San Francisco has a way of finding its people. For artist Paola de la Calle, it was a print of a Zapatista portrait wheat pasted on a wall in the Mission that called out to her during her first visit in spring 2016. She shared this pivotal memory with me during a visit to her art-filled, third-floor studio apartment on Bush Street.
Paola grew up in Boston and Colombia, one of two people in her family that were documented in the US. She was the one who traveled back and forth, bringing household items, photos, gifts, and stories from Colombia imbued with longing, connection, and home. In Boston, even as a child, she noticed the access she had in contrast to all of the adult caretakers in her life, and the ways her family carefully navigated the systems around them. She saw her parents clean houses and bars for a living, sometimes working until after 2 a.m. to clean up after Boston College students who had just finished partying. This mixed status upbringing between countries laid the foundation for her worldview.
Suitcase sculpture with found objects and printed cotton
Coffee, printed cotton, found objects
All of the women in Paola’s family were creative and made a living with their hands – her aunt who made quinceañera dresses taught her how to sew, while other aunties designed table centerpieces, baked cakes, and made ceramic figurines. During her teen years in Boston, Paola studied graphic design at Rindge School of Technical Arts, a public school, where she spent half of each school day for three years using Photoshop. “That, as much as sculpture, printmaking, sewing, all feels like part of my wheelhouse. I’ll print memes my family sends through Whatsapp and put them on a ceramic calling card like the paper ones we used to use, bridging the present and the past through technology.”
When she started to call herself an artist, Paola learned that one of her maternal ancestors, Benjamin de la Calle, was a well-known black-and-white portrait photographer in Colombia during the early 1900s, but her family had disavowed him because he was queer. “He was an ancestor that my family wanted to forget and push to the side, and I didn’t really know how to engage my family in that conversation.” In a bold act of reclamation, she changed her given last name, “Gonzalez” to his, “de la Calle.” “He’s someone in both my artistic and family lineage that I’m always trying to bring into my practice.”
Like most children of immigrants, Paola went to college with a directive from her parents to study something that would make her money. She majored in sociology at Skidmore College in upstate New York, which offered a useful language and framework for naming the power structures and narratives that had shaped her and her family’s lives. In her junior year studying abroad, taking art classes in Madrid opened up the world in pursuit of making art.
When she started to call herself an artist, Paola learned that one of her maternal ancestors, Benjamin de la Calle, was a well-known black-and-white portrait photographer in Colombia during the early 1900s, but her family had disavowed him because he was queer. “He was an ancestor that my family wanted to forget and push to the side, and I didn’t really know how to engage my family in that conversation.” In a bold act of reclamation, she changed her given last name, “Gonzalez” to his, “de la Calle.” “He’s someone in both my artistic and family lineage that I’m always trying to bring into my practice.”
After graduating from Skidmore College, Paola moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where she began teaching art for a living. She struggled to find community and belonging in the landlocked city, so she was excited for the opportunity to show one of her pieces at a local gallery there. At the exhibit opening, she searched the venue but could not find her piece, a linoleum print of a woman, titled Madre Tierra (Mother Earth). Finally, she found it tucked away, hanging in a dark corner, the title changed to Tropical Bust. “I took a Sharpie and changed it back.”
Not long after, Paola made that visit to San Francisco in spring of 2016 and caught all of the signs the city put in her path, starting with that Zapatista wheatpaste. Without any prior introduction, she walked into Galería de la Raza, a beloved Mission district arts organization founded in 1970 by Chicano artists and activists. “They had this beautiful show up, featuring women artists, and there were corn husks on the wall. There was something inside of me saying ‘Oh my god, my people are here. I have to move here and I have to show here.’ I remember specifically saying it out loud.”
Not long after, Paola made that visit to San Francisco in spring of 2016 and caught all of the signs the city put in her path, starting with that Zapatista wheatpaste. Without any prior introduction, she walked into Galería de la Raza, a beloved Mission district arts organization founded in 1970 by Chicano artists and activists. “They had this beautiful show up, featuring women artists, and there were corn husks on the wall. There was something inside of me saying ‘Oh my god, my people are here. I have to move here and I have to show here.’ I remember specifically saying it out loud.” Growing up by the coast in Boston and also with the mountains in Colombia, the geography of San Francisco immediately makes me feel at home.” Paola moved to the city six months later into a one bedroom in the Tenderloin. She now resides in a studio apartment in Lower Nob Hill and makes art in her Mission District art studio.
Soon after her move, Paola responded to Galería de la Raza’s open call for artists to participate in Comidas Medicinas, a group exhibit in fall of 2018 exploring food justice from Latine, indigenous and immigrant perspectives. They invited her to show her work. At the same time, Galería de la Raza received notice from their landlords that their rent would be doubling, launching them into an eviction fight after 46 years of calling their storefront gallery on 24th and Bryant Streets home. They called on the community to show up in protest.
“The five Uncage/Reunify/Heal quilts were the biggest scale I had worked on at that point. Even though I was the one that proposed them, I told Galería, ‘This timeline feels tight, I don’t know that I can do it.’” The campaign’s culminating action involved transporting the quilts to display on May 1, Immigrant Rights Day, in Washington DC. “They told me, ‘No, we have community, we will get folks to help you sew them. What do you need? Let’s make it happen.’ Galería pushed me to see my practice beyond what I saw it as at the time –that as an artist here, the only way that you can thrive is through community.” All five quilts successfully made it to D.C.
Paola had witnessed the destructive impact of gentrification living in Boston and Cambridge. Responding to Galería’s protest call, she did not show up empty handed. By this time, she had developed her own dictionary of symbols, natural elements, and mundane and sacred objects largely drawn from her transnational upbringing and Colombian heritage that appeared throughout her body of work. “I have this visual language that I’m making work with, so I made a print with an image of a cupped hand lifting the building out of flooding water, because the landlords were raising the rent. I brought it to the protest.”
Relief print 2018
Galería put up a fight, but they were ultimately displaced out of their home at the end of 2018 and forced to move into a temporary space on Valencia Street. It would take several years of persistent advocacy to secure financial support for permanent space. They called on volunteers to help with the move into their temporary space. “So I volunteered and started forming a relationship with them in that way.” This way of showing up in solidarity with no expectation of anything in return, particularly for an artist who is new to the area, is the key to San Francisco’s heart.
During her first artist residency with Galería in 2022, Paola stepped up as Lead Artist for Caravan for the Children, a national six-month campaign to demand the release, reunification and healing of migrant children still held in ICE custody as a result of the Zero Tolerance policy. Inspired by how, in the late 1980s, the queer-led movement to stop HIV/AIDS had successfully repurposed quilts, an iconic and traditional “American” craft, as a larger-than-death display to honor their dead and raise awareness for the living, Paola saw their visual potential to serve the Caravan for the Children campaign. As a counter to the horrific images of children in cages circulating in mainstream and social media, Paola envisioned these quilts as a vehicle to dignify Central American voices, imagine reunification, and heal from this collective and ongoing trauma.
“It’s always really frustrated me, when people talk about, who’s gonna pick our fruit for us? Even the conversation around the Dream Act or DACA, look at these students who study and work really hard. People and issues deserve more nuance. That has been a guide post in the way that I make my work, especially with a conversation that’s being had very publicly, and the people being impacted don’t get to have much of a say. I live for that gray area, and I think that’s a thread from my upbringing.”
“The five Uncage/Reunify/Heal quilts were the biggest scale I had worked on at that point. Even though I was the one that proposed them, I told Galería, ‘This timeline feels tight, I don’t know that I can do it.’” The campaign’s culminating action involved transporting the quilts to display on May 1, Immigrant Rights Day, in Washington DC. “They told me, ‘No, we have community, we will get folks to help you sew them. What do you need? Let’s make it happen.’ Galería pushed me to see my practice beyond what I saw it as at the time –that as an artist here, the only way that you can thrive is through community.” All five quilts successfully made it to D.C.
Printed cotton with embellishments
Printed cotton with embellishments
The pattern of Paola’s bold and precise interventions in her life and work are the moves of an artist engaged with the past, present, and future as a protagonist who is ready to build and destroy, to make space for personal and collective liberation and healing for the culture and lineages that they claim. These moves distinguish her from an advertising and marketing approach to art as a “creative.”
She loves this country that raised her and knows that it has its issues, but wonders, “What would it be like for us to put out a new narrative, that is really mundane? It’s not this geography of violence, but of people going about their day to day lives?”
Paola de la Calle is an artist of the people, whose work flourishes in genuine and reciprocal relationship with her community. When it comes to narratives surrounding immigrants, Paola pushes the conversation beyond the constant focus on how hard they labor and the jobs they do. “It’s always really frustrated me, when people talk about, who’s gonna pick our fruit for us? Even the conversation around the Dream Act or DACA, look at these students who study and work really hard. People and issues deserve more nuance. That has been a guide post in the way that I make my work, especially with a conversation that’s being had very publicly, and the people being impacted don’t get to have much of a say. I live for that gray area, and I think that’s a thread from my upbringing.” Relying on a narrow narrative of immigrants as hard workers to justify their right to exist within the US reduces their humanity. This same narrative obscures the role of the US in carrying out imperialist policies over generations that are at the root of why living conditions in their homelands make it impossible to stay.
Her process reveals how subversive the mundane can be and how naturally it invites the participation of the ordinary people who live these complexities every day. “It’s true, I find a lot of beauty in spaces that have been lived in.”
In contrast, Paola points out that the Netflix-fueled images of Colombia’s violence and narco-trafficking has actually led to an increasing flood of US tourists traveling there fascinated with the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, buying souvenirs and tee shirts with his image. She loves this country that raised her and knows that it has its issues, but wonders, “What would it be like for us to put out a new narrative, that is really mundane? It’s not this geography of violence, but of people going about their day to day lives?”
Paola’s parents live back in Colombia now. When she was first starting her art practice, her family regularly joked about how she always wanted them to send her pictures of the “ugly things”, “the mess.” After their initial teasing and discomfort, however, her parents started initiating, sending her photos without being asked. Her dad even posed with a broom in the style of Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic painting for her mom to send. She reflects that part of her practice stems from the immigrant tendency to hoard things. “We had storage units of stuff growing up. Now, my dad will bring out the boxes. I have a lot to work from.” Paola has turned this nostalgic collection of daily household objects, natural elements and photos into a powerful visual language that communicates the complexity of identities, historical memory, and distance. Her process reveals how subversive the mundane can be and how naturally it invites the participation of the ordinary people who live these complexities every day. “It’s true, I find a lot of beauty in spaces that have been lived in.”
Paola’s most recent duo exhibit with Oaxacan Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist Sarai Montes, From Fertile Lands Birthing Women Made of Flowers, is currently on display in Galería de la Raza’s new permanent space, featuring their respective work created over nine months as Galería’s 2024 ReGen Artist Fund grantees. The show’s title is taken from a poem Paola wrote and then printed on a map of South America originally made by a Scottish cartographer, Keith Johnston. “I see that artwork as a response to my research on the early maps of the Americas and its discovery; and the common narratives that immigrants come from ‘nothing’.”
Paola and Sarai used the portrait medium to honor revolutionary women across the world. The portraits she created of Ester Hernandez and Olga Talamantes, queer Latina elders with incredible living legacies of art and activism, take up the largest walls in the gallery and are titled Entre Nosotros (Among Us). Ester, who grew up in a farmworker family, created the famous 1982 Sun Mad Raisin print, calling attention to the toxic impact of pesticides on farmworkers. Her work had an enormous effect on Paola’s practice when she first got started. Olga and Paola had worked together on the Caravan for Children campaign just three years earlier.
In the same way she asked her parents to send her photos, Paola asked Esther and Olga to contribute personal objects, which she sewed around their portraits and painted with coffee. Paola wanted to create a complex and intimate representation of these two women who had largely been seen through their public-facing political work. She created their large-scale portraits during her time away at artist residencies. “As an artist who works from my kitchen table, having access to three blank walls, it’s gold. A really big studio impacts the kind of work that I’m making, because I go bigger. I have the space to paint and make a mess, try new techniques and leave things out in a way I can’t do at home.”
Paola credits Doris Salcedo, a Colombian multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses historical violence and disappearances in Colombia, with informing how she approaches heavier subjects. “The scale of her work is always shifting and her materials always change. I’m deeply inspired by artists who don’t put themselves in a box.” She ensures her own creative freedom through continually learning new mediums, and her process draws on multiple forms. “I dance a lot in the studio. The subject matter that I’m working on is really heavy, so the studio can’t be a heavy place. The studio needs to be a place where there’s release.” She offers a list of genres on rotation when she makes work – Vallenatos, cumbia and salsa, house jazz, pre-crossover Shakira. “I love a bolero. It reminds me a lot of my grandfather and the chickens in his backyard. There’s a feeling of home and tenderness with that music.”
“Here, you learn, you get opportunities from other artists. You are able to provide opportunities for artists. There’s also no taking for granted that there’s a lineage, there are elders who want to pass things down.” Paola is grateful that she found the mentorship she was looking for in Ester Hernandez and Olga Talamante when she began the process of developing their portraits, which has led to more understanding of the kind of artist she wants to be. “I didn’t name this before for myself, but I think a sign of success is being able to mentor someone and feel that you can support them with the knowledge that you have. I’m not there yet.”
After eight years making San Francisco home, Paola has no intentions of moving away. “I’ve come to terms with what it means to survive here and how hard you need to work.” By traditional markers of success, Paola is rising as an accomplished artist, prolific in her practice with solo shows, collaborations, press coverage, a string of residencies and grant opportunities. Still, she dreams of affordable housing and accessible public transportation alongside having a proper studio and being able to sustain herself with her art. She talks about affordable housing as a collective dream that requires a collective fight. “San Francisco is a deeply creative city with lots of history, not just with arts, but also with popular movements of keeping the culture alive. If you’re thinking about rent and money, it makes it really hard to imagine, and artists need to be able to do that.”
In her time here, Paola has come to define success as being part of a supportive community dedicated to maintaining and defending culture. Increasingly, this is necessary for survival. “When we’re seeing students being silenced, disappeared, it’s often the beginning of fascism. What are the patterns that we’re seeing, where has this happened before, who are the folks that have been engaging in that work that we can tap into? We can take lessons from the world about how to resist. Art needs to work in conjunction with movements.” She sees that resistance also requires attending to the mundane. “If we are going to be boycotting X, Y, and Z, what are the systems we need within communities so that folks can still get their groceries?”
In contrast with an art world that is often filled with competition and a sense that there is not enough for everyone, Paola landed in a part of San Francisco that feels abundant through its connections. “Here, you learn, you get opportunities from other artists. You are able to provide opportunities for artists. There’s also no taking for granted that there’s a lineage, there are elders who want to pass things down.” Paola is grateful that she found the mentorship she was looking for in Ester Hernandez and Olga Talamante when she began the process of developing their portraits, which has led to more understanding of the kind of artist she wants to be. “I didn’t name this before for myself, but I think a sign of success is being able to mentor someone and feel that you can support them with the knowledge that you have. I’m not there yet.”
After spending one afternoon with Paola, dropping one gem after another on how to be an artist that moves with integrity in a city filled with legacy and heartbreak, she is surely on her way.
