Bel Falleiros is a Brazilian artist with an Architecture degree whose artistic research focuses on land identity.  Starting with her hometown, São Paulo, she has worked to understand how contemporary landscapes, city tissue and its monuments (mis)represent the diverse layers of presence that constitute a place. 

Since arriving in the U.S. she has worked closer with the land, creating space for grounding and exploring the stories and symbols that can unite us. 

For Upstate Art Weekend /  Falleiros will install her living monument, America (un)known at the Gardiner Library, this installation will remain on view through October 2021. An additional installation, To Ripple with Water, will be on view at the Denizen Theatre in Water Street Market for Upstate Art Weekend only (August 27-29).

America (un)known  / Contrasting with the phallic monuments to Columbus and other “New World” colonizers scattered across the Americas, this horizontal circle form of clay-bricks celebrates ancestral and Indigenous forms of construction that bring humans, earth, and the cosmos together. Etched in various bricks are phrases composed by Black, Latinx and Indigenous people of the Americas that touch on ideas of home, belonging, and memory.

In a recent conversation with Anna Parisi of Latinx Spaces, Falleiros asks, “if we imagine each one of us as builders of what comes ahead, based on the ruins of what didn’t work, what could we do or what could we reimagine?” We invite the members of our New Paltz community to share their own foundational phrase with the Artist and join the ongoing national archive of 

responses at the link here.

To Ripple with Water / "A contemplative and immersive experience with Bel Falleiros, provoking us to ask, what remains when we slow down and listen?  The work invites us to ground ourselves, to make space for silence, to recall what’s left in the dark." - Art Spiel

Read more about the installation HERE.