San José Museum of Art
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María Berrío: Songlines

  • A barefoot woman wearing a long floral dress sits on a couch. Next to her is a large plant and behind her large windows show the blue sky.

    María Berrío, Clouded Infinity, 2020. Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas, 84 x 120 inches. © María Berrío Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Victoria Miro. Photo by Bruce M. White.

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    María Berrío: Songlines traces a decade of the artist’s intricate “paintings with paper”: large-scale works made from cut and torn paper fragments that coalesce into expansive scenes shaped by myth, memory, and migration. Interlacing personal and global narratives—from Colombian ecologies to diasporic life in New York—Berrío weaves together a litany of tales drawn from theater, dance, oral histories, papermaking traditions, natural history displays, colonial legacies, motherhood, and migrations of birds and people across an endangered earth. María Berrío: Songlines brings together a selection of works across six series that materially and conceptually demonstrate the deepening of Berrio’s practice from 2015 to 2025. Through ​​the artist’s ​​meticulous material process and ​​evolving storytelling, the exhibition considers the enduring power of narrative to make meaning across cultures in an ever-changing world. 

    Support

    María Berrío: Songlines is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and San José Museum of Art. Generous support for the national exhibition tour by Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro. 

    SJMA’s presentation is made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with additional support from Wanda Kownacki. 

    Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by principal support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, and the Skyline Foundation; by lead support from the Adobe Foundation, Toby and Barry Fernald, Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tammy and Tom Kiely, Wanda M. Kownacki, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100; and with significant endowment support from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

     

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