BIOGRAPHY
María-Elena Pombo was born in Caracas (Venezuela) and is based in NYC (USA).
She is currently an artist in residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center in Governor’s Island. She has participated in residencies and fellowships at Wave Hill, Yaddo, the Bronx Museum, and NEW INC, The New Museum’s incubator for art, design & technology.
Pombo won the 2021 London Design Biennale’s Theme Medal, and has received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council on the Arts, New York Restoration Project, and more.
Her work has been exhibited at Somerset House (London), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), A/D/O (Brooklyn), SXSW (Austin), Yamamoto-Seika (Osaka), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), and more across the USA, Europe, Japan and Latin America.
Pombo’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Slowdown, Metal Magazine, i-D Italia, Vogue México, Forbes, and the book ‘True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes”.
She is faculty at Parsons School of Design, teaching and developing curriculum for studio classes with a focus on research and experimentation. Pombo was instructor at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden, where she designed and taught classes on natural dyes through a decolonial and non-extractivist lens.
STATEMENT
I work through open-ended and interconnected projects that investigate real and speculative pasts, presents, and futures through installations, sculptures, videos, and moments that play with site-specificity, ephemerality, and participation.
My practice is based on embodied knowledge acquired through closely working with materials and research that draws from science, history, nature, mythology, language, and conversations.
As a member of Venezuela’s recent and ongoing diaspora, I am interested in untangling notions of territory. I do so by centering Earth-matter holding historical and contemporary importance across different cultures and times, which I often gather through collaborations. From avocado-seeds and mollusk shells gathered by restaurant-workers, petroleum and algae gathered by individuals, and more. A framework to engage heterogeneous publics into co-creating alternative forms of knowledge through contemporary rituals based on cooperation.
Applying ancient and emerging technologies such as natural dyes and bioplastics, both of which draw inspiration from geological processes, I re-contextualize and transform these materials beyond recognition as a metaphor for the need of new ways to understand the world.
