Dalila Sanabria | strange mountains
April Art Exhibition at the Eclipse Mill Gallery
Williams College visiting lecturer in art installs recent works at historic mill site.
North Adams, MA—March 2, 2026—Eclipse Mill Gallery proudly presents strange mountains, a solo exhibition by Dalila Sanabria. The exhibition runs from April 3-29, 2026 and showcases recent sculpture, drawings, and multi-media works that explore the artist’s interpretation of the Latinx aesthetic of rasquachismo and its emphasis on making ingenious and vibrant objects from what is available.
Opening reception: Friday April 10, 2026, 6-8 p.m. The artist will be present.
Artist talk and panel discussion: Sunday April 26, 2-4 pm. Sanabria will be joined by leading Latinx art scholar and author Elizabeth Ferrer and Williams College Assistant Professor of Latino/a Studies Kevin W. Cruz Amaya, with exhibition organizer, Anne Elise Urrutia, as moderator. Together, they will reflect on the exhibition’s central themes: exile, migration, cultural inheritance, and material poetics. The conversation will explore how Sanabria’s work engages memory, belonging, and the body in relation to place, and how these ideas resonate across contemporary Latinx art, sculpture, and scholarship.
About the Artist
“I’ve been thinking about isolation and elevation, how altitude permits perspective, and how displacement continually shapes the diasporic condition.”
Dalila Sanabria comes from many places. Her culture and heritage has traveled with her from Florida and South America to Williams College, where she is teaching courses in drawing and sculpture and working in residence. Sanabria’s art reflects both the everyday and sacred, whether seen or merely suggested; and here in the Berkshires, she has drawn inspiration from this place.
Sanabria reflects on moving into her Williams College studio, “I was given the timber remnants of a 200-year-old demolished Berkshire building. Their toxicity compelled me: arsenic-treated hemlock wood recalling the poison hemlock that once martyred Socrates. In many ways, being here has felt like looking through a hazy pane of glass, witnessing the world from a remote, snowy peak. I’ve been thinking about isolation and elevation, how altitude permits perspective, and how displacement continually shapes the diasporic condition. I wouldn’t have made this work at any other time or in any other place.”
“I was thrilled to meet Sanabria thanks to the Latinx Project at NYU. As recent newcomers to the Berkshires, both of Hispanic backgrounds (Sanabria is of Chilean-Colombian-American heritage), and both familiar with the experience of growing up in US ‘border’ states (Florida and Texas, respectively), I am excited about our overlapping cultural interests,” says Anne Elise Urrutia, a writer on her own familial Mexican roots.
“Sanabria’s art picks up the pieces of what we have, just as we always have, and in an act of tenderness and defiance, creates anew.”
There’s a sense of being a stranger in a strange land, of living in an exile world. We move, we build, we move, we leave. And yet, we remain, we persist, we flourish, we grow. We even sense the origin stories of those who have been here long ago. We feel their presence too.
Sanabria’s art tells a story of wood and ashes, using wood and ashes. Sanabria’s art picks up the pieces of what we have, just as we always have, and in an act of tenderness and defiance, creates anew.
A constructed stand of hemlock, gathered wood from a decaying building, might be mistaken for a simple batch of recycled materials waiting to be rebuilt. But in fact, it has already been touched, if you stop long enough to realize it.
When you do pause, you notice the subtle clues, emerging quietly from the surface. The leaning plank stands on its own, the burnt wooden column has a shiny black inside. Something has dripped down the side of what appears to be another tree reminder in this forest of wooden remnants. And then, the soft image of a curled up kitten emerges from some black smudges on a neighboring piece. A fallen log is clad in the words “again and again” hundreds of times in place of its bark. It’s burnt, charcoal and wood. The material of trees upon trees. And yet, arms of bronze cling to, explore, emerge from, and proclaim these majestic remembrances of a forest past.
As we wander through and search among this artist’s forest, we see other reminders of place repurposed… sheets of metal, an old bicycle handle, some abandoned truck headlights, distressed colonial silver, a concave glass lens from a clock. What lies beneath, behind, inside, among these found objects is waiting to be discovered. Words, images, and what remains, emerge from the ashes of these woods.
Dalila Sanabria received her MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has recently been exhibited at The Luminary, St. Louis, MO; 100 Million Space, Kansas City, MO, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, and others. Recent residencies include Jack Shainman Gallery and the Latinx Project, both in New York City. Her website is at dalilasanabria.com.
The Eclipse Mill Gallery is located at 243 Union Street, North Adams, Massachusetts 01247. Exhibition details, viewing hours/appointments, and media contact is available by contacting anne.elise.urrutia@gmail.com