Soledad Salamé (b. 1954, Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean-born interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her practice spans printmaking, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and mixed media, and is distinguished by a sustained commitment to research-based inquiry that fuses empirical investigation with a poetic visual language. Her work examines the intersections of environmental change, technology, migration, and human rights.
Salamé earned her BA from Santiago College in Chile in 1972. She later pursued advanced studies in Caracas, Venezuela, at CEGRA, Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica (CONAC), completing her training in 1979. Her academic formation combined traditional printmaking methodologies with experimental graphic processes, fostering an early and enduring interest in materiality, seriality, and the relationship between image-making and systems of communication. During her years in Caracas, she was immersed in a dynamic cultural and political environment that encouraged interdisciplinary inquiry and socially engaged artistic practice.
From 1973 to 1983, Salamé lived in Venezuela, where her encounter with the Amazon rainforest profoundly shaped her artistic trajectory and deepened her engagement with ecological systems. This experience marked a decisive expansion of her practice beyond formal concerns toward broader investigations of environmental vulnerability, geopolitical conflict, and the ethics of human intervention in natural landscapes. She relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1983 before establishing her studio practice in Baltimore shortly thereafter.
Grounded in extensive field research throughout the Americas and Antarctica, Salamé’s work examines the environmental and social consequences of climate change, extractive industries, and technological intervention. As she notes, her practice draws on environmental humanities, political ecology, and postcolonial studies to explore how systems of power, resource extraction, and global capitalism disproportionately affect vulnerable populations and fragile ecosystems.
Her recent projects focus on migration and displacement driven by environmental instability and political inequity, as well as the ecological consequences of the global clothing industry and so-called “fast fashion.” Engaging questions of labor, consumption, waste, and transnational production networks, these works critically address the material and human costs embedded within contemporary economies of mass consumption.
Through collaborations with scientists, environmental researchers, and technologists, Salamé develops works that integrate empirical data, cartographic methodologies, and material experimentation. These interdisciplinary approaches result in immersive installations that function simultaneously as sensory environments and critical reflections on socio-political conditions.
Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the University of Essex (UK), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Deutsche Bank (New York), among others. She has exhibited internationally at institutions including El Museo del Barrio (New York), the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile, the Katonah Museum of Art, the Museum of the Americas, the Miami Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore, and the Museum of Goa, India. In 2025, her work was the subject of a major career survey at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas.
Major projects include Fast Fashion: Camouflage (2025–26); We the Migrants: Fleeing/Flooding (2019); The Women’s March (2017); Are You Listening? (2016); ALMA: Atacama Large Millimeter Array (2014); Territories (2013–14); Barcodes: Merging Identity and Technology (2012); and Where Do You Live? 3000 Miles of Maryland Coast (2009).