A diverse range of artwork hangs on the walls of Chickadee Art Collective. The shop, owned by Nicole Stirling, serves as a matriarch of the local art scene in Lake Tahoe.
Stirling curates pieces from 62 local artists, fostering the art community in Tahoe.
Stirling, a Kings Beach native, splits her time between paddle boarding in the summer and skiing in the winter. An artist herself, she does beadwork and paints color-packed mandalas.
She started Chickadee in 2022 to provide a space to sell many local artists’ work as well as her own. Originally, she sold her art at a collective in North Tahoe, but it closed in 2019, leaving Stirling and the other artists with no home for their art.
During the summer of 2021, she started a pop-up store in her driveway, selling her art pieces. As local artists started taking notice of what she was doing, they asked if they could sell their art as well. Eventually tents packed her front yard. During this time, she ran a preschool in Incline Village, served as the director and also taught first grade.
Seeing a need for a retail space to sell art, she reached out to the North Tahoe Business Association and was connected with the current property, Tahoe Backyard. She was told the space next to the store was available.
This is when she realized she could really do this and felt inspired by all the artists in her area cheering her. But, her own self-doubt started to creep in and made her second guess everything. Being as self-aware as she is, she needed to get into her self-convincing mindset. She thought back to how she ran an entire preschool. As the director, she did budgeting, marketing, advertisement, enrollment, and social media. She realized she could run a business.
Although she was still unsure, the thought of someone else starting an art collective in Kings Beach filled her with jealousy. She knew that if seeing someone else beat her to her dream bothered her that much, she absolutely had to dive all into her idea. So, she quit her teaching job, used the money she had been saving to buy property, and started the art collective.
One of the first artists to join Chickadee was Claire Botsford, who has her own hand-made clothing brand called KnottyBotKnitWear.
Botsford had just come back from traveling the world when she came across a social media post from Chickadee seeking artists.
During her travels, she would find yarn stores and make sweaters for each place she went. Moving back to Tahoe, with no place to stay, Botsford lived out of her pickup truck for a few months with her cat, Marx, in the Truckee forest.
Botsford dedicates a lot of the inspiration for her work and her growth as an artist to the Tahoe community for supporting and advocating creativity.
“Everyone needs someone to tell you to keep creating and that’s what community is for,” she said.
Stirling encouraged her to make products and be her authentic, creative self, Botsford said.
Running a business in North Lake Tahoe has its challenges, Stirling said. Chickadee relies on tourism and the store is not on a main street, she said.
When the store first opened, Stirling sought out artists by contacting people she worked with at the collective that closed. She also posted a “call to action” artists request on social media. Today, artists come to her by calling to inquire about the collective and bringing in their work to show.
Chickadee’s most popular items are Tahoe-shaped things. Anything with a Tahoe theme or bears sells the most and is popular with tourists, Stirling said.
Looking toward the future, Stirling hopes to expand Chickadee. She dreams about having a bigger space to sell more art, and also to have a space that is on the main downtown Kings Beach street. Further down the road, she has dreams about owning stores in different areas and expanding her audience.
Noticing the trend in shops like hers popping up in Tahoe, Stirling fantasizes about Tahoe one day being known as an art destination.
“I hope that we are building a community of artists that can not only get along, but help and support each other by selling our art together and not be so competitive. Community over competition,” she said.
Autumn Novotny is a student at the Reynolds School of Journalism. The story was produced in partnership with the school’s Lake Tahoe News Project.