Lina Puerta American, b. 1969

In her work "Crop Laborer-Green," Lina Puerta combines aesthetics with activism, advancing the conversation around land, labor, and resources. Puerta highlights farm workers at the center of both her narrative scenes, emphasizing the hands that are vital to our Western food system and honoring their bond to the land and the wisdom they gain from it. Puerta’s work explores themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge.

Puerta’s Latinx Farmworkers in the US tapestry series uses cotton and linen paper pulp along with recycled fabrics and paint. Latinx Farmworkers in the US portrays the intense physical labor and hardship required by exploitative industrial agriculture, contrasted with the poetic lifecycle of the crops themselves. Writer and curator Coco Dolle states, “Puerta’s work falls into the global movement and legacy of Latin American artists and activists channeling their inner suffering and collective pathos or anger onto their works... At the core of these movements is a desperate yearning for freedom from European imperialism, machismo, and American big-stick diplomacy.”

The artist creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings, and wall hangings, blending a variety of materials—including artificial plants, paper pulp, and found, personal, and recycled objects. She was born in New Jersey, grew up in Colombia, and now lives and works in New York City. Puerta holds an MS in Art Education from The City University of New York and has exhibited across the country and abroad. She has received numerous awards, such as the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Crafts/Sculpture, New York, NY; Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans, LA; Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, New York, NY; Kohler Arts Industry Residency, Sheboygan, WI, among others.