PROJECT FOR EMPTY SPACE | 10/11 @ 3PM | Exhibition Tour With Lina Puerta

Join artist Lina Puerta on October 11 at 3PM for a tour of her exhibition, “La Sierpe”.

Developed over the course of Puerta’s two-year residency, La Sierpe marks the culmination of an extended period of research, experimentation, and artistic production. Centered on the serpent as an ancient symbol of cyclical time, transformation, and collective renewal, the exhibition invites visitors into an immersive environment where inherited ways of seeing give way to new possibilities for connection. Throughout the exhibition, the serpent serves as both a guide and a guardian, illuminating the relationships among ancestral knowledge, ecological balance, and collective care.

This tour is presented as part of PES Studios’ annual Fall Open Studios at 800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Boulevard, Newark, NJ! Explore four floors of artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails.

Presented annually alongside the Newark Arts Festival, Open Studios offers a unique opportunity to discover the work of 50+ resident artists across individual workshops, communal areas, and maker spaces. PES supports a multidisciplinary community of culture makers whose practices are rooted in social impact, activism, and collaboration.

About the Artist

Drawing on her Colombian-American heritage, Lina Puerta is a multidisciplinary mixed-media artist whose work explores the intersections of the natural and the human-made, engaging themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, collage, handmade-paper painting, and textile-based works, incorporating materials from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal, and recycled objects.

Born in New Jersey, raised in Colombia, and based in New York City and Newark, NJ, Puerta holds an MS in Art Education from CUNY. She is developing a public commission for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Her work has been exhibited at the New York Botanical Garden, Ford Foundation Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum, The National Academy of Design and the MSU Broad Art Museum. She is a two-time recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture (2017 and 2026), and has received the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant and the ArtPrize Eight Sustainability Award. Her residencies include Project for Empty Space, Art Omi, Dieu Donné, the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Program, the Joan Mitchell Center, Smack Mellon, and Materials for the Arts.