LINDA HAIM:

LO REAL MARAVILLOSO

Sculpture/Construction/Assemblage using found objects, materials & media

Colombian-born artist Linda Haim was influenced in her art by social conditions surrounding her while she was growing up. The first words she spoke were in imitation of the goats and sheep grazing outside her window in El Barrio de la Soledad in the city of Bogotá. Her unique fusion of reality and imagination is rooted in lo real maravilloso, a unique kind of magical realism where different times and places simultaneously intersect in the Latin American reality. Linda is the daughter of Don José Haim, a humorist born in Mexico City, and Doña Paulette Antebi de Haim of Atlantic City, New Jersey. After fine arts studies at La Universidad de Los Andes, Linda spent many years doing social and political work in the Barrios Populares of Bogotá, where she experienced close-up the life of the impoverished working classes of Latin America. Upon her arrival in New York City, she continued her art studies at Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research. It was when she moved west to San Francisco a few years later that she began to combine her fine arts and political activism background into a new hybrid form: satirical puppet-sculptures. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1999, she continues to develop and explore the possibilities of her subjects and medium. Certain life-size sculptures seen below have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The first piece on this page, Burlap Campesina, was presented prominently at the entrance to the International Puppetry exhibition at the Craft and Folk-Art Museum (now Craft Contemporary) in 2003.