Koyoltzintli’s Ceramics Ask a Simple Question: What if an object was meant to be heard?
At the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, New York, Koyoltzintli is presenting “How to Play a Broken Bone,” an exhibition on view into June that turns a centuries-old bone flute into a point of departure for new work. The artist, who moves between photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound-based ceramics, has built a practice around the tension between preservation and activation: what happens when an instrument is collected, displayed, and left silent?
Koyoltzintli, who moved to the United States to attend the School of Visual Arts in 2001, has long drawn on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, where she traces some of the oldest ceramic traditions and ceramic instruments in the Americas. In her studio in upstate New York, she describes herself as someone who carries a lineage while making her own work in the present. That balance between inheritance and invention runs through the exhibition.
The show includes two eight-foot-tall drawings related to carvings on the flute, as well as “An arrow to the sky” (2026), a series of spirit-being works painted with liquid clay on linen and intended to hang by windows. Koyoltzintli said the placement recalls the way offerings are set where spirits can pass in and out, a detail that gives the work a quiet ritual charge.
Also on view is 9 Tz’lkin (2026), a large ceramic water whistle with columnar spires topped by candles. The title refers to a day in the Mayan calendar associated with ceremonies for water and fire and with giving thanks to the feminine, according to the artist. The piece is activated by pouring liquid into a spout and swirling it to alter atmospheric pressure, producing a whistling sound that Koyoltzintli likens to wind off the ocean.
Her interest in sound sharpened in 2020, when the pandemic kept her from traveling back to Ecuador and she began visiting museums in search of communion. What she found, she said, was a deeper connection between clay and sound — a shift that continues to shape her work, and to expand the possibilities of ceramics as both object and instrument.
