Soledad Salame: Camouflage, Blaffer Art Museum

Soledad Salame, Fast Fashion Atacama I, II, III, IV, 2025. Archival print on canvas with hand work and embroidery. Panels I, III, IV: Courtesy the Artist and Goya Contemporary Gallery Panel II: Courtesy Sue Payne

Soledad Salamé: Camouflage

October 17, 2025—March 7, 2026

Acts of environmental violence, from the casual to the catastrophic, seem to grow more commonplace and inconspicuous by the day. At the same time that consumer branding touting taglines of “natural, green, and eco-friendly” gain increasing currency in the marketplace, big business and industry continue to churn through natural resources with little consequence or regard. Global summits and regulation continually fail to gain traction or compliance in response, and eco-activists hurling paint upon art history feels daftly counterproductive. In this fraught context, Chilean-American artist Soledad Salamé proposes a poetic form of intervention marrying art, research, and re-invention. Locating moments when nature’s resilience meets human resourcefulness, she works with an evolving team of scientific and ecological collaborators to create works as repositories of labor, resistance and reflection. Over decades of work and travel in service to this project, a subject and location she has returned to frequently is the Atacama Desert in northern Chile as a beleaguered site of pollution. It is most notably the site where millions of pounds of disposable textiles, often called “fast fashion,” are dumped and piled – to the degree they have become an uncanny part of the region’s topography. After visiting this site and feeling the depth of its impact, Salamé has translated aerial photos of the festooned Atacama into dizzying camouflage fields where she traces weighty details with needle and thread. A sister process gives shape to humble dresses the artist has fashioned from recycled cotton fabric, in quiet aspiration of re-populating this distressed Anthropocene. In this exhibition, Salamé’s new body of work is contextualized by past work she has created in Chile and other locations further afield – all unified by the sensitive and hopeful appraisal of environments forever (re)shaped by acts of humanity.

Soledad Salamé: Camouflage and its related programming is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, with significant support from Sue Payne. Additional support from Surpik Angelini, Ruth Dreessen, Sally Jabaley, M. Diane Marks, and Anonymous make this exhibition possible. Soledad Salamé: Camouflage was commissioned by Steven Matijcio, with logistical and curatorial support from Amy Raehse and Goya Contemporary. Special thanks to Surpik Angelini, Michael Koryta, and Lowery Stokes Sims.

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Soledad Salame, Camouflage, Blaffer Art Museum, photo by Franciso Ramos

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Soledad Salamé: Camouflage | Exhibition Brochure

The Blaffer Art Museum is pleased to present the first U.S.-museum solo exhibition of work by Soledad Salamé. Soledad Salamé: Camouflage considers the interrelationships between industry, innovation, and social responsibility: Salamé’s work is profoundly interdisciplinary, both in her research methodology and her material approach.

Born in Chile, Salamé’s early training in Venezuela centered printmaking; the discipline remains integral to the development of her ideas. Moving to the U.S. in the early 1980s, Salamé was drawn to the country’s relationship with technology, particularly in space travel. In this exhibition, several bodies of work look at satellite technology to consider not only our relationship with space, but also our detachment from the Earth as we commit to industries that have irreversible impacts upon our shared environments.

In her travels to the Atacama Desert, Salamé has studied the dumping of discarded clothing waste. From its environmental impact to its human implications—which for Salamé are never separate—these clothing dumps become dizzying visual fields. To abstract them, Salamé extends long histories of Latin American Abstraction, as it emerges in tension with unfolding political contexts. In the end, her proposal for how we see the world around us tell us as much about her commitment to the natural environment as to her engagements with form, color, and diverse mediums.

In the end, Salamé’s vision is one that has much to say to Houston and the Gulf Coast region. On view for the first time in Houston, her Gulf Distortions epitomizes the local overlap between industry and ecosystem, and the ways in which she understands our human impact upon the planet. That work, marked by intentional technological glitches, is responsive and predictive: by breaking the formal image Salamé reminds us that glitches can also be agents of change, of new visions, and of better futures.

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