Carolina Caycedo named 2026 Arthur and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist

Artist Carolina Caycedo will be in residence at the Sam Fox School’s research-based printmaking workshop, Island Press, this March.

During her residency, she will engage with students to create a series of “Root Portraits.” The works expand upon her ongoing series, “Plant Portraits,” initiated in 2021, which explore systems of reciprocity between people and plants. Caycedo’s “Root Portraits” examine the crucial root-to-soil interactions happening underground with a focus on Midwestern prairie grasses.

The works created at Island Press, among others, will be included in her upcoming solo exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, opening in September 2026. She will also participate in Counterpublic, St. Louis’s public art triennial, which opens in September as well. Caycedo previously exhibited artwork at the Kemper Art Museum as part of the 2025 exhibition, “Seeds: Containers of a World to Come.”

Carolina Caycedo is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Her artist’s books, hanging sculptures, performances, films, immense satellite photo collages, and installations are not merely art objects but gateways into larger discussions about how we treat each other and the world around us. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale energy infrastructure, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. 

Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice. She confronts the colonial gaze and contributes to the reconstruction of environmental and historical memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. Caycedo conjures common goods and collective bodies in what she refers to as geochoreographies to examine the environmental, economic, social, and spiritual impacts of extractivist industries, raising questions about the future of our shared resources, and gearing towards a fair transition. 

In 2023, Caycedo received a Soros Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She was the 2023-24 artist in residence at the Getty Research Institute, and the 2024 UCLA Regents’ Professor visiting in the department of design media arts. In 2025, her show “We Place Life at the Center” was at the Vincent Price Museum in Los Angeles, and her work was included in the Kemper Art Museum exhibition, “Seeds: Containers of a World to Come.”

In 2008, Dr. Arthur L. Prensky established The Arthur and Sheila Prensky Visiting Artist Endowment Fund to bring distinguished artists to the Sam Fox School for artist residencies at Island Press. Visiting artists work closely with faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students through a variety of programs and interactions to create innovative prints that garner a critical response from national and international audiences.