In my work, I am a storyteller. I am telling narratives about my Colombian family’s immigration, the pre-Columbian South American presence, and my American latchkey, after school cartoon childhood. All of these stories work together to create a multicomponent self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo Colombian-American hybrid. Mining tidbits from historical research, familial narratives, and cartoon culture, I create surreal stories in clay much in the way Gabriel García Márquez did with words, autobiographically narrating history with its ups and downs, its humor and tears.
Making my work is an act of revealing undervalued histories from Latin American, Amerindian and Women of Color. These identities are lost through conquest, migration, and time, then gained through family, culture and exploration, and finally passed down through tradition, preservation, and genetic memory. I have found value in my histories and aim to help preserve my cultures by honoring them through my artwork.
In my historical and cultural studies of lost, conquered, and overlooked communities, I have found that craft and clay belong in my pursuit, and I’ve embraced it. I relate to the role of the craftsperson, which is often linked to women’s work, working class, and cultural tradition. Furthermore, my primary medium, my ancestral terracotta, has historically been considered a lesser material and the white glossy Majolica glaze that was brought over from Europe was used as a surface to hide the iron-rich clay body. I use this material as a metaphor to describe colonization and its impact on me.
Natalia Arbelaez is a Colombian American artist born and raised in Miami, Florida to immigrant parents. She received her BFA from Florida International University and her MFA with an Enrichment Fellowship from The Ohio State University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in museums, galleries, and included in various collections, such as the Everson Museum, New York; Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York; Fuller Craft Museum, Massachusetts; The ICA Miami; and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada. In 2016–2017, Arbelaez was a Rittenberg Fellow at Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York, and was awarded the Inaugural Artaxis Fellowship that funded a residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine. In 2018, she was recognized by NCECA as an Emerging Artist and was a 2018-19 resident artist in the Ceramics Program at Harvard University, where she researched pre-Columbian art and histories. In 2019-2020, Arbelaez was an artist-in-residence at MAD Museum in New York City, where she researched the work of historical and influential women ceramicists of color and continued this research as a 2021 and 2023 Visiting Artist at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA) in Pomona, California. She joined the School of Art + Art History + Design as Assistant Professor in Ceramics in the fall of 2024 after completing a residency at the MenLo Studio in Jingdezhen, China, where she spent the summer researching the city’s rich ceramic history and industry.
