A Forest Grows in Sugar Hill

“Face to Face” with Tatiana Arocha

Tatiana Arocha is an artist. She is also both a daughter and a mother, though these parts of her biography are not obvious when looking at her drawings: large scale monochrome murals of the rainforests in her native Colombia. The more I spoke with Arocha, however, the more it became clear that these roles—of artist, mother, and daughter—found their meeting point in her work. 

When I interviewed the artist (in a happier time when museums were not closed due to the threat of COVID-19), we met at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem. On the walls hung Respiro un Bosque (“I Breathe a Forest”), an exhibition of Arocha’s work, which includes four murals of the Colombian rainforest, photographs, plant specimens, and various other tools pertaining to her process. (The show is up until September 2020. I hope the museum will reopen before then, for all our sakes!) 

The artist and her son in the rainforest (Image courtesy of the artist)

At the center of one of these murals is the Sambucus, or elderberry, tree that grows on her father’s property outside of Bogotá, a piece of land which he has spent the past 25 years reforesting. What began as a field is now “packed with trees,” including this one, whose branches seem to hold within them their own ecosystem, as smaller plants and animals make their home nestled in its leaves. The mural is an homage to the “memory,” of this tree, impossible to represent accurately, as it seems always to be changing. 

The tree is a microcosm of the property, itself a place of revelation for both the artist and her ten-year-old son, who is being raised in New York City, though he frequently visits Colombia with his parents. For these urban dwellers, the land is saturated with life lessons and teachable moments, of the kind you’d imagine a wise grandparent might impart to a young and eager acolyte.

It just so happens that this is the scene that plays out when the family visits, as Arocha’s father uses the land as a book from which to teach his young grandson the names of plants and what they mean to Colombia and its people. And though her son might not realize it, Arocha too is often listening intently and learning just as much. 

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The artist’s “Night Mountains” at BRIC in 2019. (Photograph by Jason Wyche)

I first encountered Arocha’s large scale drawings far from the leafy jungles of South America, amidst the water stained concrete of Bryant Park’s subway station, in which her digital print was featured in one of MTA Art & Design’s lightboxes. I came across her work again at BRIC, in Brooklyn, where she had made a mural for the café. In these transitional spaces her work appears slightly mysterious, impenetrable forests of leafy flora bursting in black and white, with an occasional animal peering out from among the foliage. The appeal of these images in public spaces is clear, as glimpsed on a commute or while buying a coffee they communicate themselves quickly and effectively, making an otherwise blank space feel as if it were teeming with life. 

At a children’s museum, however, they can reach their fullest potential, as their layers of complication come to the fore thanks to the frank and fastidious ways in which kids interact with art. Nothing—especially not when it comes to images of animals—escapes a child’s attention. Arocha laughed as she told me how she quickly ran out of things (like a hidden frog or a trail of ants) for the museum’s small visitors to find, not anticipating their enthusiasm for an afternoon game of I-Spy. 

Installation view of Arocha’s Respiro un Bosque at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling (October 23, 2019- September 20, 2020). (Photograph by Timothy Lee Photographers)

“I love New York kids. They’re so precocious,” the artist says. And while perhaps they don’t understand that the works are done in monochrome to recall the engravings Spanish colonialists did of the wild selvas of Colombia, nor do they intuit the visual reference to Japanese screens (“Japanese art is very good at creating a hierarchy,” the artist says as way of explaining the inspiration), they do know that images of nature are never pure—even children of six understand the fraught ground inhabited by climate change and the exploitation of resources. One concerned, if geographically-challenged, child asked why she had not painted koalas hanging around in her jungle, as a gesture of support for a species recently routed from its home by the Australian wildfires. (The artist, of course, had to inform him that koalas do not live in the Amazon, though she felt for the newly homeless marsupials.) 

Talking to children about geographic biodiversity is one of many teaching moments offered by Arocha’s work, which allows for a million branching paths down which children (and their chaperones) can wander, with plenty to learn along the way. Among these paths is the inevitable discussion of use, and not unrelated to it, value. The forest as a place of harvest (or exploit) is unavoidable, whether approaching it from pre- or post-colonial perspectives. 

El río en el que nos bañamos, 2020. (Photograph by Oscar Monsalve)

One mural, opposite the Sambucus tree, is of a jungle plantation, but not the sprawling cotton fields of the antebellum South we might picture when hearing the word, as the plantations of the Amazon are multi-crop swathes of forest, nary a monoculture in sight. This might be the picture of sustainability, but the exploitation of resources is not far from Arocha’s mind, as she enhances each mural with gold paint, as a reference to the gold extracted from the earth by Spanish conquistadors (and which is still extracted to this day). The inclusion of gold is also a way of juxtaposing cultural values—the gold, precious to the colonizers, bumps up against images of the multi-functional coca plant, of extreme value to the colonized. 

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When we talk of the work, descriptions of children visiting the museum mingle with stories of Arocha’s own son’s experience in the rainforest. When the Museum called the artist with the news of her exhibition commission, she happened to be with him on a residency for parent-artists in the Amazon, where her son had rapidly taken to the screen-less lifestyle of swimming in natural springs while cohabitating with tarantulas and possums as roommates. It is easy to conflate her son, romping in the jungle, with the neighborhood kids visiting the museum on their field trips, as if there was a fold in the space-time fabric connecting the two. 

El saúco de Ananse, 2020. (Photograph by Oscar Monsalve) The Sambucus tree on Arocha’s father’s property.

When talking of the natural world, Arocha often mentions the word “reciprocity,” implying that wherever there is a take, there must also be a give. You can only harvest from the land if you know where to give back to it. 

Arocha has the privileged position of being an artist, where reciprocity is of equal importance. An artist takes inspiration from the world, but with the implicit promise that she will turn around and pass it on, the same way her father passes his knowledge to her son. Arocha is asking us, through her work, to examine what we consume, how we grow and are sustained—whether by land or by art—from generation to generation. 

She has harvested the land for its images, bringing back the bounty to New York, where schoolchildren learn lifelong values of environmental stewardship and responsibility, nourished by the knowledge she has shared. 

More on Arocha’s work can be found here.