photo credit: Naomi White
Alicia Piller is a Los Angeles–based sculptor whose mixed-media installations explore material memory, ecological systems, and cultural erasure through biomorphic and architectural form. Raised in Chicago, she earned a BFA in Painting and Anthropology from Rutgers University in 2004, grounding her work in both visual language and the study of human systems.
Piller spent a decade in New York City working in the fashion industry, followed by three and a half years in Santa Fe, New Mexico—experiences that shaped her distinct sculptural voice and deep engagement with material transformation. She received her MFA in Sculpture and Installation from CalArts in 2019.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum and the California African American Museum, among others, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times. She is represented by Track 16 in Los Angeles.
PRESS:
LA TIMES, Trash is treasure for this jewelry maker and sculptor (Dec. 30 2025)
CARLA, Artmaking and Apocalypse: Four Artists on Octavia E. Butler (June 2025)
CARLA, ISSUE 28 (Review of Solo Show ‘Atmospheric Pressures’ 2022)
Creative Boom
Artillery
Culver City Crossroads
Full Blede
24700
Curate LA
Voyage LA
Sculpture cameo! Season 2 Episode 3
Click to LISTEN!
Click to LISTEN!
STATEMENT:
Piller’s sculptural practice investigates material memory, ecological systems, and cultural erasure through layered, mixed-media forms. Drawing on cellular biology as both structure and metaphor, her work locates the root of human histories within material systems—where trauma, repair, and continuity unfold simultaneously.
Working across organic, industrial, and found materials, Piller constructs what she describes as a material cosmology: a space in which macro and micro perspectives converge. Vinyl, leather, latex, resin, and salvaged fragments are assembled into complex, biomorphic structures that evoke both bodily and architectural forms. These materials, often removed from their original contexts, are reconfigured into systems that feel at once familiar and estranged.
Rooted in craft traditions inherited from her African American maternal lineage and Jewish American paternal lineage, her practice engages processes of binding, wrapping, layering, and repair. These gestures operate as both formal strategies and acts of preservation, holding histories within the surface of the work.
Across sculpture and installation, Piller creates environments that examine how memory is embedded in matter and how historical trauma persists within contemporary cultural and political landscapes. Her works function as evolving organisms—accumulating, rupturing, and reassembling—proposing that the past is not fixed, but continually active within the present.
