Emergence in Times of Emergency by Adriana G. Prat
December 7 2026 - January 15 2027
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We are living in an extraordinary moment when humanity has reached a delicate point of entanglement of multiple crisis – ecological, political, technological, financial, plus a crisis of meaning – all intertwined, from which an overwhelmingly complex metacrisis emerges, where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.
In my personal quest to grasp how we got here and how to better live in this juncture, aligning with my decision to offer the rest of my life’s energy to protect the natural world, I have been seeking facts and perspectives related to this predicament from reliable sources. Informed by this quest, my art has also emerged in ways rooted on a re-assessment of how I see the world: I believe that at the center of the tremendous challenge humans face is our constant anthropocentric focus instead of thinking of us as just a part of the natural world.
I have engaged in re-thinking how to change my usual approaches to how I create my art. I started to refuse to consume more, rather gravitating to repurpose stuff, objects, waste to create my work. I repair and re-pair; I mend and reinvent.
I moved my painting practice to work almost exclusively on repurposed substrates. I have moved even further to work with repurposed fabric and objects, including those that have a personal meaning and are connected to my origins. I marry unlikely partners to build works that portray beauty grounded on simplicity.
The inspiration of my works is anchored in the ultimate crisis which is the ecological one: the irreversibility of a finite biosphere that cannot be rebooted if we ruin it.
I am repairing myself from a human-centric perspective. This path I choose to follow is not linear and is full of dilemmas but I go on. One breath at a time. I hope it inspires you.
Featured Artist
Adriana G. Prat is an academically-trained scientist, with a PhD in Biophysics, turned artist and curator on a quest to inspire action for the environmental crisis.
As you speak with Adriana, you will learn that she has also been passionate about the environment since her childhood days in Argentina, when her father sparked her love and respect for nature, and a sense of the beauty and vastness of our planet and its vulnerabilities. These early insights influenced her curiosity that led to life choices, including her decision to become a scientist. After Adriana moved to the US, a more introspective lifestyle inspired her to become a fervent artist. An art residency in insular Iceland further motivated her to find a new unique way to communicate her environmental concerns. Informed by her scientific experience, through her work and the work of others via her curatorial activities (see i3Cartists.com), Adriana’s quest is to find a way to inspire change in others to halt climate change.
For her artworks, she works on alternative painting supports such as corrugated cardboard and repurposed canvases. She also experiments with textiles, assemblage and other mixed media techniques with rejected materials.
Adriana has exhibited at galleries, academic institutions, art centers, museums, and alternative spaces, in Argentina, and the US, mostly in the greater Boston area, and in galleries or alternative spaces in Reykjavík (Iceland), London (UK), Melbourne (Australia), and Paris (France). She is a juried member of the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) and the Cambridge Art Association (CAA, and the SoWa Artists Guild, among others. When not at her Cambridge studio, Adriana welcomes visitors to a shared studio in the Boston SoWa Art & Design District.
