Laura Anderson Barbata returns to Wave Hill’s Abrons Woodlands with Our History is Not Found in a Book. Visitors are encouraged to meander down the hill to the south of the gallery. Entering the shady woods, they encounter a group of hammocks. This place for rest, contemplation and conversation offers a way to experience nature that differs from the formal relationship fostered by the gardens. It gives visitors a chance to relish the shade and to enjoy the variety of native trees and plants that flourish at Wave Hill. It continues a thread in Barbata’s work that provides an open-ended experience with nature and honors the presence of indigenous cultures here. Her earlier work, Traces of Infinity, launched the generated@wavehill program in 1999. It was a series of installations that also invited an intimate relationship with the woods by honoring those who have come before us.

Collaboration is at the heart of Laura Anderson Barbata's practice, which combines art-making with identifying and fulfilling community needs. Since 1992, she has worked with indigenous communities in the Venezuelan Amazon and Ecuador to develop ongoing papermaking projects that preserve language and history. In 2001, she began working in Trinidad and Tobago with the Moko Jumbies, a group of stilt dancers whose traditions stem from West Africa. She also initiated a papermaking project in Grande Riviere in the north. Her drawings, sculpture and installations have been presented in exhibitions throughout Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Europe and the United States. She is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bozano-Simonsen Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City and the American Express Collection. Barbata studied sculpture and engraving at the School of Visual Arts at the University of Rio de Janeiro and sociology at the University of California, San Diego, in San Diego, CA.

More information can be found at www.lauraandersonbarbata.com.