{"id":1865642,"date":"2026-04-04T12:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T09:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1865642"},"modified":"2026-04-04T12:27:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T09:27:00","slug":"gisela-colon-brings-monolith-sculptures-to-bruce-museum-and-puerto-rico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1865642","title":{"rendered":"Gisela Col\u00f3n Brings Monolith Sculptures to Bruce Museum and Puerto Rico"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gisela-Colon-working-in-Los-Angeles-studio.-Photo_-Marten-Elder.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tGisela Col\u00f3n didn\u2019t plan to become an artist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI studied law because I thought it would protect me,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em>, looking back on a childhood in Puerto Rico shaped as much by instability as it was by the farm in the outskirts of Bayam\u00f3n where she grew up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tShe left San Juan in 1987 on a Truman scholarship, built a career in environmental law in California, and spent her twenties and thirties raising two sons. Making art, which she learned from her mother, a painter, remained secondary. It wasn\u2019t until her kids left for college that she returned to it fully. \u201cThat was my time,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, nearly four decades later, Col\u00f3n is the subject of two institutional solo exhibitions:\u00a0\u201cRadiant Earth\u201d at the\u00a0Bruce Museum\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cThe Mountain, The Monolith\u201d\u00a0at the\u00a0Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo de Puerto Rico, a dual presentation that doubles as both a career milestone and a homecoming. Represented by Puerto Rico\u2013based dealer Walter Otero, Col\u00f3n has, over the past decade, built an international profile with installations ranging from Desert X AlUla to sites near the Pyramids of Giza, while placing work in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami, and El Museo del Barrio.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHer work sits in loose dialogue with Minimalism, Light and Space, and Land Art, though she prefers her own term: \u201corganic minimalism,\u201d a way of describing sculptures that focus less on form than on material; what it\u2019s made of and where it comes from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Gisela Col\u00f3n\u2019s monoliths at the Bruce Museum. Photo by Patrick Sikes<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAt the Bruce, that thinking takes shape in two bodies of work. First there are wall-mounted \u201cpods\u201d that read as biomorphic, almost cellular forms, somewhere between design object and living organism. The monoliths, taller and more austere, change color as natural light moves through the gallery.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a magical experience when you\u2019re in front of them,\u201d said Margarita Karasoulas, a curator at the Bruce who first encountered Col\u00f3n\u2019s work last year at Efrain L\u00f3pez\u2019s Tribeca gallery and helped bring the exhibition to the museum. \u201cThey shift with the light\u2026 everyone stops in their tracks.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat you\u2019re seeing is only possible because of how she\u2019s using these materials,\u201d said Danielle O\u2019Steen, the exhibition\u2019s co-curator, pointing to Col\u00f3n\u2019s use of plastics and engineered pigments to create those surfaces that shift as viewers move around them.<\/p>\n

\n\tKarasoulas had been thinking about how to activate the museum\u2019s newly expanded, light-filled sculpture gallery, a space that sits at the intersection of art and science. Col\u00f3n\u2019s work, which incorporates aerospace-grade materials and collaborates with scientific processes, fit naturally into that framework.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sculptures may look machine-made, but they are not. Each piece is cast and layered by hand, with pigments tied to specific places. At the Bruce, several monoliths reference Puerto Rican sites\u2014river systems, caves, coastal formations\u2014while the stones arranged around them come from the California desert near Col\u00f3n\u2019s studio, creating a small landscape inside the gallery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCol\u00f3n often talks about her work in terms of time. The pods relate to the body and perception. The monoliths point to longer scales, geological or even spiritual. When she speaks about the work, it\u2019s as if they are a physical extension of her body. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI feel like in the past life I was a rock. I was a piece of basalt. I was a mountain. You know, mountains are inside me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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Install view of one of Gisela Colon\u2019s wall mounted works at the Bruce Museum. Photo by Patrick Sikes.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThat idea traces back to her childhood in Puerto Rico, where she grew up between San Juan and Bayam\u00f3n. Her father was a chemist; her mother, who taught her to work with color early on. She remembers peeling bark from eucalyptus trees on her grandfather\u2019s farm, watching layers reveal themselves and then heal.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat was an early lesson,\u201d she said, \u201cin how nature transforms.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn her work, those early experiences show up in the materials themselves. Pigments reference specific landscapes. Forms echo caves, rivers, and mountains. Personal history is folded into the physical structure of the objects.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer parallel exhibition in San Juan makes that connection explicit. At the Museo de Arte Contempor\u00e1neo, the work is placed back into the terrain that shaped it, from the El Yunque rainforest to the caves of Camuy, where mineral formations built over millions of years resemble the forms her sculptures take. It is, by her own description, a full-circle moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the same time, Puerto Rico itself is newly visible in the broader cultural conversation, driven in part by figures like\u00a0Bad Bunny. Col\u00f3n welcomes that attention but resists the idea that it marks a beginning.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think he\u2019s brought attention,\u201d she said. \u201cBut we\u2019ve always been here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThen she starts listing names.\u00a0Roberto Clemente.\u00a0Rita Moreno.\u00a0Ra\u00fal Juli\u00e1.\u00a0Ricky Martin. Puerto Rico is small, just over 100 miles long. But it produces at a scale that feels disproportionate.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHow does that happen?\u201d she asks. Her answer is simple. \u201cYou know that Puerto Rico, the actual island, is made of the remains of a sunken a volcano that erupted millions of years ago,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lovely metaphor because, sometimes I feel like we\u2019re all about to erupt you know? People just see just a little bit, only what\u2019s on the surface, but underneath there has always been mountain of energy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYou can see that idea in the work. The monoliths feel formed over time rather than designed all at once. The pods suggest something growing, slowly and continuously. Even her newest paintings, made with meteorite dust and volcanic material, push that idea further, combining materials from different places into a single surface.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe left Puerto Rico because she thought she had to. She came back to find it was always there\u2014less a place than something that shaped how she sees the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/gisela-colon-bruce-museum-puerto-rico-monoliths-1234778986\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gisela-Colon-working-in-Los-Angeles-studio.-Photo_-Marten-Elder.jpg?w=1024″] Gisela Col\u00f3n didn\u2019t plan to become an artist. \u201cI studied law because I thought it would protect me,\u201d she told ARTnews, looking back on a childhood in Puerto Rico shaped as much by instability as it was by the farm in the outskirts of Bayam\u00f3n where she grew up.\u00a0 She left San […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1865642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1865642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1865642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1865642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1865642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}