Borinquen Gallo is an Italian-Puerto Rican, Bronx-based artist whose work delves into themes of beauty, community, socio-cultural systems and structures through sculpture and installations made using a range of repurposed materials. Everyday detritus, construction, and packaging materials including trash bags, debris netting, and caution tape are painstakingly knitted, threaded, and reconfigured into lush textural weavings. Across a broad range of considerations — material, formal, psychologically intimate and social — the work aims to modulate between the familiar and the surprising so as to fundamentally disrupt viewers’ assumptions regarding what is valuable and discardable. 

Gallo has exhibited at Burning in Water Gallery, BRIC Arts Media, Smack Mellon, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, The National Academy Museum, the Queens Museum, Columbia University, and The Cooper Union and Queens College. Residencies include The Children Museum of Manhattan (2019), The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace program (2015), the Vermont Studio Center (2013), and The Cooper Union Artist Residency (2011). In addition, Gallo has worked on curatorial projects with BAM Fischer and Pratt Institute. She has received numerous awards including the Sol Shaviro Award (2015), The Marion Netter Fellowship (2010), the Doris Liebowitz Art Educator Award (2009). Gallo is currently visiting Associate Professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute in New York. She received a BFA in painting and sculpture from the Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art, an MFA in painting from Hunter College.