Lina Puerta: Manigua

Weeds serve as the inspiration for Lina Puerta's Botánico series, initiated in 2010. Nature, uncontrolled, can be found sprouting from all manner of abandoned urban space. Even as humans strive to exert control, or exterminate nature altogether, she responds with resilience. Mother Nature slowly reclaims the cracks and crevices.

A site-specific installation for Miller Theatre, Columbia University in collaboration with The Wallach Art Gallery. Puerta's work is presented in collaboration with the Uptown triennial, an initiative of The Wallach Art Gallery that surveys the work of artists who live or practice in northern Manhattan.

This site-specific work is the fifth annual collaboration between Miller Theatre and The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, located on Columbia University's new Manhattanville campus, in The Lenfest Center for the Arts. Previous murals were created by Tomo Mori, Scherezade Garcia, Maya Hayuk and Vargas-Suarez Universal.

The Botánico series explores this tension between humanity and the botanical world. Puerta uses artificial plants, designed to create maintenance-free and organized adornments, to mimic the unruly, uncontrollable bounty of weeds. Her installation Manigua (scrubland or swampy undergrowth) intervenes the venerable walls of this historic hall, suggesting forces gathering deep inside the building, overflowing and breaking the structure down to a pastoral ruin.