Joseph Liatela

Working across sculpture, installation, and performance, Joseph Liatela explores how materials, architectures, and bodies hold and transmute histories across time. His artistic practice evokes spaces of collective experience—from religious and medical environments to nightlife and sites of memorial—where promises of salvation and healing commingle in proximity to historical erasure and loss.

Originally trained in printmaking, Liatela’s practice engages with trace, repetition, and transformation as catalysts for exploring broader notions of collective memory, absence, and movement. Ephemera, impression, and remembrance are central to his work, which attends to histories often excluded from the official archive and the alternate forms of citation and narrative through which they are sustained.

Live flowers, bodily traces, and participatory gestures within monumental installations are characteristic of his open-ended practice. Across these forms, Liatela examines how collective experience is produced, sustained, authored, and transformed.

Liatela has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Marli Motsumoto (São Paulo), Proyecto Galería (Mexico City), Galerie Du Montparnasse (Paris), Denniston Hill (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The Jewish Museum (New York), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York), and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York), among others. His debut museum solo exhibition Nothing Under Heaven was presented at George Segal Galleries in 2022.

Liatela earned an MFA in sculpture and expanded media from Columbia University. He has received grants and fellowships from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Banff Centre, California College of the Arts, and Columbia University, among others, including a Van Lier Fellowship. His writing has been published by the Leslie-Lohman Museum Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Oxford University Press, and Duke University Press. Liatela’s work has been featured in Artsy, The Leslie-Lohman Museum Journal, SF MoMA’s Open Space, EMERGENCY Index, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, Artforum, and Art & Education.

Current and recent exhibitions include Denniston Hill’s collective installation Chimera (2026) for The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh; A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit at Palm Springs Art Museum, curated by David Evans Frantz; Scientia Sexualis at ICA LA, curated by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro as part of Pacific Standard Time; and the solo exhibition Ex-Voto at Fragment Gallery in New York City.