KARELA LUCIA PALAZIO (b. 2003 Managua, Nicaragua)
Education:
2025 *** B.A. Art & Religious Studies, Yale University, cum laude + Distinction in Majors, New Haven, CT
2022 *** Summer Study, Theater & Screen Design, University of Arts London, Camberwell, U.K.
Awards:
2025 *** The Design Kids Awards, Selected among top emerging designers globally
2024 *** Studio Fellowship, Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, Yale University
2024 *** Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies Fellow, Yale MacMillan Center
2023 *** Saybrook College Creative & Performing Arts Award, Yale University
Exhibitions:
2025 *** Tell it Slant, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2024 *** Threshold, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2024 *** Studio Fellowship Exhibition, CCAM, New Haven, CT
2023 *** This Design is Very Human, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2021 *** Untitled: (Portrait of 2021), Bass Museum, Miami, FL
Experience:
2025 *** Studio Assistant, Jillian Mayer, Miami, FL
2025 *** Resident, CITY-STATE, Miami, FL
2024 *** Art + Design Intern, Wasserman, Brooklyn, NY
2024 *** Studio Assistant, Oswaldo Caceres, Managua, NI
2024 *** Design Intern, Forum3, Seattle, WA
2024 *** Creative Chair, Yale Spring Fling, New Haven, CT
2023 *** Studio Assistant, Anindita Dutta, NXTHVN Residency, New Haven, CT
2023 *** Graphic Design Intern, Verité, Amherst, MA
2023 *** Project Intern, O, Miami, Miami, FL
2022 *** Furniture Archivist, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
2020 *** Artworks Intern, Arts4Learning, Miami, FL
Publications:
2025 *** Tell it Slant Exhibition Catalog, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2023 *** The Yale Herald, Vol. XCIX Issue(s) 13-23, New Haven, CT
2021 *** Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering, Jai-Alai Books, Miami, FL
Karela Palazio’s work is rooted in a practice of symbol-use and making that takes root across graphic and sculptural mediums. The spiral is a constant because of its transcendent nature through time and space. From indigenous Miskito art in Nicaragua to road signs indicating firehoses, the spiral represents the movement through past, present, and future as a single unity that is ever-expanding. It speaks directly to an existence of a shifting and elusive reality that can never be captured.
Understanding symbols to be projections of larger concepts and patterns of human existence in visual form, Palazio views shadows as projections of physical objects, using them in works to expand sculptures between the physical and the metaphysical. Interested in how the shadow can speak to religious experience through its physicality, the works originate in light (the divine) and end in amorphous shapes (the feeling within).
Using cane weaving to create spaces of Latin American religiosity, the artist’s recent body of work reclaims the medium and makes it specific to Nicaraguan culture. Cane weaving came to the Americas in the 1650s through England, since it was used to create furniture that could withstand the hot and humid climates, unlike the upholstery typical to Europe at the time. It took root in the United States, and evolved into wicker furniture, but in the rest of the Continent, the technique has remained the same for centuries. The weave pattern in Nicaragua has its own name, ojo de pollo, or chicken eye, since every other square makes an eye-like shape. Through interventions within the weave with wire, beads, and string, the artist uses the weave as a gridded canvas to adorn with colors and materials familiar to churches in Nicaragua, building upon the naming of the weave to create a specifically Nicaraguan object.
The radio station, as an ephemeral space of information transmitted through unseen waves, tunes into a specific frequency filled with information. In the moments of lapse in between, or when the space is empty, what results is an audible static, an abyss. Exploring this static through drawing and re-fashioning it to communicate illumination of the divine during a religious experience, Palazio is interested in layering the spatial experience with an audible static.
This, in conversation with Palazio’s design work that collects and re-organizes the everyday, points to the artist’s interest in constructing systems of meaning that reveal how the sacred emerges through everyday materials, cultural memory, and sensory experience.
Incorporating cane weaving, shadow and frequencies to create a space of Latin American religiosity, the artist’s work embodies a powerful, irrational and transcendental nature.
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KARELALUCIA@GMAIL.COM