The June 2024 Lake Street Art Drop is with artist and Lake Street muralist, Pablo Kalaka!
Hints begin on our Instagram and Facebook stories @VisitLakeStreet at 6:00 pm.
Meet the Artist, Pablo Kalaka
Painter, muralist and illustrator. Chilean by birth (1975) and Venezuelan by upbringing. He has a degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (1998) and studied illustration and graphic art at the Escola de Comics Joso, in Barcelona, Spain (2002-2004).
His family history within social and political militancy, together with the impact generated by the urban art movement that was happening in Barcelona in those years, ended up guiding his work towards the urgent and timely intervention of public space, thus becoming one of the contemporary muralists with pieces in a large number of cities around the world .His work can be seen on walls and walls of cities such as Caracas, Mérida, Carúpano, San Carlos and Río Caribe (Venezuela), Bogotá (Colombia), Pucallpa (Peru), Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires and Ensenada (Argentina), Havana (Cuba), Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende (Mexico), Minneapolis and New York (United States), Paris and Bagnolet (France), Lindau (Germany), Barcelona, L´Hospitalet de Llobregat and Tarragona (Spain). Some of these works were carried out in different mural art festivals, among which Kosmopolite (Paris, 2008), Karupana (Venezuela, 2013), Cromasur (Bogotá, 2015) and La Puerta del Sur (Santiago de Chile, 2018) stand out.
His work has been recognized in different individual exhibitions in Caracas, Barcelona and Minneapolis; among the most important are Cara Candela, Puro Corazón (Rómulo Gallegos Latin American Studies Center, Caracas, 2010), where he also gave a mural art workshop to the public; Cuestión Caribe (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, 2016), which was also taken the following year to the Nau Bostik (Barcelona, Spain) and the Museo de los Llanos (Lara, Venezuela), and an untitled solo exhibition at the Indigenous Roots Cultural Center (Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2018). It was also part of the I and II Biennial of the South. Peoples in Resistance (Caracas, 2016 and 2017). He made murals in Mexico City, with the support of the Old Toy Museum of Mexico (MUJAM) in 2019 and 2021. He is periodically cocreating public art with the mosaic artist Daniela Bianchini in Minneapolis, MN, where he resides, since 2021, and he has made almost 20 murals in the Twin Cities so far.
In the field of illustration he has published four books, three at the Publishing House El Perro y la Rana (Caracas), two of them for children, belonging to the Caminos del Sur collection: Maichak and the sacred prism, by Fanny Uzcátegui (2006) and Bichitos de mi patio by Liliana Peraza (2018); and one in the Fantomas collection: Vañka by Antón Chéjov, with a translation by Marco Aurelio Rodríguez (2017). At La Estrella Roja Publishing House (Caracas), he illustrated the Anthology of Children's and Youth Literature, prepared by José Javier Sánchez and published under the collection Palabras Andantes (2013), National Book Award winner in 2014. Likewise, his illustrations appeared on the covers of two books published by the FAO - Venezuela (2016): Cities for Life: Urban Agriculture and Sovereignties of the 21st Century and Appropriable Biotechnologies for Food Sovereignty; and the albums Me tá llamando by Akilin (Venezuela, 2017) and the albums: Conectando (2017) and 20 from the multicultural band based in Barcelona, Che Sudaka (2022). He made the artwork for the book Corazón de niña, written by the Spanish singer and composer Amparo Sánchez, and published by ECOVAL Publishing House in 2023. This same year he published the illustrated book Son de estos mares, of which he is the author.