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Published on October 14, 2020

Lina Puerta

Weeds serve as the inspiration for Lina Puerta's Botánico series, initiated in 2010. Nature, uncontrolled, can be found sprouting from all manner of abandoned urban space. Even as humans strive to exert control, or exterminate nature altogether, she responds with resilience. Mother Nature slowly reclaims the cracks and crevices.

The Botánico series explores this tension between humanity and the botanical world. Puerta uses artificial plants, designed to create maintenance-free and organized adornments, to mimic the unruly, uncontrollable bounty of weeds. Her installation Manigua (scrubland or swampy undergrowth) intervenes the venerable walls of this historic hall, suggesting forces gathering deep inside the building, overflowing and breaking the structure down to a pastoral ruin.

Lina Puerta was born in New Jersey and raised in Colombia. She lives and works in El Barrio. Puerta holds an MS in Art Education from Queens College/CUNY and has exhibited internationally. She is the recipient of several important recent residencies, including a Fall 2017 Artist-in-Residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She has also been honored with a 2016 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, Artprize-8 Sustainability Award, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2015 Kohler Arts Industry Residency (WI), 2014-15 Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop, 2013-14 Smack Mellon Art Studio Program, 2014 Materials for the Arts, 2013 Wave Hill Winter Workspace, and the 2010 Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Exhibition venues include The Museum of Biblical Art, El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, Wave Hill, and Geary Contemporary in New York City, and Pi Artworks in London. Puerta's work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Wilder Quarterly, Sculpture Magazine, and Artnet News among others.

Lina Puerta, Untitled (Turquoise/Tapestries Series), 2016, 49" x 38" Handmade Paper composed of pigmented cotton, linen and abaca pulp; embedded with lace, sequined fabrics, velvet ribbon, fake fur, feathers, appliqués, chains and found insect wings.