Bio & Project Information
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 2022-2023 KALA Fellowship Award recipient and previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY.
She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, and VOGUE among others.
De la Calle will use The ReGen Artist Fund to combine portraiture, storytelling, and archiving to honor two Queer women and Latinx elders living in San Francisco, Olga Talamante and Ester Hernandez. While our cities and institutions are filled with memorial plaques and sculptures dedicated to people who have made an impact after they’ve passed, De la Calle is interested in honoring our elders, their contributions, and lives while they’re still with us, especially as she has been exploring the life of one of her Queer ancestors, Benjamin de la Calle. This project is a way to honor his existence and his art practice.