Drawing inspiration from Colombian poet María Mercedes Carranza’s piece “La Patria” (“The Motherland”), Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist Paola de la Calle’s debut solo exhibition, In This House We Are All Buried Alive examines the relationship between power and memory. What becomes the memory of a culture? Of a family? Who benefits when memories are forgotten?

De La Calle investigates how the social-political histories of the United States and Colombia shape family narratives, influence identity, and transform cultural memory. In This House We Are All Buried Alive is a testament to the necessity of collective remembrance and resistance against the institutionalizing of historical amnesia.

Where María Mercedes Carranza’s poem ends, Paola de la Calle’s exhibition begins.

About Paola de la Calle
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.

Learn more about Paola de la Calle
Artist website
@paoladelacalle