Natalia Almonte
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Natalia Almonte was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She holds both an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons and an MA in Art History and the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary Art from Christie’s Education. While at Christie’s, Almonte received the Alumni Association Award for Contemporary Art Connoisseurship. The artist's solo, collaborative and group work has been exhibited in multiple galleries from Smack Mellon in NYC to Área: Lugar de Proyectos in Puerto Rico. This past February she was the artist-in-residence at the Spruce Residency in PA.
In 2018, Almonte co-founded the collective Paradoxluxe which began as a multimedia video collaboration that developed into a curatorial team currently organizing the second and third iterations of the traveling exhibition, WE ARE HERE TO SERVE YOU. The first show opened at the Aronson Galleries on 5th Avenue in February 2020. The project investigates the intangible similarities between Greece and Puerto Rico through the lens of two entities in debt, but not indebted to, imperial powers that already control their economies.
Almonte is interested in the emotional anatomy of the Puerto Rican and coined the term “melancolonia” to describe how colonialism infiltrates the body and psyche to the extent that you don’t understand when it controls you. “Chronic Islandism”, another term coined by the artist, addresses the cyclical exploitation and neglect masked by changing circumstances since the foundational motivations for maintaining colonial grips are the same. Through experimental audiovisual poetics, text, installation, and works on paper, Almonte reflects on the lack of trust in record-keeping that validates the consideration of the subjective testimonial as truth, since fact and fiction are blurred even through “official” standards. Although this all sounds devoid of hope, a chronic state of dissonance is actually a space of infinite possibilities.
 China - Hong Kong / Macau Hong Kong The idea of Unpeeling started with one of the artist’s grandma’s after dinner habits - peeling oranges and share them with her family. The act of peeling oranges symbolizes sharing, connecting and healing. Peeling the orange reveal the vulnerable center, and metaphorically this action exposes the ar... |
 United States of America Brooklyn I'm uncomfortable being photographed and have been uncomfortable exposing a lot of skin - even at the beach. Like most females growing up in a big city, the unsolicited and lewd attention, that began in my pre-teen years, made me guarded, feeling ashamed of my body. Now, as a mature woman I've been... |
 Canada Toronto I had just arrived a few days before at my artist residency in rural India, near a small village called Andore in Rajasthan. I was there to photograph and identify wildlife as reference material for my scratchboard portraits. I had acquainted myself with the surrounding farms and the pathways t... |
 Israel and the Occupied Territories Givataiym As a computer graphics artist I work in front of my computers’ screens, employing a variety of 2D and 3D digital graphics programs as my brushes, my palettes of paints as well as my cameras, with which I create my artworks. These are usually about fantastic realities, as if to follow Valerio Adami’s... |
 United States of America Berkeley The female body is nothing short of a miracle, stronger than any of us were taught to think about ourselves. During the pandemic deep into the shelter in place order, I got to witness a home birth. These images were inspired by the water birth, the beauty of both the before and after. As the po... |
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