Nico Salazar is a queer artist, illustrator, and designer born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the creator of Future Fantasy Delight—a bold, black-and-white, linework-driven universe where New Mexican iconography, manga, street fashion, and 90s/Y2K nostalgia.

Raised between Santa Fe, New Mexico, Oxnard California, and Pearl Harbor Hawaii due to his father’s service in the U.S. Navy, Nico’s work is a vibrant remix of cultural touchstones: adobe skylines, lowriders, palm trees, chola cousins,  rave flyers, anime, vaporwave-era internet graphics, and corner store toys.

Nico works almost exclusively in black ink, building intricate worlds packed with tough-yet-tender characters who exist in imagined spaces—cyber cafes, capsule motels, cyber deserts— Creating often densely detailed compositions filled with glamour, folklore, and fashion-forward weirdness where Queer and Hispanic mythologies take center stage.  

He earned his BFA in Illustration from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2014, launching Future Fantasy Delight as a conceptual product design project that quickly evolved into a cult-followed brand. Shortly after he went on to create installations for Santa Fer Arts & production Company Meow Wolf. His immersive installations with Meow Wolf include Hidden Capsule (Santa Fe), The Slurp Zone (Las Vegas), Mijo Miho Cybercafe (Denver), and Hidden Capsule Motel (Dallas).

Nico’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Las Vegas, Santa Fe,  New York, Denver, Chicago, and Miami. When he’s not drawing, you’ll find him collecting luxury paint markers, gazing at the Tokyo skyline, or chasing palm trees wherever they grow.