Natalia Pereira
Engine Company 33
Organized by Curator & The Pioneers Co-Op
August 16 - September 13, 2025
Natalia Pereira, Blood Stream 1, Acrylic on Paper, 18 x 23 in., 45.72 x 58.42 cm., 2023
Natalia Pereira by Saul Appelbaum, 2021
I first encountered Natalia Pereira through her cooking—drawn in by the warmth of her restaurant, Woodspoon, where food was more than nourishment: it was storytelling, care work, a sensory archive of ancestral knowledge passed hand to hand, voice to voice. My first meeting with Curator co-founder Dan Golden happened there, over a meal where nourishment became a kind of communion—body and soul in conversation.
With Engine Company 33, Natalia brings that same care into her visual art. Her first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles arrives with the intimacy of a homecoming—an unfolding shaped over years of friendship, collaboration, and shared community.
The exhibition’s title echoes two currents: the inscription above the Rusha & Co. entry—a historic fire station restored by Guy Rusha—and a quieter labor: the tending of fire, the transmutation of heat into light, a work both Pereira and Rusha know in their bones. Entirely self-taught, Pereira recasts the firehouse’s masculine legacy as a sanctuary of feminine spirit, a space where the unseen, the mythic, and the ancestral can breathe.
The collective spirit of its organizers—Curator and The Pioneers Co‑Op, a cultural cooperative rooted in shared authorship across art, film, design, performance, and social practice—shapes the exhibition. In one gallery, documentary, new media, and limited edition works created with Saul Appelbaum, Janina Picard, Nato Thompson, Dan Golden, James Holmes, David Welch, and Natalia herself, offer a layered portrait of a regenerative practice, placing Natalia’s art in dialogue with her collaborators. Interwoven are never-before-seen black-and-white photographs of self-taught woodcarver Elijah Pierce by Stuart Appelbaum, grounding Pereira’s vision within a lineage of artists who transform hardship into beauty. Natalia is entirely her own force. But there’s a thread that connects her to an artist like Elijah Pierce—a person whose devotion to community, and whose transformation of story into form, feels mythic. This room functions less as a conventional “exhibit” than as a living, breathing trace of the poetic and pragmatic operations behind Engine Company 33.
Natalia’s exhibition unfolds across three spaces, each reflecting her world-building practice, where memory, ritual, and imagined societies converge.
The first gallery with the fireplace channels the warmth of Woodspoon’s hearth. Sculptural miniatures and paintings on paper and cloth gather for a ceremonial dinner. A long table is set with flowers, vintage tableware, tablecloths, and sculptures, each bearing the trace of Natalia’s attentive hand. Here, the everyday becomes an altar of care, where nourishment turns into story, and story into communion.
In the second room, she moves through dream-space with the same sensorial fluency she brings to her cooking—layering gesture, color, and texture as if composing a living ritual. Unfurling scrolls, gestural works on paper, and sculptural forms depict muses, medicine women, and ancestral guardians drawn from her evolving AD105 Society: the Teachers of the Unknown, the Society of the Blind, and Conversing Colors. Saturated earth tones, deep mineral blues, and luminous ochres give the works a grounded radiance, their surfaces breathing with the residue of the elements. They feel both ancient and immediate, inviting viewers into a threshold state where waking life and ancestral dream converge.
The third gallery transforms into a collective gathering space for Natalia’s miniatures, reminiscent of a town hall meeting or a Saturday night promenade. Here, the sculptural figures—testaments to shared histories, communal rituals, and collective memory—invite interaction and reflection. Their arrangement emphasizes both individual presence and interconnected narratives, creating a larger, unified story of community and shared identity.
Engine Company 33 is a threshold moment. A quiet blaze. A space for story, spirit, making, and reflection.
—Saul Appelbaum, Founder, The Pioneers Co‑Op
