The Use of Materials as Poetry

The New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAAT) presents The Use of Materials as Poetry, a group exhibition curated by Austria Ulloa and featuring ten Latin American artists whose practices transform clay, watercolor, textiles, and found materials into acts of memory, care, and cultural reflection.

Featuring works by Augusta Lecaros, Catalina Tuca, José Durán, Juan Abuela, Lucía Hierro, Lucas Pereira Elias, Pablo Matute, Samuel Sarmiento, Valeria Maldonado, and Giselle Lucía Navarro, the exhibition foregrounds the poetic potential of materials as carriers of history, labor, migration, ritual, and belonging. Each artist engages material processes in ways that reveal the relationship between making and meaning, allowing surfaces, textures, and traces of handwork to become expressive forms of narration.

Visitors are encouraged to slow down, look closely, and consider how modest materials like fiber, pigment, earth, stitch, and glaze can hold memory, tenderness, and resilience. The exhibition frames poetry not as metaphor alone, but as a material practice shaped by touch, repetition, and the enduring intelligence of the hand.

NYLAAT
House 18, Nolan Park, Governors Island
New York, United States

nylaat.org