Bio/CV

My work draws from my experience as a Colombian-American artist, examining the relationship between nature and the human-made, and engaging themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. I create mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal and recycled objects. I start a work with concept in mind, but at the actual time of making, I manipulate materials intuitively, responding to the juxtaposition of colors and textures. Experimentation and layering are key to my practice, as I push and play with materials and mediums.

In my early work, I was interested in the female body and seeing it through the lens of nature, free of religious taboos and hypersexualization. These ideas manifested as sculptures of anatomical and botanical hybrids, highlighting their functions and intelligence as wondrous, spiritual and magical. I then began the Botánico Series in 2010 to explore the tension between the human and botanical worlds. Deconstructing the human control exemplified by artificial plants, I reassembled them to mimic the resilience and seeming chaos of wild plants, sometimes erupting from the gallery walls themselves. At other times I made “contained” works inside suitcases or bell jars that are small ecosystems just like our own bodies. These incorporate lace, sequined fabrics, and jewelry to reference the body, as we are also part of nature and need to reconnect with the celebratory aspect inherent in both nature and ourselves. My next series Traces further examined urban landscapes themselves as a collective body, incorporating concrete and tiled surfaces as they evolve with the passing of time.

In 2016 through an artist residency with Dieu Donné, I began experimenting with handmade paper-making, developing a way of layering pigmented paper pulp with various patterned and textured fabrics and then sculpting the surface with water and stencils. Utilizing these techniques, I created the Latinx Farmworkers in the US Tapestries Series (2017) which highlighted the extreme physical labor and hardship demanded by exploitative industrial agricultural systems, contrasted against the poetic life cycle of the crops themselves. This naturally evolved into the Willard Crops Series of paper collages, in which I turned my focus to the crops, which like the workers who tended them, were subject to pesticides and chemical inputs to maximize profits. Imagining a solidarity between plants and workers, I pushed the sensual and joyous possibilities of the various materials’ forms to create vibrant vegetable portraits to honor the farmworkers for their unsung dedication to plant well-being.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I began the Kinship Series of paper works that emerge from a personal process of reaching out for connection to ancestral indigenous knowledge that inspires a new relationship with plants—not only to the food or medicine they produce—but to their entire bodies and their accumulated wisdom. My most recent works move from paper to fabric, and are inspired by Indigenous weaving patterns related to food and agriculture, passed down across generations of women. I also employ the art techniques of quilting and embroidery that have been associated with domesticity and traditionally practiced together by women, under colonialism, to escape social isolation and seek mutual aid. By integrating these two aspects of my Mestiza ancestry, I seek to decolonize colonial ways of thinking and uplift undervalued knowledge, to recuperate alternative ways of living and relating that can ensure a sustainable and biodiverse future for generations to come.

CV

Lives and works in New York

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2022: Accumulated Wisdom, The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY
2021-2022: Migration, Nature and the Feminine, East Harlem Hunter College Gallery, NY, NY
2021: La Huerta y Yo, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, NY, NY
2018: Tapestries, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY
2017: Within/Without, Geary Contemporary, NY, NY
2015: Traces, Geary Contemporary, NY, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025: Farmland: Food, Justice, and Sovereignty, MSU Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI
2025: Past As Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgement, part II, National Academy of Design, New York, NY
2024: Against Monoculture, Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA
2023: Entangled Nature: Lionel Cruet and Lina Puerta, Bronx Museum (off-site), Bronx, NY
2022: Deshilar: La Revolución Cotidiana, Museo la Tertulia, Cali, Colombia
2022: Ariel René Jackson & Lina Puerta: Woven Lands, Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, NY
2022: Building Radical Soil, The Latinx Project at NYU, NY, NY
2021: Vida, Muerte, Justicia/ Life, Death, Justice, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, UT
2021: RED, Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2021: The Memory of Water, Ponce + Robles, Madrid, Spain
2020: Present Bodies: Papermaking at Dieu Donné, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY
2019: Figuring the Floral, Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY
2019: Radical Love, Ford Foundation Gallery, NY
2019: Buen Vivir/ Vivir Bien, Mexic-Arte Museum, TX
2018-2024: Labor & Materials, 21C Museum Hotels (Traveling exhibition)
2018: Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair, The 8th Floor Gallery, NY
2018: Site & Survey: The Architecture of Landscape, Richmond Center for Visual Arts, MI
2017-2018: Manigua (from the Botánico Series), Miller Theater, Columbia University
2017: American Histories, Pi Artworks, London, UK
2014: Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden, Museum of Biblical Art, NY
2011-2012: El Museo’s Bienal: The S-Files 2011, El Museo del Barrio, NY
2010-2011: EAF10: 2010 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY

SELECTED GRANTS, AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

2025: Newark Artist Accelerator Grant, Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ
2024-2026: Project for Empty Space Residency, Newark, NJ
2024: ArtOmi, Ghent, NY
2023: Reach Residency, Blue Hill, ME
2023: NWAW Artist Residency, West Palm Beach, FL
2020 KODA Lab Residency, Brooklyn, NY
2019-20 SugarHill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling Artist Residency, NY, NY
2017 NYFA Fellowship in Crafts/ Sculpture, NY, NY
2017 Joan Mitchell Artist Residency, New Orleans, LA
2016 Artprize Eight’ Sustainability Award, Grand Rapids, MI
2016 Dieu Donné Artist Residency, New York, NY
2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters and Sculptors Grant
2015 John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Residency Program, Sheboygan, WI
2014 Materials For the Arts, Art Studio Residency, LIC, NY (Summer/Fall 2014)
2013-14 Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program and Fellowship, Brooklyn, NY
2010 EAF- Emerging Artist Fellowship. Socrates Sculpture Park, LIC, NY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

2024: Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Color Pulp, by Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour. The Legacy Press, pp. 196-205.
2022: Hyperallergic: “Sustainability as a Form of Resistance in Art,” by Billy Anania
2022: Sculpture Magazine: “Lina Puerta - Review,” by Jonathan Goodman
2022: Whitehot Magazine: “Cultural Rebels: Latinx artist Lina Puerta,” by Coco Dolle
2021: The New York Times: “Expanding the Scope of ‘Latin American Art’,” by Holland Cotter
2021: Hyperallergic: “Lina Puerta’s Art Mimics Botanical and Female Anatomical Forms,” by Louis Bury
2019: Hyperallergic: “What Does Radical Love Look Like?” by Seph Rodney
2018: Brooklyn Rail: “Harlem Perspectives: Decolonizing the Gaze,” by Nico Wheadon
2015: Hyperallergic: “Relics of a Future Environmental Collapse,” by Benjamin Sutton
2014: Hyperallergic: “When Snakes Could Walk: Contemporary Artists Take On the Garden of Eden,” by Allison Meier

EDUCATION

1995-1998 Master of Science in Art Education, Queens College, NY
1988-1992 Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Studio Art, Wells College, Aurora, NY