The “Pattern Project” Exclusive collections | collaborations for Concalma
Mel Xiloj
Mel Xiloj is an artist and designer. She currently lives between Puerto Rico and New York. She used to work as an artist assistant but now she doodles non stop for a living. She loves to bike and rescue stranded plants.
Mel Xiloj
Tela = Agustino
Mel Xiloj
Tela = Candyland
Daniela Paola Romero
“Supakid” is the cyber moniker of Daniel Paola, an artist,
After working several years as a graphic designer for the advertising industry, Daniela started to experiment with photography and illustration outside of the ad world until it became a full-time job.Since then, she has developed a series of DIY projects which include comics, posters, zines, editorial photography and styling. Supakid’s web identity is based on patterns and brilliant colors, photographs that tell a story or self portraits as studies in the documenting of fashion. Each discipline has its own theme, style and language and tries to communicate a certain message or to foster a particular reaction from the audience.
“SupaKid”
Tela = “Brick”
Zawahra Alejandro
Concalma and Zawahra Alejandro join together to create a line of limited edition bags for daily use with textiles designed by local artists. Concalma is a design brand and the textile bag is their main product. Zawahra Alejandro fosters and represents the work of artists internationally.
The title of the print is ‘Caribbean Beat and its part of the series “MarkMaking”
Sebastian Vallejo’s work is inspired in the expansive quality and spontaneous ways that exists in nature where organic and non organic forms are exposed and transform one another. He is informed and influenced mostly from the light and color of he Caribbean specially Puerto Rico where he was born and raised.
Tela=Caribbean Beat
Limited edition | 24 units
Sofia Maldonado
Born from a Cuban mother, in Puerto Rico. Her unique vision issues from the inherent complexities of her identity as well as the energies of the youth cultures that have informed her creative practice. Her work draws inspiration from abstraction; deconstructing post-colonial urban landscapes intertwine with nature, developing her own interpretation of nostalgia. Maldonado was awarded the Manhattan Community Arts Fund by the LMCC. Her first solo museum exhibition took place at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, in 2012; and has exhibited in several major institutions including the CAAM, Mint Museum, Museum of Art and Design, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, The Ringling Museum; and Museo del Barrio. Public projects include 10th Havana Biennial, Real Arts Ways, Time Square Alliance, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Maldonado lives and works in New York.
Carolina Caycedo
Carolina Caycedo engages with issues and contexts that affect a broad public on an everyday level: in her work, art functions as a pretext for offering up utopian models to inhabit a world in which individuals and communities are increasingly subject to com-modification, exploitation, and discrimination. As part of the colombian art collective Colectivo Cambalache, she helped conceive the project “Museo de la calle” (1999–2002) — an ambulatory and constantly shifting archive of objects initially collected by barterin in one of the city’s most marginal neighborhoods and then circulated and displayed around Bogotá and eventually abroad.
With her individual project “Daytoday” (2002–09), she lived for brief periods of time without any money in cities like Vienna, New York, and London, subsisting by bartering services she could offer — for example, haircuts or Spanish lessons — in exchange for basic things like food or a place to sleep but also non essential goods and services like a digital camera or an invitation to a party. Her experience demonstrated that bartering is as much a form of social exchange as it is an economic one.
Caycedo’s complicated biography has inevitably influenced the content of her work — she was born in the UK, grew up in Colombia, and started a family in Puerto Rico, before residing in multiple cities in Europe and the US. But rather than employ apolitical terms like »nomadic« or »globetrotting«, the artist refers to herself as an immigrant, in order to emphasize the fact that uninhibited travel has become possible only for a relatively small elite, and that even as a part of this elite, most artists live under precarious economic conditions. Her 2003 video “How to obtain a British passport” shows a civil marriage ceremony as well as the negotiations that proceeded it when a Colombian friend, threatened with expulsion from the UK, asked her to help him obtain the British nationality by marrying him in exchange for 3,000 pounds. The following year, Caycedo organized a public march in Hackney, London, in which participants carried a large banner that read »immigrants influence home cultures« — the first of a series of banners with political messages that function as both affirmations and calls to action.
Much of Caycedo’s work is enacted and exists solely in public space as a form of urban intervention. In “Offerings”, 2011, she collaborated with religious and social activist groups on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to organize two candlelight ceremonies whose themes were illumination and pilgrimage, labor rights and immigration. over the course of a weekend, people from all walks of life were invited to gather around shrines of votive candles with screen-printed messages such as »better conditions for cultural workers« or »sustainable thinking« in an event that revisited the notion of art’s redemptive power.
Michelle Faguet, 2012.
Her work has been exhibited widely in venues such as Foundation Cartier and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris; Iniva in London; Creative Time, New Museum, Queens Museum, Ford Foundation and Apex Art in New York; Serralves Museum in Porto and Museu da Cidade in Lisbon; House of World Cultures and NGBK in Berlin; Secession in Vienna, Steirischer Herbst in Graz and Lentos Kuntshalle in Linz; Moderna Galerija in Slovenia; MUSAC in Leon, Santa Monica Art Center in Barcelona, and Casa Encendida and Matadero in Madrid; Wattis Institute in San Francisco; LACE and 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles; Teorética in San José; Alianza Francesa, Espacio La Rebeca and Galería Santa Fé in Bogotá. She has participated in the 2010 Pontevedra Biennial, 2009 Havana Biennial, 2009 San Juan Poligraphic Triennial, 2006 Whitney Biennial, 2003 Venice Biennial, 2002 Young Art Biennial in Turin, and 2001 Istanbul Biennial.
She has been invited to be a 2012 artist in residence at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Berlin. Caycedo received the Cultural Exchange International grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 2009, a 2005 fellowship of the Arts and Humanities Research Board in London, a Cultural Diversity Award from London Arts in 2002, and a 2001 year of the artist residency from the Arts Council in UK. Carolina Caycedo lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Alia Farid
(b. 1985) is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist who works at the intersections of art, architecture and the public realm through the activation of spaces for critical thinking and action. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (Viejo San Juan), a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge, MA), and a Master in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Catalonia). She has completed residencies at Beta Local (San Juan), Casa Árabe (Córdoba), the Serpentine Galleries (London) and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha). She currently works in the Heritage and Museums Department of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters of Kuwait on developing public programs and enhancing cross-institutional relationships.
Collection = “morir soñando”
Fabric selection by Alia Farid
Limited Edition