From November 2024, through January 2025, the ICA Santa Fe will become Brazilian-American artist Natalia Pereira’s studio, collapsing the boundaries between the instance of display and artistic practice.
a birth – I can’t stop invites visitors into the intimate process of creation, as an ‘empty’ gallery begins as a functioning artist studio and gradually evolves into a complete exhibition over the course of a two-and-a-half-month residency.
An award-winning chef and prolific artist, Pereira will activate the ICA gallery with a series of four exclusive dining experiences that invite visitors to witness different stages of the project as it unfolds.
Buy Tickets:
1st Dinner Experience 11/07
2nd Dinner Experience 11/22
3rd Dinner Experience 12/5
4th Dinner Experience 12/20
Originally from Minas Gerais, Brazil, Pereira brings her rich culinary heritage—blending African, South American Indigenous, and European traditions passed down through generations—into her creative work. Each dinner, led by a locally sourced ingredient, will showcase the unique touch that earned her Los Angeles restaurant, Woodspoon, recognition as one of the LA Times’ best restaurants in 2021 and 2022, a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2022, and a James Beard semi-finalist nod for “Best Chef in California.”
Additionally, the ICA will host a series of open studio events, including guest lectures exploring traditional seed-saving practices, water stewardship in Northern New Mexico’s acequia systems, and the politics of wild foraging. These events will also include tea gatherings and open studio hours, inviting visitors to engage with Pereira’s multifaceted artistic practice.
Pereira’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures—primarily created on or with found paper—depict individual silhouettes that she refers to as medicine women, teachers, and beings who hold both questions and answers. These figures are members of what she calls the AD 105 Society, a reference to the year AD 105, recognized as the year when paper was invented in China by Cai Lun, who standardized the paper-making process using plant fibers, old rags, fishnets, and tree bark. As Pereira explains, the body is held between the birth certificate and death certificate. She describes her use of paper as honoring the body’s fragility and its ability to express and create between the “before” and “after.”
In Pereira’s hands, paper becomes a living surface—delicate yet resilient. Her lines are both frenetic and precise, creating a cacophony of color that produces silhouettes, abstracted yet familiar, which emerge from the page, straddling the mystical and the tangible.
“I am a member of this magical world. Through this particular act, I am able to birth them—my hands honorably hold, feeling the soul. I witness their universal birth; there is not much room for correction, only discovery. They are an extraordinary society, here to show us magic, good intention, and our conditioning. Every cell has the ability to transform and evoke a new society—one where there is still a memory of the wealth of Nature that we can all share and use. Now, in every cell, is the potential for great reason to return.”
– Natalia Pereira
