Luciana Abait is an Argentine-born artist based in Los Angeles who creates multimedia works that explore the impacts of climate change and environmental fragility on immigration. Her artworks, which span photography, painting, sculpture, video installation, and augmented reality, have been exhibited in galleries, museums, and international art fairs across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Abait’s recent solo exhibition, “On the Verge,” is currently on view at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, marking her first museum solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition features over 20 recent artworks that demonstrate Abait’s powerful visual language, which often utilizes a deliberately unnatural and neon palette to create an unsettling and disorienting effect. At the same time, Abait renders her pictures with intentionally beautiful surfaces and colors to remind viewers of what is at stake in our fragile environment.

The exhibition, which originated in Laband Art Gallery in Los Angeles, was curated by Karen Rapp, the gallery director, who says that Abait’s depictions of our contemporary climate crisis are “overwhelming and invitational.” Abait draws from her own personal feelings of displacement and vulnerability to urge viewers to consider how global warming is wreaking havoc, especially on the lives of climate migrants. Works like “The Maps That Failed Us,” a monumental sculptural installation of the maps of the world shown at random and out of context, make visible our social, physical, and planetary interdependence.

Luciana’s art practice is driven by a desire to make her work widely accessible to the public in both art contexts and public spaces. She sees art curators and administrators, art galleries, art consultants, and art dealers as part of the ecosystem that will help sustain her art practice and partner with her to reach new public audiences and bring her projects to new places.

Sourced photo

Abait’s recent public art projects have included The Billboard Creative, Projecting Possibilities, and LUMINEX, where her monumental immersive video installations “Agua” and “The Glass Wall” were projected onto the facades of buildings in Downtown Los Angeles. She has completed numerous corporate and public art commissions, among them “Vistas,” a 24 feet mural commissioned by Miami-Dade Art in Public Places, and “Hong Kong Windows,” commissioned by Swire Properties in Hong Kong.

Abait’s works are held in private, public, and corporate collections from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Among these collections is the Permanent Art Collection of Neiman Marcus, Miami-Dade Public Library System, and Four Seasons in Florida, King and Spalding in Texas, Lehigh University Museum and West Collection in Pennsylvania, Sprint Corporation in Missouri, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington D.C.

In addition to her art practice, Abait is also a resident artist of the 18TH Street Arts Center in Santa Monica and a recipient of the 2016 Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship Award and the “Art Lives Here” Award by the Geffen Playhouse in 2022. Publications such as The Art Newspaper, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Aesthetica, and Stir World have all featured her work.

As Abait’s art practice continues to evolve, she remains committed to creating works that invite viewers to step into the forsaken scenes of our contemporary climate crisis and make environmentally conscious choices. Through collaborations with creatives and people in the art industry, she hopes to reach new public audiences and make her vision of the environment widely accessible in both institutions and public spaces.