photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: AiR / Ada Pilar Cruz / USA
“So it was magical arriving to an isolated and scenic landscape. There seemed no way out but with a car or a very long walk in the heat. It was hot. The sunsets were spectacular, then there was the star studded sky and a perfect bench to lie down and stare upward.
When I am working in a new studio, particularly in a new place, while traveling, observing, learning, I draw from the experience. Each place gives me an energy of new insights and I make work in relation to the place based on what I have found there, what I have seen and the pieces of its history that I can glean.
My plan while at Joya: AiR was to make paper. I had made paper out of seaweed that had washed onto the shore when I had been in a place by the ocean. Now I was going to be in an arid environment and I wanted to gather dried fibrous plant material (I imagined cactus) to make a different kind of paper. Interestingly, I did not find cactus-type plants. Instead, I found pine, grass, herb, and thistle. The amazing blaze of blooming poppies was out of the question. I walked and gathered then I boiled the fiber for hours, and I pounded the material into…not quite pulp as I gave myself blisters in attempt. I had brought dried abaca pulp that I re-hydrated, and mixed with the gathered and cooked materials. In all I made 95 11”x18” sheets of paper. I would screen the pulp and lay it out to dry in the heat of the day. The papers would dry within an hour.
These papers are beautiful.
Now I have another idea”.
Ada is from New York with family from Puerto Rico. Her education and life have been in both places. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art where she worked with ceramic sculpture and printmaking. She is one of the founders and a member of Buster Levi Gallery, in Cold Spring, NY - which is run by artists. She exhibits in this gallery every two years.
She is also a member of a non-profit print shop in El Barrio, NY, called Rafael Tufino Print Shop - part of Taller Boricua.
In her capacity as an artist, she is a Museum Educator having worked with MoMA for 25 years, and now she teaches as an educator with The Drawing Center in New York City.