Terrain Biennial 2025
Artist Reception Sunday Nov. 2, 2-4pm
The historic Oak Park Art League hosts three artist installations, one of solid materials in sculptural form Bethany Cordero's The Architecture of Becoming, a video projection, Pia Cruzalegui's Romeria and Margot McMahon’s Flow. Together these works overlap and occupy the garden courtyard offering a contemplative experience to explore and witness changes in the works as the season progresses and collaborates with these works, weathering the physical and changing the meaning over time.
Architecture of Becoming
Medium: Ceramic, steel, fiber
This work questions what it means to hold oneself together through layered time—what softens, what endures, and how materials, like memory or identity, are reshaped by the forces that surround them. The salvaged textiles speak to histories of use and care, while the ceramics offer both structural presence and subtle fragility. Together, they form a vertical body that will shift aesthetically through weather, sun, rain, and decay. The textiles will fray and bleach; the clay may stain or crack; The paper will undoubtedly disintegrate, and the steel will rust—all changes welcomed as part of the sculpture’s living evolution.
This outdoor sculpture consists of approximately 25 stacked, flat ceramic panels (6” x 6”) interspersed with salvaged textile squares of about the same size, all pierced and threaded onto a central vertical steel rod. The stacked sequence reaches a height of approximately 62 inches, forming a slender, columnar form. The ceramic panels are high-fired and durable, offering rigid contrast to the softness and wearability of the repurposed fabric. Together, the layering builds a textured vertical presence that gently sways between natural and constructed, permanent and provisional. The materials have been intentionally chosen to respond differently to environmental exposure, allowing the sculpture to evolve visibly over time.
Bethany Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist whose work centers on the transformative potential of materiality. Working primarily with clay, fiber, and metal, her practice explores how these materials undergo shifts and adaptations, reflecting the fluid nature of identity and the passage of time. Themes of resilience, impermanence, and renewal are central to her sculptures, which often incorporate remnants of steel and bronze alongside textiles. By assembling these fragments, Cordero creates forms that hold memory and embody the tension between fragility and strength. Her process-driven approach, whether through welding or weaving, highlights the material's capacity for change, while drawing connections between personal experience and collective narratives.
www.bethanycordero.com
@bethany_cordero
Romeria
Romeria. (2024) is part of a triptych titled, Palo santo. Garúa. Romería. (trans. Palo santo. Pilgrimage. Mist.) Two bodies of water, seemingly unrelated, converge in the montage of these images. Romería is a pilgrimage—an infinite story of histories passed from one generation to the next, from one part of the globe to another. This work is part of a series that transposes oral narratives—constructed chaotically, like Borges' infinite library, with fragmented and interwoven threads. When I began this series, I revisited unfinished personal stories and returned to Borges, whose literature has captivated my imagination since adolescence.
(Spanish)
En La biblioteca de Babel, Jorge Luis Borges propone que en la biblioteca infinita los libros están compuestos muy simétricamente con tipografía y tinta muy negra, los textos cuentan con las veintidós letras del alfabeto, el punto y la coma. El relato define a los humanos como el “bibliotecario imperfecto.” La biblioteca es el universo. Pero, ¿es este universo personal?
Romería forma parte de una serie de obras (Palo Santo, Garúa, Romería) que transponen narrativas orales y que, al igual que la biblioteca borgiana, se construyen caóticamente a través de relatos fragmentados. Al comenzar esta serie, volví a historias personales aparentemente inconclusas y releí a Borges, cuya literatura ha cautivado mi imaginación desde la adolescencia.
A través de este trabajo observo y hago emerger historias orales, transformando la memoria en imágenes incoherentes, letras, palabras y frases separadas por puntos, comas y espacios metafóricos e intercalarlos en un laberinto visual. Es una historia sin principio que, en su trayectoria hacia el infinito, se detiene paulatinamente e insistiendo en captar un presente absurdo, en un intento de explicar un universo personal.
Pia Cruzalegui
As an independent curator, Pia Cruzalegui (b. Peru) places special focus on contemporary issues related to the environment, women, and LGBTQ+ community. She has organized exhibitions in Chicago, Miami, and abroad, and is the producer of Oral Fixation Art Podcast. Pia received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and a BA in Video, Film, and Multimedia from Florida Atlantic
Pia was given a recognition award by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage of Quito, Ecuador, for her work Rojo Rosa Rosado, in 2019, and her video documentation project, “American Tales in the Making” (2020), funded by the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read, was commissioned by and archived at the Freeport Art Museum, in Illinois. Pia Cruzalegui was born in Peru. She lives and works in Chicago where she works as an artist, curator and producer.
@piacruzalegui
FLOW, carved wood
Flow in the courtyard of the historic Oak Park Art League, that thrives through contemporary artistic statements, transforms a gardenscape into a coral reef to remind us of our connection to ocean-life. Even in the Midwest our emissions and plastic waste affects the ocean daily.These manatees and ocean forms resemble flight and perching while swimming amidst the floral and botanic flora to remind us of life forms that existed before our Athropocene era of interruption. Carved from wood, cast in resin and painted with shimmering automobile paint, these life forms are translated into the most permanent material: Resin-plastic. It is dichotomous with the wood carved surface that glistens with man-made permanence to reflect and offer contemplation to our translation of nature into man-made everlasting materials. Just as the botanical tended garden is transformed into the likeness of a coral reel by the Flow of ocean life, the motion can be within air as flight or water as flow through a natural life-forms.
Margot McMahon
A lifelong environmentalist, internationally- awarded Margot McMahon sculpts, writes, and paints human, plant, and animal forms to say, through art, her hope that decisions be made to support life on earth. With degrees in Environmental Journalism and Art, and an MFA from Yale University, Margot continuously makes environmental statements in art and writing. She has been called the “Studs Terkel of the sculpting world” for her humanistic portraits, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Monument for Gwendolyn Brooks Park. The Smithsonian, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago History Museum, Soka Gaikkai International, Mobil Oil, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Steans Family Foundation, and Yale University have collected her sculptures.
Margot taught at Yale University, Yale Norfolk, the Art Institute of Chicago, and DePaul University. Monthly, Margot publishes a Substack about science writing. Since 2020 she has directed the Green Blocks Initiative webpage on Yale Blue Green's (YBG) website and co-chairs YBG's Programming. In 2023 and 2024 Margot received writing awards for humor and political essays from Off Campus Writing Workshop.
She has published environmental statements in the World Book Encyclopedia, Chicago Magazine, Write Volumes, OCCW Anthology, Scholastic Magazine. Margot's recently published Coral: Is It an Animal.Plant or Mineral has received the IWPA Mate E Parmer First Place book award, Nationally the NFPW Book award and Mom's Choice Award. Aquarius Press published The Margot McMahon Collection: If Trees Could Talk ( NFPW 2022 National Book Award) (IWPA 2022 First Place Book Award) Mac and Irene: A WWII Saga (2021). RESIST! A Visual History of Protest launched with an exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in 2023. The Fifth Season (2nd edition)received 2020 First Place Mate E. Palmer Book Award (IWPA). Recipient of Soka Gakkai International’s Arts/Culture award. Margot McMahon is published in Chicago Magazine, World Book Encyclopedia, Scholastic Magazine, MIT Press, and Yale University Print & Publishing.
@margotmcmahon
We are always open to enhancing our garden courtyard, especially with works of art!
This is where you will find out who is exhibiting sculpture in the courtyard garden and how to be considered for this opportunity.
