La Encañado, Natalia Arbelaez

March 8 – April 19, 2024

The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present Natalia Arbelaez’s New York City solo debut. In her research-based artwork, Arbelaez uses sculpture and video to embody her family’s stories and her experiences as a Colombian American. Approaching her artwork as a storyteller and archivist, Arbelaez adds these missing stories to the historical record.

In this exhibition, Arbelaez has reinterpreted pre-Columbian Andean art and rituals, remixing them with elements from the American pop culture of her youth. She presents videos of herself using her ceramic sculptures to perform these newly personalized rituals. Her sculptures, which are displayed alongside the videos, are inspired by, for example, Quimbaya pottery, Muisca golden masks, and Inka agricultural tools. Arbelaez uses her videos to draw attention to the conceptual nature of the pre-Columbian pieces that her sculptures are based on. She reminds us that those works are art, not artifacts, and should be engaged with for their ideas, not just admired for their forms.

Natalia Arbelaez is a New York-based artist. She earned her MFA in ceramics from The Ohio State University and her BFA at Florida International University. Recent exhibitions include: Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY; 2023), Galerie Wolsen (Aalborg, Denmark; 2022), and Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, FL; 2021). Her work is held in a number of permanent collections, including: American Museum of Ceramic Art, Everson Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, and Harvard University. Arbelaez has been a resident artist at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Penland School of Craft, the Museum of Arts and Design, and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, among others, and is a co-founder of The Color Network.

Images below: Alan Wiener, courtesy Greenwich House Pottery 2024.