Gabriela Salazar on Art, Loss, and Environmental Consciousness
Gabriela Salazar's art practice is an ongoing dialogue between the natural world, the built environment, and the personal experiences that shape her identity as both an artist and educator. Her works speak to the pressing issues of our time, from climate change and its devastating impact to the intergenerational relationships we inherit and reshape. Rooted in her upbringing, surrounded by architects and immersed in the intersection of materiality, structure, and form, Salazar continues to explore the complex boundaries between human-made and natural worlds.
In this interview, Gabriela reflects on the intersection of art, identity, and environmental consciousness, sharing insights into her ongoing projects, including her thought-provoking series "Leaves," her upcoming site-specific installation at Olana, and her deeply personal exhibition No Shoulder at Efraín López Gallery last year. As a teacher, Salazar also speaks to the invaluable exchange between the classroom and her own practice, underscoring how art is a space for both learning and unlearning, for creation and connection.
Installation view, No Shoulder, 2024, Efraín López, NY
Making and creating often carry deep personal significance for artists. How has your practice shaped your identity and daily life, both as an individual and as an artist?
It’s hard to imagine my life without art. I grew up with architects for parents at a time when everything was still drawn by hand, so from a young age I had the experience of seeing how drawing and designing were a way to think through problems and imagine possibilities. My parents also exposed me to a manner of seeing the world that encouraged imaginative deconstructing and reconstructing, and appreciating how making on all sorts of scales plays such a vital role in our lives. And for the past almost-20 years I have been teaching art for a living, so I’m regularly trying to get young people to understand the power of creating, as well. Artists and people in the arts are my community, my friends, my inspiration. Meanwhile, I have periods where I just can’t make it to the studio for weeks at a time, and it’s taken me some time to realize that despite these sometimes-long breaks, I am still an artist, that that identity is not going to go away, or be taken from me. I feel so fortunate to be able to make my work, but it also is a challenge to keep making art in a life full of so many other demands and hierarchies. Making art is a choice every day one does it. And I think that choosing towards something is a particular orientation, maybe skill, that artists cultivate. Over time it becomes a mindset.
Can you tell us about your ongoing projects and the narratives or ideas you’re exploring through them? What impact do you hope they’ll have on your audience or the broader art world?
An ongoing hope of mine is bringing attention to climate issues and to the power of art to bring people into the climate conversation—not so much to find solutions, but solidarity. I’m daily devastated by what’s happening on Earth and my helplessness to make big changes. And a lot of change is required to even come close to prior CO2 targets; we’re already baked into some substantial upheaval. One thing I find particularly demoralizing is feeling how our broader culture and society are still moving in the wrong direction, even as more and more people are aware and concerned about climate change. It was through a project I did with The Climate Museum in 2020-2021, “Low Relief for High Water,” and the conversations I had with their director, Miranda Massie, and their whole fantastic team, that I came around to the importance of building community around climate issues. I think people need to feel like there are others like them, embracing those changes we need to make as a society, knowing that change can be hard but lead to greater good. And I’m a loner by instinct, so this is a challenge for me to practice! But I love that through my work I can choose to get into it with others, that I have a channel to connect and create connection, and can feel fortified through that when everything feels bleak.
Gabriela Salazar, The sinkhole, Dinosaur Playground, 2024. Graphite on paper, 30 x 22 1/2 in (76.2 x 57.1 cm). Photo by Inna Svyatsky, Courtesy the Artist and Efraín López
For two years now I have been working on a series called “Leaves.” They are low-relief cast works in water-soluble paper, an inherently vulnerable material. (It turns to pulp if wet.) The casts are primarily of plant matter and food scraps, but also my daughter’s building toys, metal fasteners, and my parent’s old drawing stencils. As the paper pulp dries over the material and objects, the plants’ pigments get pulled into the paper, leaving these stains that start bright but fade and change with time. I see the legos and blocks and screws and stencils as elements of an intergenerational relationship with building, and a passing down of knowledge and access to the tools needed to build a more resilient world. The works are not about going back to some earlier time though, they’re very much about being able to sit with change, with trying to accept things as they change so that we can see it for what it is. I feel like this is something I really struggle with when I think about the changes happening to our planet and to humanity’s viability because of the climate crisis. I want to fix it, but there’s no fix, only adaptation.
Coming in Summer 2025, I have a site-specific outdoor project at Olana (the Frederick Edwin Church homestead), north of Hudson, NY that takes a historical angle towards resource extraction and our human need for comfort, specifically heating and cooling. This work is in two parts, made of reclaimed wood and steel. So very different material approach but again, the work isn’t offering solutions but asking viewers to pay attention to something that they may have learned to take for granted. I believe we have to be able to see how we got to where we are to better understand other ways of ordering our world.
Installation view, No Shoulder, 2024, Efraín López, NY
Your exhibition No Shoulder was recently on view at the Efraín López in New York. What inspired this body of work, and what stories or themes are you aiming to convey?
The show was a set of ten graphite drawings and one metal sculpture. The drawings are from iphone images I took last summer (2024) during a period of what I think of now as anticipatory mourning and grief. Personal loss, political loss, planetary loss…it was all weighing very heavily. We traveled to Puerto Rico and upstate NY with our daughter, and I was also in Florida to visit my grandmother, who was very ill. I took pictures throughout, as, I now think, a series of placeholders for what I was feeling but didn’t have the bandwidth to process. At some point mid-summer I came around to a determination to return to drawing and to use the process of translating the photos onto paper as a place to locate, physicalize, some of the processing of what I was dealing with. These works became the works in “No Shoulder.” The title of the show is from a sign my daughter read on the side of a road in Puerto Rico, which perfectly summed up the feeling of having no spare room to pull over and take a break, and no clear place to turn to for comfort (while referencing the body, and the way the body internalizes grief and anxiety). Through assembling the images and juxtaposing some (about half of the works are diptychs), I was also attempting to put the feelings I was having into some sort of system, to create a visual grammar for the structures, people, and places that felt important to me, that felt under threat, vulnerable. Some themes that reoccur are a sense of genealogy or inheritance or time; new forms made through a breaking or failure and reorganization; obvious or seemingly neutralized threats; attempts at care and warning; and a never-ending need to adapt. These are themes that have shown up in my sculptural work as well.
The preparation for an exhibition like No Shoulder involved extensive thought and effort. Could you walk us through the conceptualization and development process, and how long this journey took from inception to completion?
This exhibit actually came together fairly quickly, once I stopped being fearful of going in a two-dimensional direction. Despite drawing being a part of my practice in different ways for years, and feeling an overwhelming desire to return to it in a significant way, it was hard to say “yes, that's what this exhibit will be.” My public work had been much more materially centered and sculpturally formed for a while now—I wasn’t sure I could cut it, drawing representationally! But the drawings really needed to be made, and I think that’s what I feel from them, that attention and care that is a sort of gift. I also found that after years now making sculptures, I feel much more confident using paper, graphite, and drawing tools in a semi-sculptural way. The thickness of a sheet of paper is full of possibility, as are all the forms that graphite takes. For example, in a few of the works, “Counting rings, chicks in the house” and “Tendons and synapses, open to air,” I pressed into the paper with a stylus to create an embossed pattern that then appeared as I drew over the raised parts of the surface. I used stencils and rubbings and graphite powder to create some of the variety in texture. It became a bit of a game to try to figure out how elements of the drawings needed to be made and how they all worked in conversation on the page. The last work to be made was the sculpture, “Compendium I,” which was a way to bring all those forms back into a more responsive, bodily-oriented object. The metal shapes are suspended on a cord (they can rotate around it) that hangs at the bottom with a plumb bob, which is an old construction tool for finding a line that’s perpendicular to the ground. What I love about this tool is that it’s not fixed, it’s apt to swing and shake, so to read what it’s telling you, you have to be still and pay attention. But even then, the tool is prone to deflection because of the rotation of the Earth (and even vibrations of the subway, I’ve discovered!), so the stillness is all relative to a constant, imperceptible, contextual movement.
Gabriela Salazar, Compendium (1), 2024. Steel, aluminum, found steel plumb bob, 127 x 24 in (322.6 x 61 cm). Photo by Inna Svyatsky, Courtesy of Efraín López
Growing up with parents who were architects from Puerto Rico, how did their perspectives on design and structure shape your artistic approach, particularly in your focus on interconnectedness and materiality?
Honestly, I’ll be figuring that out for the rest of my life…. To start, they were schooled in a modernist agenda, of “form follows function,” and a “truth” to material. So I grew up hearing these sorts of axioms while observing a kind of reverence they had for material, for where it came from and its nuances, and a respect for skilled builders and craftspeople. (My mother used to quiz us with her samples, what was marble or granite or cherry or white oak, for example.) But they also carried in that education a healthy dose of young skepticism for some of modernism’s tenets, its failures to be humanistic, its imported quality to a place like the Carribean. And as a child I spent a lot of time actually in apartments that were being demolished or in stages of renovation—it was rare that my parents were working from a completely blank slate—and even then there were always clients and codes and budgets that shaped decisions. Connected to that experience, I feel that limits—ones that I discover, ones I set, ones I seek—are a big part of the ethos and process underlying my work. Like in the case of the air-dry clay I make from used coffee grounds, or the water-soluble paper, what can a material take, what is its limit, and what does it look like to stretch that to breaking? Or in the case of the handrail forms I make, there is often a feeling of instability, like a form that you expect to have a certain limit actually can’t take the force you want to apply. I did a work in 2014 at The Lighthouse Works called “In Advance of a Storm (for Luis and Antonia) (for A and L) (for parents) (for two)” that was my way at the time of acknowledging their influence and the constraints it imposed. The work was two structures based on a procedural interview (“The Cube Game”) that I did with each parent separately. They didn’t know what I was interviewing them for, and I basically tasked myself to build and realize what each described with a 10’ x 10’ x 10’ base shape. There were a few other elements in the work, including a floral aspect that required weekly upkeep. It was interesting to “collaborate” with them in this way, kind of giving them both total control and none at all. Over time, it’s been gratifying to learn that their influence is a conversation that’s ongoing, both spoken and not, explicit and implicit, always kind of delimited by the current version of our roles as parent and child.
“Making art is a choice every day one does it. And I think that choosing towards something is a particular orientation, maybe skill, that artists cultivate. Over time it becomes a mindset.”
Installation view, No Shoulder, 2024, Efraín López, NY
As both a teacher and an artist, how do these roles intersect and influence one another? In what ways do your experiences as an artist inform your teaching methods, and vice versa?
There is a lot of conversation between these roles. Being in the classroom offers me an opportunity to learn from my students and keeps me engaged in the learning and possibilities of art. Most of my students are in high school and are not cynical about art, but may have some fear or misunderstandings that prevent them from experiencing its potential fully, and need to be reintroduced to making mistakes, to having fun in trying something new. And to realize that it can be a connective process. That, personally, took me a long time to learn—growing up in a competitive school atmosphere, I was quite shy about sharing anything that felt in progress or failing for a long time—so I try to open up those avenues to community and communication for them. I’ve learned a lot about how to share my own work through becoming the teacher I am now. I think it makes us better people when we hold present that we all are here learning, making mistakes (maybe even on purpose), trying to do something in a worthwhile way. This engagement keeps me realistic—but also hopeful—about art’s role in the world and its energy in the space between individuals.
What steps can galleries, museums, and other art spaces take to genuinely represent the richness and diversity of Latin American art? How can they go beyond stereotypes to present a more nuanced and authentic Latino experience?
I recently saw two gorgeous shows, “Personal Geographies” organized by Dulcinea Abreau at the Andrew Freedman Home and “Flow States” organized by Susanna V. Temkin, Maria Elena Ortiz, and Rodrigo Moura at El Museo del Barrio that both exemplified this range, and in their own ways expanded the field for what Latinx art is “about” and from whom and where. In particular, I loved how Abreau’s show, for me, brought me a renewed appreciation for my own complex family history that doesn’t fit neatly into the “Newyorican” stereotype. So I’m very excited by the increase of interest worldwide in the art of Latinx artists, and hope that curators just keep seeing beyond geographic and thematic boundaries. As long as curators bring Latinx artists into their agendas—regardless of the theme of their shows—while also considering how to make shows that directly address the complexity of Latinidad experience—currently and historically—I think generally we’re on the right track.
Your work often investigates the relationship between the natural and built environments. How do you see art as a medium for understanding and interpreting the world around us?
Art is a testing ground. None of us have hard and fixed answers, we’re all trying out different versions of reality. Is it this? Could it be this? What if we look at it this way? Or try it like that? With my students I prioritize looking at art as much as making it for these reasons. Studying art and reading fiction both do this work. For me, growing up in New York City, not exactly surrounded by untrammeled nature, my story is often about realizing that even in a city, in the depths of the human infrastructure marvel of New York, we’re still in nature, it's here doing its work, working on me, on all of us, visibly and invisibly. My story is also about how that interstitial relationship is shifting, sometimes dramatically, because of climate change. Again, I don’t have answers, but I think if you can’t imagine the world as it may be—and more generatively—the world you want to see, then it can’t come to be. And art can help provide the visuals, prod the possibilities.
Installation view, No Shoulder, 2024, Efraín López, NY
With No Shoulder and your art more broadly, what emotions, reflections, or ideas do you hope viewers will carry with them after engaging with your work?
That’s a great question. Especially for a show that feels more personal and close to me than many I’ve made, I feel that I thought less about the viewer in these few months than I usually do when making a work of public art, or even sculpture, which is always in relation to the bodies in a room or space. But reflecting on it now, I hope that viewers leave with a feeling of sensitivity to the world and people around them. Maybe they can see and feel with more focus, or a new lens, or a broader range for a while after interacting with my work. I don’t think “No Shoulder” is a hopeful show, but in the sort of strain between forces apparent in a lot of the images, the things breaking or falling apart or being beset by nature, there is a lot of life, and energy. I hope it feels like that energy isn’t stagnant, is moving, in flux.
The creative process can be both rewarding and demanding. Can you share a particularly challenging moment in your practice and how you overcame it to create something meaningful?
One of the most challenging things I’ve encountered in my practice has been becoming a parent. Like being an artist, motherhood is now central to who I am and also asks me to give more of myself than I’ve ever had to before. Balancing those two essential—inherently creative—roles has been—continues to be—the making of a strange shape that I keep discovering new sides to. So I would substitute “integrate” for “overcome.” Being a parent and an artist is a challenge that is ever-evolving and ever-present, and the insistence of that ubiquity has pushed me into new ways of thinking about my work, our place in the world, and the future. Despite the destabilization, I’m looking forward to the unexpected ways it’ll continue to influence my practice.