Gisela Coln

(Hardback)

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The monumental Land Art sculptures by Puerto Rican ecofeminist artist

Gisela Coln is a Puerto Rican-American contemporary artist whose organic, totemic, light-activated sculptures and monumental environmental installations explore human per_x0002_ception challenging viewers to experience transformation in real time and space. Through an artistic process that employs high-tech materials like optical acrylics and carbon fiber, as well as matter harvested from sites of the artist's own life, Coln is known for pioneering a language of "organic minimalism" that recalls the energy of the earth, ancestral biological memories, and concepts of time, gravity, and universal forces of nature. Coln's monoli_x0002_ths invoke bullets, projectiles, and missiles, consequently recalling the fraught history of militarized colonialism in the Caribbean generally, and the artist's complicated personal experiences with gun violence more particularly. Yet for Coln the monolith in its soaring verticality also echoes the arresting mountainous peaks of Puerto Rico, an enduring source of materia prima for the artist. Employing ecofeminist and decolonial strategies, Coln reconfigures entangled histories into a universal language, transmuting forms of violence, displacement, and death into vessels of healing, light, and life.

Author Bio

Art historian, theoretician and curator, Joachim Pissarro is President Emeritus of the Bershad Professor of Art History and director of the Hunter College Galleries, Hunter College, CUNY/City University of New York.

Christian Viveros-Faun, New York-based writer and curator; he has organized exhibitions in leading museums around the world, is the author of several books, and currently serves as Curator-At-Large for the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum.

Kristin Korolowicz is an independent curator and writer. She has held curatorial positions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Bass, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York. She has published essays and reviews in exhibition catalogues and magazines.

Sara Seilert is Director of the Museu Nacional da Repblica, Brasilia, Brazil, and curated Coln's multi-part exhibition and environmental activation of the Museu and Brasilia's Monumental Axis in 2024.

Lauren DeLand, Ph.D., is a scholar of modern and contemporary art with two decades experience teaching at colleges and universities.