Award-winning artist based in New Mexico.
Elżbieta Kaleta was born, raised and educated in Kraków (Cracow), Poland. She earned a Ph.D. in biology and worked in research, also finding time to do scientific illustrations.
In 1981, she came to the USA for postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School and later settled with her family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When her son’s illness forced her to stay at home, art became her therapy and source of income. Despite suffering from several chronic health problems herself, Elżbieta has persevered in managing to work in a continuous way all her life.
Elżbieta creates paper cutouts (called WYCINANKI in Polish) using the finest papers available and a pair of scissors. The majority of her work is deeply rooted in Polish folk art style and tradition. Elzbieta’s love of Nature is visible in her designs brimming with fantastic flowers, birds, and animals. Her art often raises spiritual and environmental issues.
Over the years Elżbieta has participated in hundreds of art shows, festivals, and exhibitions traveling around the USA and abroad to Japan and China. Her most important solo exhibitions were in Maxwell Museum of Anthropology in Albuquerque, NM and in Clifford Gallery - Parco I in Tokyo, Japan. Her art remains in numerous private and corporate collections including Albuquerque Museum (Albuquerque, NM), Carlsbad Caverns National Park Visitor Center (Carlsbad, NM), and Museum of Jintan (Jintan, China).
She has completed two Public Art projects for the city of Albuquerque and two other collaborative projects for Corrales Community Recreational Center (Corrales, NM), and for Sandia Mountains National History Museum (Albuquerque, NM). Her art has been featured in numerous publications.
Elżbieta has devoted hundreds of hours to classes and demonstrations in schools, senior citizens’ centers, and museums. She has been awarded grants from the New Mexico Arts Division’s Folk Arts Apprenticeship Program five times.
Elżbieta has been honored as a Local Treasure by the Albuquerque Arts Business Association.
Peter White (Author and Folklorist, Professor, English Department, University of New Mexico) wrote:
“Elżbieta Kaleta’s wycinanki (paper cutouts in Polish) reveal her absolute mastery of the technical skills and artistic traditions of this 19th century, rural, decorative art. But her work also illustrates how the practice of folk art can serve to affirm cultural identity while it simultaneously reflects the artist’s evolving understanding of a new culture and a new home. In Elżbieta’s colorful, intricate, often symmetrical designs we have a nearly perfect portrait of what it means to be an immigrant artist firmly and happily rooted in European past, but who seeks to absorb and display selected forms, images, and themes characteristic of her “new world”. Thus Elżbieta’s work is an idealized reflection of the American experience.
All folk art, particularly WYCINANKI, evolves, incorporating new designs, and motifs from various sources. With an open attitude and an artist’s eye, Elżbieta discovered interesting correspondences between Polish, Hispanic, and Native American motives. In both, Poland and New Mexico we see motifs based on Catholic imagery with much of the folk art revolving around the observance of the same religious holidays. Art forms celebrating the countryside (farming, animals and birds) are also prevalent in both cultures.
Elżbieta was particularly drawn toward the geometric designs and earth colors of Mimbres pottery made by prehistoric peoples of Southern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona. She enjoys incorporating these ancient figures and symbols into her art. Mimbres pottery has characteristically repetitive and sharply delineated figures which are aptly suited to the techniques of the paper cutter.
Therefore, on both technical and cultural grounds, Elżbieta Kaleta has ingeniously fused the old world with the new.”