feature image: Marla Sweitzer, Untitled, Tile 49, 2024. Oil on ceramic, 8.25 × 7 inches. Photo: The Nook Gallery.
By Isabel Pinheiro
At first glance, The Nook, an art gallery quietly tucked into the corner of a St. Louis home’s kitchen, might seem like nothing more than a charmingly domestic scene: a kettle on the stove, a cat rolling on the floor, papers strewn across a worktable. But this is no ordinary retreat. Conceived and curated by artist Emily Mueller, The Nook is an experimental project that subverts the boundaries between public and private, art and life, domestic and public. It’s a space where domesticity becomes fertile ground for artistic reflection and creative disruption.
The space itself is layered: it is a kitchen, studio, and gallery all at once. A clay vessel in progress rests beside glass jars and handwritten notes; a pan is in the oven while sheets of pulp dry nearby, soon to become material for new works. Visitors are offered a warm cup of tea or coffee, invited not just to view an artwork, but to live with it, to inhabit the atmosphere it co-creates.
That intimacy is precisely what gives The Nook its radical edge. Historically, the kitchen has been dismissed in cultural narratives, imagined as “a woman’s place,” the ideal setting for the proper, domestic woman. As the symbolic heart of the so-called “cult of domesticity,” the kitchen has carried the weight of gendered expectations, often associated with passivity, the nursery, care work, and invisibility. Yet the Nook refuses this script. Rather than acknowledging this stereotype as a limitation, it subverts it. It proposes that domestic space is not a constraint but a catalyst, asking: what if the space historically assigned to women’s care becomes the ground for critical engagement and artistic encounter?
Mueller’s curatorial approach is as intentional as the space itself. Drawing from her experience and a broad network of artists, she seeks creators who might thrive within The Nook’s intimate, offbeat conditions. Often emerging or underrepresented, these artists are invited to treat the domestic setting not as background, but as material, something to be folded into the work’s conceptual or formal language. In this sense, The Nook, the kitchen becomes a stage, a site of emotional, aesthetic, and conceptual resonance, where creativity is not confined but made possible by the domestic setting. Mueller’s curatorial practice doesn’t mask the domestic, it foregrounds it, allowing the gallery to operate not in spite of its setting, but because of it. The result is a porous space that invites intimacy, presence, and reflection, where the supposed limitations of the domestic become the conditions for artistic agency.
This dialogic spirit extends to the artworks themselves, which do not arrive as static monuments but as temporary guests. Their presence is contemplative, but also conversational. Thus, The Nook offers a radical proposition: that intimacy is a form of criticality, and that the domestic, far from being marginal, can be a site of artistic centrality. Here, to be at home is to reframe. To enter The Nook is to step into a space where care, creativity, and critique are not only possible, but inseparable.
Visit www.thenookstl.com to learn more and connect on Instagram at @thenook.stl.
The Radical Kitchen: Domestic Space as Curatorial Practice is published in Vol 39. Purchase a copy here.
Isabela Pinheiro is an art historian, psychoanalyst, and scholar. Her work bridges the fields of art and psychoanalysis, with a focus on the intersections between feminism, gender studies, critical theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. Isabela is an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Lindenwood University, where she teaches in the department of Art History, College of Arts and Humanities.
She holds a Master’s degree in Art History and Visual Culture from Lindenwood University, with a thesis titled From the Invisible Object to the Void: An Examination of Surrealism and the Lacanian Real, and a B.A. in Psychology from PUC-São Paulo.
She worked as curator at the Historical Hawken House Museum in St. Louis, MO, where she collaborated on the redesign of the museum’s permanent exhibition, Reconstruction and Industrialization: The Gilded Age in Saint Louis. She also curated the exhibition Historic Hawken House: A Review Of The Past, A Look Into The Future, dedicated to the institution’s 50th anniversary.
She is also in private practice as a psychoanalyst.