Nixon is known on Instagram for delicately capturing with pen and marker the humor and beauty in our mundane moments, often featuring solitary women and girls. But in recent years she’s found herself compelled by the 1980s—even though she didn’t experience much of it, being born mere months before the decade’s end.
As the youngest of five children, though, she inherited lots of hand-me-downs from the period and was immersed in its TV and movies, thanks to her siblings. “I guess we’re all nostalgic for a time when things felt simpler,” the Little Rock–based artist reflects, “even though they weren’t, obviously. But if you were a kid then, it seemed like it was.”
Back then, the mall was a haven, where teens first tasted freedom from their parents. “It was a rite of passage to go to the mall by yourself when you were 12 or 13,” Nixon notes. “That was one of the first places our parents let us go by ourselves because it seemed pretty safe.”