Natalia Almonte

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.