RSVP for María Elena's bio yarn workshop on Saturday November 7th, at 3pm.
María Elena Pombo works through open-ended, interconnected projects exploring how histories, territories, and forms of knowledge are embedded within materials from the Earth. From avocado seeds and mollusk shells collected by restaurant workers to petroleum, water, and algae gathered through collaborations, she transforms these materials beyond recognition through sculpture, installation, video, and actions involving site-specificity, ephemerality, and participation.
Her practice combines embodied knowledge acquired through material experimentation with research drawn from science, history, nature, mythology, language, and conversations. As a member of Venezuela’s diaspora, she explores territory through substances collected in particular places, carried across borders, or used to evoke them.
At TAC, she will continue a textile series in which materials associated with different territories become yarn through a brown-algae gel and a process adapted from molecular gastronomy. She weaves and knots these fibers into structures exploring registers of nostalgia: morriña for places left behind, anemoia for times never experienced, guayabo for people missed, and petroleum for Venezuela’s past prosperity.
Working with processed brown-algae extract and raw sargassum collected across the Caribbean by friends and herself since 2023, she will experiment with textile structures while researching how cultures have used weaving and knots to record and transmit knowledge.
María Elena Pombo was born in Caracas and is based in New York City.
She has participated in residencies and fellowships at Smack Mellon, Yaddo, Wave Hill, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Museum of the Arts, gmtc, and NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator.
Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been exhibited at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York 2026, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Biennial 2024, and shows at Somerset House (London, England), Gewerbemuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, Switzerland), Grand-Hornu Museum (Boussu, Belgium), Yamamoto Seika (Osaka, Japan), among others. She has also developed site-specific public artworks in beauty salons, concrete factories, mechanic shops, and abandoned military structures across New York City.
Pombo received the 2021 London Design Biennale Theme Medal and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council on the Arts, and New York Restoration Project.
Her work has been featured in ARTnews, Cultured, The New York Times, The Slowdown, METAL Magazine, i-D Italia, and Vogue México. She has taught at Parsons School of Design and Brooklyn Botanic Garden and lectured at museums, universities, artist-run spaces, and community-based programs.
