Photo Credit: Tim Correria
Libby Paloma! She will be joining us from September – December!
About Libby:
Libby Paloma (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and performance. Embracing maximal aesthetics, humor, and craft traditions, Paloma transforms familiar materials into layered forms imbued with multiple meanings. Her immersive, labor-intensive soft sculptures draw from traditional sewing and craft techniques passed down by the women in her Mexican lineage. Through these tactile, richly textured works, Paloma explores intersectional identity, cultural transmission, and the radical softness of queerness. Often activated through sensory engagement or performance, Paloma’s pieces invite interaction and play, creating spaces of interconnection and reimagination through what she calls “world softening.”
Paloma’s performance pieces are shaped by lived experience and often unfold through humor, storytelling, and the expressive use of the body to share nuanced perspectives on queerness, disability, and identity. Their performances often subvert dominant narratives using humor and absurdity to open space for empathy and embodiment. Playful yet pointed, their performance work activates her sculptural environments and deepens the emotional and conceptual resonance of the works.
Before fully pursuing an art career, Paloma spent two decades working in education as a counselor, teacher, and Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP). They hold a BA in Liberal Studies, an MS in Communicative Disorders from San Francisco State University, and an MFA from Parsons School of Design at The New School, where she received the President’s and University Full Scholarship.
Current Work by Libby:
Connective Tissue (2025)
Brings together the work of three queer femme artists, Libby Paloma, Heather Renée Russ, and Caitlin Rose Sweet.
Libby Paloma’s soft sculpture and performance piece contains oversized, tactile pies. The work transforms an everyday symbol of empty promise into a sensorial environment where sweetness pledged is actually served. She uses traditional sewing techniques passed down by the Chicanas in her family. Her practice is rooted in a conceptual framework they call world-softening, grounded in their lived experience with a congenital connective tissue disorder.
Images were photographed by Velvetpark Media
copyright © Velvetpark Media 2025
My work is often an exploration of language, materiality, and the cultural perceptions of what it means to live with a disability (I have a congenital connective tissue disorder and hearing loss) as a queer, mixed Latinx, femme. Recently, I’ve been inspired by the scholar Theresa Milbrodt—who has written about how able-bodied people often misread disability as inherently “tragic”—my work instead foregrounds humor, storytelling, hope, flexibility, and resistance.
Past Works by Libby:
Based on Actual Events
is a multidisciplinary work that combines live performance, sculpture, and video. In this piece, the character Libby attends a peculiar, humorous, and unsettling telemedicine appointment with Dr. Dislodge and Receptionist Michelle—both also played by Libby Paloma.
No Picnic
In this installation, I combined my creative research and background in Speech-Language Pathology to explore idiomatic expressions using humor to scrutinize life’s difficulties while offering simultaneous relief. The word picnic originates from the French word “pique-nique,” dating back to the 17th century, with the direct translation meaning “bite little nothings.”…
Still Living (with)
I recreated a still-life scene from my couch—where I spent much of the previous year recovering from a particularly difficult period related to my connective tissue disorder. The installation featured over 40 soft sculptures made from upcycled fabric, including soft sculpture food items designed for interaction, and a rug where visitors were invited to sit or lie down. The piece breathed admiration and care into personal objects, discarded materials, my ever-healing body, and the strangers who came to experience it.
