I Am de Mis Antepasadas

June 26th - July 25th, 2025

One Grand Gallery is excited to welcome Portland-based artist Adelina Ruvalcaba for her first gallery exhibition after graduation from PNCA with her MFA. Rooted in themes of cultural heritage and communal gathering, this exhibition transforms the familiarity of a traditional dining setting into a reflective and unique site-specific experience. From pozole to arroz con gandules, the artist’s dinnerware immortalizes the most intimate aspects of her identity. She is not only preserving the foods, but the memories of those who passed down the recipes.

Most of the work in the exhibition is what the artist has tenderly named her “fossils”. She takes cultural food ingredients and seasons her clay, allowing the food to choose its final resting place before firing. She follows this process by firing the work with the dried ingredients embedded into the clay in a burnout firing, subsequently immortalizing them. This glazing style is directly influenced by real tree fossils she has seen at the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals in Hillsboro, OR. The beauty of this style is that it can never be replicated. Every single plate, bowl, and ceramic foods featured in the installation are like a fingerprint. No molds are used when replicating foods like conchas, chips, oranges, plantains, or coffee beans. Each object was individually made to hold its own identity and story.

For the show title "I Am de Mis Antepasadas," Ruvalcaba has subverted the grammatically correct "antepasados" or “forefathers” and made it feminine, ending in an "a" to shift focus to the maternal lineage that raised her. In this sense, the work reflects resilience, a sense of belonging, and the complexities of identity. She invites her audience to sit among the dinnerware, experiencing the feast at its apex; where stories are shared, laughter is contagious, and love is abundant.


Adelina Ruvalcaba is a mixed media visual artist and emerging curator in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys reading fiction novels and exploring the forest with her dog, Misia (named after the great Baroque artist, Artemisia Gentileschi). She was born and raised in the Central Valley of California and is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. After moving to Oregon, she found herself at a loss with her identity. This realization sent her down a path of rediscovery. Adelina’s creative practice highlights the labor of love from one’s home, especially the kitchen. Influenced by her deep-rooted love for prehistoric cave art, she reimagined fossils by transforming them into ceramic dinnerware. She also creates immersive installations that help tell the intimate stories of her fossils, offering viewers a sense of belonging and space for reflection.



@somatic_creations

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