ST. LOUIS, MO.- A labyrinthine art installation comprising over three tons of soil sourced from St. Louis, created specifically for the Pulitzer Art Foundation, is the centerpiece of an exhibition devoted to the work of the Bogotá-based artist Delcy Morelos (b. 1967), which opened Friday, March 8, 2024.

Delcy Morelos: Interwoven is the first museum showing to place Morelos’s acclaimed earthen installations within the context of her earlier artistic output. Some 30 drawings, paintings, and sculptures are assembled to trace the sociocultural and spiritual connections the artist has examined over the last 30 years.

Morelos grew up in Tierralta, a town near the Caribbean Sea in the north of Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. Its rich and fertile terrain encompasses the Amazon rainforest, deserts, coastlines along the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the Andes Mountains. Like all Colombians of her generation, the artist grew up against a backdrop of prolonged violence.

From 1964 and 2016, an internal conflict claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals, predominantly civilians, while reinforcing enduring structures of racial disparity, social inequity, and land appropriation.

Having spent the majority of her life “on the brink between life and death,” as Morelos explains, she started her career by examining violence as something that originates from and is enacted upon the human body. In much of Morelos’s early work, crimson pigments, rope-like forms, and glistening, watery surfaces suggest the body and its internal organs. Two decades into her career she followed these ideas to working directly with soil as a primary material.

Morelos’s soil environments manifest deep reverence for the earth and address interconnected relationships between land and its inhabitants. It was through her grandmother, a descendant of the Emberá community, that Morelos developed her understanding of humans’ place in the natural world. She has furthered this knowledge in recent years with her own research into Andean and Amazonian cosmological teachings and information shared by the Indigenous leaders.

“This exhibition is an example of how contemporary art can connect people and ideas. In her art, Delcy draws on the knowledge of Indigenous peoples throughout the Andes and the Amazon and the craft of weaving, fundamental to those cultures, to call for greater ecological awareness,” says Cara Starke, Executive Director, Pulitzer Art Foundation.

Tamara Schenkenberg, Curator, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the organizer of Delcy Morelos: Interwoven, says, “Delcy has spoken about how everything that exists is interwoven like a basket that continually reweaves itself. In this exhibition, we take weaving as a process, visual motif, and conceptual throughline to trace her career, from her early paintings and sculpture to her recent installations using soil as an art material.”

Delcy Morelos: Interwoven
March 8 – August 4, 2024