August 24, 2023 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Join us for the closing reception of Paola de la Calle’s In This House We Are All Buried Alive on Thursday, August 24, 6:30–9:00 PM at SOMArts Cultural Center.
This gathering features an artist talk between Paola de la Calle and poet, installation and adornment artist Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez and free community portraits by photographer Lara Kaur.
Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia.
She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She’s a KALA Fellowship Award recipient and currently Artist-in-Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY. She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, NPR, The Boston Art Review, and VOGUE among others.
Photography courtesy of artist
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroIndigenous (Zapotec) poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the intimate kinship units that trans and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. You can read Alan’s writing on Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Poetry, Catapult, the Georgia Review and more.
Photo credit: Jess X. Snow
Lara Kaur is a Bay Area photographer who will be offering free community portraits at the closing reception.
“I have been living and working in the Bay for the past 12 1⁄2 years. I’m grateful to call this my home and honored to be in a community with some of the most incredible people. I was raised in a family separated across continents, so photographs have served as a critical piece of emotional connection despite the distance between us all. It is what inspired me to pick up a camera early in life, creating and documenting images of and for my loved ones and community — as a way to find our way back to each other.”
