Exhibition - Delcy Morelos: El Abrazo

For more than a decade, Delcy Morelos has been working primarily with earth creating encompassing environments of geometrically abstract forms and dispersions. Drawing on the cosmologies of ancestral Andean and Amazonian cultures, her own and others, Morelos’s work explores the sustaining power of mud in its many forms. For Dia Chelsea, the artist has created two immersive, multisensory installations—Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven, 2023) and El abrazo (The Embrace, 2023), the latter giving the exhibition its title—where surface and volume converge and collapse through monochromatic expanse and material accumulation. Reorienting considerations of land and site toward embodied forms of material and ecological knowledge, Morelos aims to cultivate moments of connection with what she describes as the “intimate humidity of the earth.”

In conjunction with the commission, Dia presents Soil Sessions, an iterative series of interdisciplinary activations, poetic responses to, discursive reflections on, and embodied engagements with earth as subject and material in Morelos’s work. These public programs, presented monthly throughout the run of the exhibition, invite sustained engagement with the commission through a variety of lenses.

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo is accompanied by the first bilingual publication expressly dedicated to the artist’s soil-based works, edited by Kamilah N. Foreman, Alexis Lowry, and Zuna Maza. Published in English and Spanish with a folio of versions of Amazon Indigenous origin stories from Bará, M+n+ca, Uitoto N+pode, and Yucuna Kamejeyá and Yucuna Jeruriba knowledge-holders, the richly illustrated monograph will explore Morelos’s multisensory and deeply personal approach to working with land. Publishing date to be announced.

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo is curated by Alexis Lowry, curator, with Zuna Maza, curatorial assistant.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Delcy Morelos: El abrazo is organized in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Major support provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Significant support by the Teiger Foundation and VIA Art Fund. Generous support by the Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation, Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation, Dia’s Director’s Council, and Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. Additional support by the Cowles Charitable Trust, Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Family Foundation, Clarice Oliveira Tavares, and Helen and Peter Warwick. Special thanks to IFF for their guidance and contributions toward El abrazo (2023).

Following Dia Chelsea, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in Saint Louis will present Morelos’s second U.S. solo presentation, opening in March 2024. This separate, career-spanning exhibition will feature painting, sculpture, and installation from the 1990s to the 2010s, as well as a new monumental, site-specific earth work.