Nonalcoholic Drinks Go Their Own Way

Raul De Lara’s Transcendent Takes on Household Things

The sculptor Raul De Lara’s “Familia” (2024), a cluster of five huge Monstera deliciosa leaves carved from walnut.Credit…Courtesy of Raul De Lara

The Mexican-born, Ridgewood, Queens-based sculptor Raul De Lara is aware of the irony of his choice of medium: wood. The most rooted of materials is a contrast to the precarity of his upbringing — he came to Texas at 12 with his parents, and remains here under DACA.

A meticulous carver who often uses traditional American and Mexican techniques, De Lara, 33, reimagines banal household items — snow shovels, chairs and spades, as well the Monstera deliciosa plant, a south Mexican native that has become an American houseplant cliché — as commentaries on labor and immigration.

His series “Tired Tools” evokes the exhaustion of invisible workers: A broom slouches against a wall; a pitchfork’s shaft hangs on a hook like a discarded garment. For “Soft Chair” (2022), a live-edge slab of Siberian elm is fashioned into what appears to be a cushy upholstered seat; “The Wait” (2021) and “The Wait (Again)” (2022) are round-backed rockers covered with spikes mimicking cactus spines. (In 2023, Hermès commissioned a version of the chairs shaped like a child’s rocking horse, outfitting it with one of its lavish saddles for the window of its Aspen, Colo., store.)

The artist, who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and has an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, likes to source wood from places in his past: Texas; Chicago; Provincetown, Mass., where he had a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center; and Mexico. Like Martin Puryear and Wendell Castle, whom he counts among his influences, De Lara — whose second solo museum exhibition opens on Sept. 12 at the Contemporary Austin — works with kiln-dried lumber (he prefers oak, walnut and ash) but also sometimes employs green wood, whose internal mysteries reveal themselves only during carving. “With wood,” he says, “you can see the passing of time on its skin. No other material shows you time.” — Petala Ironcloud

Beverages with Foraged Ingredients