Portale by Paz de la Calzada

In “Portale,” artist Paz de la Calzada invites visitors to explore the meaning of passage and transformation.

This site-specific installation creates a path through the stone portal in USF’s Kalmanovitz Hall atrium to The Nomadic Labyrinth (2013) on the building’s rooftop sculpture terrace. For Portale, de la Calzada incorporates a common ornamental pattern used in churches of Northern Italy to form a path that links the monument and the space. Using gaudy reclaimed carpets from hotels and casinos, de la Calzada evokes with irony the relationship between the sacred and the profane.

About Paz de la Calzada

Paz de la Calzada, a native of Spain, is an artist working in drawing, installation and sculpture. She received a BFA at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and her MFA at UNAM, Mexico City. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including the San Jose Museum of Art, the Palo Alto Art Center, the Berkeley Art Center, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, the Union Fenosa Museum and the Fundacion Caixa Galicia in Spain and the Leon Trotsky Museum and the San Angel Cultural Center in Mexico City.

De la Calzada came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003 as an Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She has since been in several residency programs like Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, Millay Colony for the Arts in New York and Valparaiso Foundation in Spain. She is a recipient of a Cultural Equity Grants by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Academy of Fine Arts Award and the County of La Coruña Grant, both in Spain.

Her current work reflects the artist’s vision of creating art that is playfully in dialogue with the urban space, exploring the relationship between nature and urban environment, daily life and ritual.