With more than 4,400 pieces of artwork on board new cruise ship Disney Wish, one would think it would be hard to identify the most stunning piece. For those who wandered up and down the stairwells of the ship that sailed its christening cruise last week, a piece titled “Cindys,” though, commanded attention.
The print of what was originally a digital art piece by Nikkolas Smith, 37, of Los Angeles looks like an oil painting, and it shows 10 versions of the famous Disney princess helping one another climb from the depths of darkness over a cliffside with a shimmering castle in the back.
“I just wanted to create something that was aspirational, but also representational of all women, and the strength that women have,” he said.
The Houston native signs his art simply as “Nikkolas,” and has been a full-time artist after spending more than a decade working as an architect for Disney Imagineering.
“It’s like every woman rising up after getting knocked down, because it’s just like this story of Cinderella — just being at the bottom, like being pushed to the lowest point, and then being able to rise up — rise up from the ashes. And so I wanted to create that kind of darkness, that cave kind of atmosphere and all these women helping each other up.”
It’s a gritty take on the traditional Disney vision with the sizes, national origins and skin colors of these 10 versions of Cinderella overt in their break from the traditional mode.
“I wanted to show all these different variations of that kind of traditional Cinderella that we know — to show every woman has Cinderella, to show that character, but every possible way you could imagine from every part of the world and every culture,” he said.
He was happy to find out crowd reaction to the piece was so positive, as friends let him know after the ship sailed with passengers for the first time last Wednesday, and he posted about it to social media with commenters remarking how moved they were by the piece.
“I wanted just to say that the strength of women is unmatched, and maybe that’s why there’s always such an intense effort to take the woman’s power away, but I don’t think that that will work,” he said. “There is something about the strength and the will of a woman, always rising.”
He noted that even though he created the piece in the past, that its meaning with recent events is as important as ever.
“With everything that’s been happening in terms of women’s rights, it’s kind of perfect to have the opportunity to talk about it now,” he said. “The parallels are there to say that we’ve got to talk about women’s rights. We’ve got to talk about the strength that women have.”
People have reached out about getting a print of the piece, but he has yet to discuss that with Disney, he said. His other art is available at www.nikkolas.art.
He had drawn fame for a previous piece he produced for Disney titled “King Chad” that showed a small child who was going through cancer treatment wearing a Black Panther T’Challa mask giving a cross-armed salute to actor Chadwick Boseman. That was on display at Downtown Disney in California, but is now on permanent display at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
As an Imagineer he worked on Avengers Campus at Disney’s California Adventure park for many years among other projects. While attending Hampton University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Hampton, Virginia, he was able to enter the Imaginations Design Competition started by Imagineer Marty Sklar, which led to an internship, and finally employment as an architect from 2008-2019.
“I was doing art nights and weekends, and doing what I call my Sunday Sketch Series — it’s one art piece every Sunday, it was just like kind of making art while i was an architect and realizing at some point along the way I should be doing art full-time,” he said.
Now that he’s left Disney, he’s continuing to work with them including a new project with Imagineering and a Marvel children’s book.
“I’m doing a lot of Disney stuff now. ... It’s a great relationship,” he said. “There’s all these moments where it’s kind of like a full-circle moment calling back to my Disney time.”
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