Holiday card for December 2025.
Dear friends and family,
Wishing you peace and joy this holiday season. May the new year inspire your creativity and fill your days with love and connection!
Love, Nate
Tag: Series
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Mini Mart Gallery art show.
I’m part of a super fun end of year group show at Mini Mart Gallery in SF! It’s an honor to show alongside so many talented artists and to celebrate creativity together.
For Walking, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 11” x 14” x 1” Come check out the amazing mix of works and help us wrap up 2025 with a burst of color and inspiration!
📍 Mini Mart Gallery, 720 Geary, San Francisco
🗓️ Opening: December 4th, first Thursday art walk.
Hope to see you there and can’t wait to share my latest cowboy painting with y’all! 🤠
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The Urbanist.
Why did I create an urban-focused retail art project?
The Urbanist is a retail art project designed to help people thrive in the city at the intersection of local community, urban inspiration, art, and design.
My passion to support people in the city is based on my own experience. I looked for a place to call home after leaving the suburbs. I moved to the city looking for creative inspiration and queer safe space. But, it was a challenge to adapt without knowing how to find belonging and the high cost of living had me operating in survival mode.
Now, the city is my home, I want to put all of my urban problem solving skills to good use, helping others[a] here feel welcome by creating goods, services, and community building. This is how I want to show up as an artist[b] in the city and how I want to interact with the world.
When I started this artist retail project, I focused on things people needed. I interviewed people and curated a welcome kit through partnerships with other small businesses. The first Welcome to San Francisco Kits were sold to brides to give to their out of town wedding guests in 2014. These kits now exist as a resource for all kinds of visitors, whether visiting or relocating, their contents offer locally made products that help welcome you to the city that has so much to offer.
This artist run retail project has evolved from just offering welcome kits to offering services that build community[c]. It’s a potential future goal to help people find affordable[d] housing in the city.
I celebrate the serendipity that occurs when people meet in cities and I want to use humor and inject joy into my process, making it healthy, fun, and the end result both lively, human, and engaging. I want this small artist business to be able to thrive while maintaining its unique voice in the fast-paced urban environment.
Welcoming essentials for urban explorers. Taking the sense of secrecy out of urban exploration while leaving all the adventure, The Urbanist aims to offer mindful, sustainable, and essential services to the community, fostering a sense of accessibility and familiarity for visitors, tourists, and relocating urban explorers.
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Howdy Cowboy Painting series.
For Walking, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 11” x 14” x 1” Howdy Cowboy
A painting series, ongoing
This series looks at the cowboy boot as both a symbol and an object of desire. I paint the boots instead of the figure: footwear standing in for the western myth rather than a portrait of the person who wore them.
The cowboy holds a specific place in American imagery. It carries rugged individualism, conquest, and a narrow idea of what a hero looks like, and it has long helped hold up patriarchal norms. I’m drawn to that imagery and wary of it in equal measure. That’s the conflict at the center of this work: an attraction that doesn’t sit easy next to a refusal to keep feeding the patriarchal symbolism the figure carries. Painting the boot instead of the body is how I hold both of those things at once, without pretending one wins out.
I’m not trying to take the myth apart. I’m trying to sit inside its contradictions and ask questions about my desire when I know better and yet I still want.
I’m honored to exhibit this work at Fogtown Hoedown to place it inside a queer country western dance tradition that has always known costume can be a form of critique and reinvention.
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“Forest Bathing: Queer Portraits in Nature: Marqeist”, 2023, 20 x 30 1.5″, Digital Photography, Nate Mahoney.
What the series is about.
This series documents people exploring and being rejuvenated by forest bathing in nature. The collaboration with queer subjects across the spectrum of LGBTQIA+ includes video interviews and still photographs to share that sense of calm with our community.
There is an open call to be photographed for this ongoing project. Link to participate.
