Feathered Reliquaries | Exhibition

Feathered Reliquaries
Solo Exhibition by Diane Arrieta

Opening Reception: Friday, December 4th, 2026, 6-9pm RSVP HERE
Artist Talk: Saturday, January 16th, 2027, at 2pm RSVP HERE

Feathered Reliquaries is a series of bird sculptures that function as small sculptural altars occupying the space between offering, witness, and warning. Drawing from the tradition of the religious reliquary, these works treat the bird as a sacred container holding memory, fragility, and evidence. Across cultures, birds have functioned as intermediaries—moving between earth and sky, life and death, the seen and the unseen. Here, that symbolic lineage is pulled into the present moment. Birds also serve as indicator species, bearing quiet testimony to ecological imbalance through declines we continue to overlook. These are not idealized figures, but laboring bodies. Surfaces crack, edges erode, and each form holds the weight of environmental strain. The reliquary no longer safeguards the past; it holds what is vanishing in real time. Circular forms gather around them like halos, suggesting sanctity while offering no protection. Suspended against the wall, the birds hover in a state of tension, caught between elevation and containment, reverence and consequence. Feathered Reliquaries asks what it means to venerate a being while simultaneously contributing to its decline. The series asks us to reconsider what we choose to hold sacred.

About the artist |

Diane Arrieta is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice bridges environmental science, cultural memory, and feminist materiality. Born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania and raised in Oil City— former site of a Seneca Indian village and later, the birthplace of the U.S. petroleum industry— her early life shaped a lasting awareness of the tension between ancestral land and industrial disruption. These layered histories continue to inform her work, which explores the delicate relationships between nature, resilience, and transformation. Of Lenape ancestry (not an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe) and Czechoslovakian agrarian European descent, Arrieta draws from inherited perspectives on land stewardship and ecological interconnectedness. Her tactile installations often incorporate clay, fiber, and found materials, merging traditional craft with contemporary sculptural forms. Arrieta holds a BFA in ceramic sculpture and an MSc in Wildlife Health from the University of Edinburgh. Her work examines the impact of human behavior on species decline and biodiversity loss, while also advocating for the well-being of women and children—especially in the face of environmental crisis. Her work has been shown widely across the United States, with recent solo and group exhibitions at Palm Beach State College, the Cornell Museum, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, the Boca Raton Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Tallahassee, and the Art & Culture Center of Hollywood. She has received numerous accolades, including the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship [x2] , the Hector Ubertalli Award for the Visual Arts and the Helen M Salzberg Visiting Artist Fellowship. She is the founding director of the International Humanities Project Curatorial Lab and has held leadership roles in academic exhibition programming and public art initiatives.