rest of the public, or the rest of the viewers, what it is that I'm seeing when I'm creating the work,” Good explained, sharing that “it’s been pretty frustrating, actually, not to be able to share the full experience with viewers.”
Good is sure to thank Erik Beehn and Test Site Projects, who created the prints. The company has partnered with Fashion Show Las Vegas for all three years of the Gift With Purchase program around the F1 race. Beehn worked closely with Good to make sure that the prints showcased the colors and depth of her art as “close as I could have ever imagined for a print.”
“He really brought the printing product to the highest fine art level, as opposed to just sending it off to Shutterfly or some other place,” she said. “Erik really, really elevated the final prints into that fine art realm where I felt good signing and numbering and having a certificate of authenticity.”
The quality of the print, along with the glasses, furthers the deeper message that Good relays in her art.
“More than anything, it supports another philosophy that I try to live by," she said, "that I will never see it all. I will never know it all, and I should always remember to look at something in a new light from a new perspective, and maybe literally, through a new filter."