POESIA 1.jpg
POESIA 2.jpg
José Durán - The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
Augusta Lecaros - The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
Samuel Sarmiento - The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
Lucia Hierro - The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
Lucia Hierro - The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)
The use of materials as poetry Curated by Austria Ulloa At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT)

The use of materials as poetry

Curated by Austria Ulloa

At The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT) House 18, Nolan Park, Governors Island, NY
June 6th - June 28th

Artists:

• Augusta Lecaros • Catalina Tuca • José Durán • Juan Abuela • Lucía Hierro • Lucas Pereira Elias • Pablo Matute • Samuel Sarmiento • Valeria Maldonado • Giselle Lucía Navarro.

When you stand close to these works, you enter a conversation that begins with touch. Ten Latin American artists bring clay, watercolor, textiles, and found matter into the room not as tools but as companions—materials that remember fingers, spaces, studios, and the slow habits of making. A glaze gathers like a memory along a rim; a wash of pigment settles as if listening; a seam keeps the mark of a hand that mended it. These are gestures of endurance and tenderness, acts that hold histories in the grain of a surface.

Each piece offers a small, insistently poetic moment that also carries broader concerns: memory and archive appear in objects and surfaces that hold family and local histories; domestic labor and care surface in forms of craft and everyday practices that pass knowledge between hands; relations to land and materiality emerge in the way soil, water, and fiber retain ecological and extractive histories; ritual, belief, and syncretic practices are visible in repeated gestures and patterns; migration and borders register as traces of movement, displacement, and transnational ties. The artists follow material urges—firing insists, wash expands, stitch releases—and in doing so let feeling arise through process rather than through explanation.

This exhibition asks for a kind of listening that is bodily as much as perceptual: bring your attention close, let your sight slow, notice the traces left by repeated care. The use of materials as poetry celebrates how modest things—fiber, pigment, earth—become language when tended; how that language can hold sorrow and joy, small griefs and stubborn hope. Here, poetry is not only an idea but a material practice: it is the way a surface remembers, the way a stitch completes itself, the way a pigment breathes.