HOST: Raul De Lara

In his sculptural work Raul De Lara (b. 1991, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; lives and works in New York, NY) reimagines everyday objects—chairs, ladders, plants, and other household items—as surreal, anthropomorphic forms. Blending technical fluency in woodworking with material play, humor, and poetic sensibility, his sculptures challenge fixed notions of form and identity, suggesting both can be continually dismantled and reassembled. Sourcing his lived experience of migration, adaptation, and cultural hybridity, De Lara explores identity as a fluid and mutable construct shaped across borders and over time.
This exhibition—De Lara’s first solo museum show in Texas—marks a personal and artistic homecoming for the artist, who immigrated to Austin more than twenty years ago. Leading up to HOST, he returned to Austin and visited the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to study flora native to both northern Mexico and Texas—the firewheel, lazy daisy, and damianita. In the resulting works, he recasts wild-growing flora as houseplants, invoking the ways in which immigrants are subject to systems of classification, containment, and control. “Why can plants—but never people—be native to two places?” De Lara asks, reflecting on the politics of assimilation and the systems that determine who or what is permitted to belong. A DACA recipient, De Lara articulates the paradox of contingence—living in a country while never fully belonging to it, or to the place he left behind. His plants evoke this liminal state: rooted, yet contained; sustained, yet unable to flourish.
For De Lara, household objects and plants are our silent companions—witnesses to our everyday acts of care, endurance, and quiet resistance; woodworking is not only an act of making, but a form of devotion and an evolving language for expressing the intricate negotiations that shape and sanction the struggle to belong.
HOST: Raul De Lara is curated by Julie Le, Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Austin.