Luisa Caldwell is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and collage, executing small intimate work to architecturally scaled installation. Recent solo exhibitions include “A Cat In God’s Garden”, an exhibition of 210 pen and marker drawings of fantasy botanicals called the Tree of Life series installed as two large wall panels and 6 mixed-media sculptures of stacked books and readymade ceramics that she etched with original imagery. A Cat In God’s Garden was on view Fall 2018 at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. “Triple C”, summer 2016, was an exhibition of five wall size hanging panels made exclusively from collected candy wrappers, at Long Island University’s Humanities Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The colorful and beguiling tapestries depicted interpretations of dramatic sky scapes.
Caldwell has been awarded permanent public art projects through the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art where she designed and fabricated three large scale hanging globe and soccer ball sculptures for PS 244 in Flushing, Queens. From the NYC MTA Arts & Design, she received a subway commission for East 180th St. in the Bronx. There, fifteen of her designs are translated into mosaic and art glass. For this project Caldwell, along with the architectural firm Lee Harris Pomeroy, received four awards including the prestigious Excelsior Award for Public Architecture from the American Institute of Architecture New York State.
Caldwell has sited many temporary large scale installations at such prestigious locations as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Infusion Center in Brooklyn and MSB Gallery at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, NY. Outdoor projects include Socrates Sculpture Park, Sculpture Key West, Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota and Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem.
Group museum exhibitions include Hecksher Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art, MassMoca, and Pepperdine University, among others.
She is the recipient of two Jerome Foundation Grants, and many full fellowships including Thomas Hunter Artist in Residence Hunter College Ceramics and CEC Artslink for production and travel to Art Prospect, St Petersburg Russia in 2018, 2019 and 2021.
Caldwell has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic, artcritical.com among others, and is in many public and private collections most notably Deutsche Bank, Memorial Sloan Kettering and Frederick Weisman Foundation collection. Caldwell currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and pove del Grappa, Italy.