HALEY CLOUSER
CURATOR | WRITER

Raul De Lara: Raíces/Roots


New York-based Mexican artist Raul De Lara carves uncanny, playful wooden sculptures imbued with personal and culturally significant stories to celebrate and foster a deeper understanding of the immigrant experience. Through traditional and innovative woodworking techniques, De Lara combines forms from nature, furniture design, and Mexican and American material culture to examine notions of nationality and identity. Championing a practice of “storytelling through woodworking,” De Lara weaves magical realism and symbolic items, like zompantle wood and Tz’ite beans, into his works to convey memories of his upbringing, Mesoamerican legends and rituals, and even paranormal encounters.

In his debut solo museum exhibition Raíces/Roots, De Lara presents works that retrace his Mexican roots following a recent return to his childhood home after nearly 20 years in the U.S. — a long-awaited visit complicated by his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. Across the SCAD Museum of Art’s Jewel Box vitrines, De Lara arranges tufted wooden chairs and construction cranes that honor his family’s history of craftsmanship, alongside modular, kinetic sculptures of cacti and monstera plants that embody his transnational, peregrine journey. Comparatively, the artist’s rocking chairs and slouching fieldwork tools evoke the precarity, manual labor, and disappointments faced by undocumented immigrants pursuing the “American Dream.” In sharing these cherished and whimsical yet difficult and often inexplicable life moments, De Lara offers insight into his story, while inspiring curiosity and connection with each other and the objects that surround us.Savannah College of Art and Design 
Museum of Art 
Savannah, GA
01/15/2025 - 07/05/2025


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