Aldrich Projects to present Estefania Puerta’s Laughing Death Drive Sept. 18–Jan. 11

Estefania Puerta’s first solo museum presentation features a sculpture and a new wall relief

Photo via The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum ( 258 Main St, Ridgefield, CT 06877 ) is pleased to announce Estefania Puerta’s first solo museum presentation. Puerta’s installation is part of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series featuring one work or a focused body of work by a single artist on the Museum’s campus. Puerta will debut her latest wall relief, Laughing Death Drive (2025) alongside Garganta Cueva (2023). Estefania Puerta: Laughing Death Drive will be on view September 18, 2025, to January 11, 2026.

Born in Manizales, Colombia, Puerta immigrated to the United States, settling with her family in East Boston. Her work recasts the terms of categorization—blurring the lines between what is deemed alien or natural, comforting or threatening, forged and found, spoken and withheld. Influenced by literature, mythology, and psychoanalysis, she delves into themes of shapeshifting and transformation, reflecting on what is gained or lost through cultural and material translation.

At the heart of Puerta’s practice is her deep engagement with materials. She incorporates a wide range of organic and inorganic elements—stained glass, fungi, plants, shells, minerals, quail eggs, resin, animal fur, essential oils, and photographs—to create works that evoke both familiarity and the otherworldly. Many of the objects she uses hold personal or cultural weight, such as volcanic rock from Colombia’s Nevado del Ruiz or her own cédula de identidad, a national ID used throughout Central and South America.

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Sited in the Museum’s atrium, Garganta Cueva is a sloping chartreuse-green case crowned with eighteen metallic, breast-like mounds. A curled-up canine form rests within, while an array of poetically charged objects are embedded across the surface. The work reflects Puerta’s ongoing explorations of containers—not only as physical enclosures, but as metaphors for how bodies, spaces, and systems harbor memory, meaning, and power. Like a tomb or sarcophagus, which houses ritual tokens as well as the spirit of a life lived, Garganta Cueva becomes a monument to the ghosts we carry, and to a selfhood shaped by what we gather and what is imposed upon us. At its center, the dog—an homage to her own companion, Mugre—embodies the tensions Puerta often explores, where protection slips into confinement, comfort is entangled with vulnerability, and domesticity drifts into the untamed.

In 2024, Puerta was awarded the Philip Guston Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, spending six months living and working abroad. Since returning to Vermont, where she currently lives and works, Puerta has turned toward more intimate enamel-on-wood works inspired by the handheld nature of reliquaries and devotional tablets—objects meant to be carried on pilgrimages or migrations. Laughing Death Drive, which stretches nearly ten feet in length and measures just five inches in height, also echoes the tactile and communicative function of these ancient forms. With this work, Puerta considers language as something felt rather than read—where meaning emerges not only from content, but through rhythm, material cadence, and the physical trace of its making. Like Garganta Cueva, Laughing Death Drive serves as an expression of presence—compressing emotion and symbolism into a meticulously arranged composition, and continuing Puerta’s investigation of how objects preserve personal and collective histories.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a ‘zine.

Estefania Puerta was awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, FL; Micki Meng Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Lyles and King, New York, NY; and was included in the New England Triennial at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, in 2022. Puerta received her MFA from Yale School of Art. She was born in Colombia and currently lives and works between Vermont and New York.

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Aldrich Projects to present Estefania Puerta’s Laughing Death Drive Sept. 18–Jan. 11