Kaleb Duarte is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages sculpture, performance, and community collaboration to examine histories of labor, communities in movement, and belonging. Migrating from northern Mexico at an early age, Duarte was raised in the farmworking rural communities of California’s Central Valley. These formative experiences continue to inform his practice, which often takes the form of temporary, site-responsive installations built from construction materials such as beds of earth, cement, scaffolding, and objects suggesting basic shelter. 

Through improvised rituals and the fabrication of objects as social platforms and performances, Duarte addresses the material and metaphysical disconnection shaping contemporary life, suggesting a shared condition of diminished awareness produced by extractive capitalist systems that distance communities from ancestral practices of gathering, community bonding, and collective memory.

Duarte co-founded, with artist Mia Eve Rollow, EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU / Where the United Nations Used to Be), an experimental residency and house of art in movement based in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico (now a nomadic project). EDELO reimagines the traditional residency model by situating artistic production alongside autonomous indigenous Zapatista rural communities that use performance, theater, poetry, and visual culture as tools for political and social transformation.