Natacha Sochat Multidisciplinary Artist
🌿 The Mission of My Work
The mission of my work has always been to improve the lives of others through the personal experience of my art. My goal is to contribute to public health in any way I can, regardless of the conceptual framework my work embodies. My art is a language of healing, reflection, and interconnection.
✋ The Hand is the Mind
My practice is both scholarly and intuitive. I create in the space between mind and hand – between thought and touch. Living with my eyes and mind wide open, I use the hand as an extension of my mind. I use materials such as fabric, yarn, and other synthetic fibers, wood, metal, oil and acrylic paint, found objects, and ceramics.
While creating, I move fluidly between intuition and reflection. At times, I work instinctively, letting the materials lead. At other times, I pause to observe, to see, and to think. My art objects embody multiple identities: woman, healer, scientist, community member, and multicultural being.
🌎 Cultural Identity and Early Work
When I first began painting, I was self-taught and I appropriated the Eurocentric style of the invaders who came to the lands of my ancestors. I believed that using their visual language might make my work more accepted. I infused these paintings with the colors and iconography of my Taíno and Caribbean heritage. Though subtle, these additions reconnected me to my ancestors’ visual language and affirmed my identity.
🌴 Roots and Heritage
Though I was born in Manhattan, New York City, at four months old I was brought to Cuba. My father was a Cuban revolutionary and a friend of Fidel Castro. From him, I inherited a passion for social and economic justice. In Cuba, a Curandera once told my grandmother Balbina that I would become a healer. She was right – I evolved as both an artist and a healer.
My parents were immigrants from Puerto Rico and Cuba, and my ancestry extends through the Caribbean, America, Africa, and Europe. Growing up in the United States, I once wanted to blend in. As I matured and gained knowledge, I realized I no longer wanted to disappear into sameness. My work now celebrates the complexity of hybridity – how identity, culture, and ancestry interweave like threads in fabric.
🌺 Childhood, Memory, and Imagination
My childhood in the United States unfolded in a world without the internet or social media. I naively believed Disney’s promise that if I wished upon a star, my dreams would come true. That fantasy helped me navigate the challenges of daily life. I sang quietly to myself every week as a child; as an artist, I continue to sing with my hands and spirit.
I grew up during a time when small, independent businesses thrived and a vibrant middle class existed. Pharmacists were respected members of their communities, and medicine was still practiced through small private offices. Over time, I witnessed how corporate greed consumed these traditions, eroding the spirit of community and independence that once defined American life. Though this is not the space for that story, my art remains grounded in a passion for justice, equity, and compassion.
🔬 Science, Complexity, and the Language of Form
With my background in science, I have long researched the interplay between different planes of existence – the infinite and the tangible, the shallow and the deep, the flat and the volumetric. Concepts such as emergence and complexity inform my creative process. The visual language of my Taíno and Caribbean roots is embedded throughout my work, connecting ancient symbols with contemporary ideas of structure and interconnection.
Recently I incorporated text into my Lo Que Tengo Que Decir series (formally launched in my March 2024 solo exhibition), merging words and image as parallel forms of expression. Through this, I seek to reveal what is often unspoken – the inner voice of memory, identity, and transformation.
🧶 Art, Community, and Healing
Whenever I create installations for public spaces- whether solo or collaborative – I cherish the interaction with viewers. I learn as much as I share. Whenever possible, I include crochet within the installation as a symbol of labor, connection, and care. Each work becomes a positive public health experience, inviting others to feel, think, and reflect.
My art is my contribution to well-being: it speaks through material, color, and form to foster healing, empathy, and critical awareness.
🐢 Taíno Iconography and Symbols
Above is a graphic showing the five tribes of Puerto Rico. DNA evidence reveals that 61% of Puerto Ricans, up to 30% of Dominicans, and 33% of Cubans carry mitochondrial DNA of Taíno origin.
In Taíno iconography, the turtle symbolizes the origin of life – a maternal figure representing fertility and humanity. Coquís, the small singing frogs beloved in Puerto Rico, are a vital part of my work, as are snails and conches, sacred symbols in Taíno culture.
These icons appear frequently in my paintings. Though rendered intentionally in a Eurocentric style in my Paintings for Children, my turtles, snails, and frogs embody Taíno meanings. Likewise, the spiral and conch forms function as self-portraits, echoing the curl of my own hair – linking ancestry, body, and identity.
The icon below was found etched on a rock in 900 BC. It is called the great seal and it is described as depicting 2 branches in the middle, surrounded by 24 leaves on the outside (of the sacred Cojobana tree). It is the Sacred Badge of Authority according to the Taino and is traditionally carried by the Cacique of the tribe to cement their authority. My opinion is that it is not two branches, but rather a tree trunk with roots and branches. Roots make more sense as the leaves still signify upper branches. My ‘Canopy of Leaves’ series as well as my ‘Trees with Roots’ and NeuroMorphic Universe Trees series were inspired by this icon.
🌿 Biography – Natacha Villamia Sochat
I was born in Manhattan, New York City in 1951, and at four months old, I was taken to La Habana, Cuba, where I was raised by my grandmother Balbina and my uncle Miguel Villamia. From the beginning, my life has existed between worlds – my hybrid heritage, science and art, reason and intuition. My ancestry is Taíno, African, and European. My paternal grandmother, who raised me, was a Spaniard from northern Spain; my father was Cuban, and my mother Puerto Rican. This multiplicity is not just biographical – it is the foundation of my art. My work has always been about connection: how disparate things, histories, and beings coexist, interrelate, and transform one another.
Growing up in Cuba during the Revolution, I witnessed both the idealism of social change and its darker consequences. That early awareness of duality – creation and destruction, care and loss – gave me a lifelong understanding of how systems, whether political, biological, or emotional, are both fragile and resilient. My grandmother often visited a spiritualist who told her I would be a healer. I internalized that prophecy. Long before I became a physician, I understood healing as the thread that connects all acts of care, including art. I see art as a form of public health – essential to the well-being of individuals and communities. Through my paintings, drawings, prints, and performances, I seek to restore connections fragmented by time, trauma, and disconnection.
📷 Early Years and the Beginnings of Vision
Photography was my first sustained medium. In 1972, while living in West Berlin, I taught photography at the Andrews and McNair Army bases and created hundreds of black-and-white negatives. Using Nikon 35mm and Hasselblad 120mm cameras, I often used myself as the subject, exploring motion, light, and time through long exposures and subtle illumination. I developed and printed my own negatives, learning to work with both precision and intuition. These early self-portraits were meditations on perception and transformation – images where form dissolved into movement and light. The act of recording motion became a metaphor for consciousness itself, laying the groundwork for the visual and philosophical ideas that later shaped my paintings.
My exploration of perception through photography naturally evolved into experiments with video. In 1998, I created a short Face Pattern video that prefigured the series I would later develop in painting – faces dissolving into rhythmic patterns of color and motion. Decades later, I extended this inquiry into digital media, using AI image platforms as tools for dialogue rather than replication. To me, these technologies are continuations of my analog practice – another means of studying emergence, transformation, and the complexity of seeing.
🎨 Education and Artistic Formation
While completing my post-baccalaureate studies at Brandeis University in 1998, I painted You Don’t See Me – a pivotal work I now recognize as the first seed of my series Lo Que Tengo Que Decir – What I Must Say. At the time, I sought mentorship and understanding, but instead encountered faculty who dismissed my work because at the time I was unable to speak their jargon in order to defend my work. Among them were Graham Campbell and his British colleagues Richard Ryan and Roger Tibbits, who deemed me “unteachable” because I was in my forties, had gone to medical school, and loved realism.
Their rejection was painful but transformative. Soon after, I entered a second post-baccalaureate program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where I found an open and experimental environment that encouraged exploration. I earned my MFA there, integrating performance, installation, and conceptual work into my practice. Looking back now, I understand that You Don’t See Me was the first Lo Que Tengo Que Decir painting – an early declaration of self-hood and voice that would not fully unfold until decades later.
My teachers and mentors in my early years were from a myriad of places. They included Arthur Polonsky, Harold Tovish, Lynn Margulis, Jerry Uelsmann, Bernard Voichysunk, Gerry Bergstein, Paul Ingbretson, Don Sibley, Nan Freeman, Susan Denker, Marilyn Arsem, Jane Hudson, Mary-Ellen Strom, Richard Townsend, and Michael Mazur. Each shaped my integration of intuitive expression, scientific thought, and philosophical inquiry.
✋ Healing, Science, and the Hand as Mind
I studied biology at Boston University’s College of Liberal Arts, working in the laboratory of Professor Lynn Margulis, whose theory of symbiosis in evolution deepened my understanding of interconnection and complexity. Later, I earned my medical degree from the Boston University School of Medicine and practiced medicine while continuing to create art.
These dual lives revealed that art and healing share a common source: both depend on perception, empathy, and transformation. I studied perceptual realism at the Paul Ingbretson Atelier, where I learned to truly see the light. That experience reinforced my conviction that the hand is the mind – that making and thinking are inseparable acts.
🌴 Roots, Heritage, and Philosophy
Though I was predominantly raised in the United States, my roots extend across the Caribbean, America, Africa, and Europe. I have inherited visual languages and spiritual traditions from my Taíno, Puerto Rican, and Cuban ancestry. Early in my career, I painted in a Eurocentric style – the language of the colonizers – to gain acceptance. Gradually, I embedded Taíno iconography and color symbolism into those forms, reclaiming my voice within that inherited framework.
The turtle, symbol of life and fertility; the coquí, beloved singing frog of Puerto Rico; and spirals, snails, and conches – representations of continuity, sound, and self – appear throughout my paintings, prints, and installations. These icons are metaphors for ancestry and identity, linking the biological and the spiritual, the individual and the collective.
🌎Major Phases
My first major works, were photography, later Americana-Hispana (begun in 1997), asserted my hybrid identity through still life. Within the Western painting tradition, I inserted objects that spoke to my mixed heritage – Taíno, African, European, and Caribbean – reclaiming my right to exist in all my cultural dimensions.
In 2003 I created Making Roots/Uprooted, which expresses interconnectedness and ancestral memory. I paint trees with their roots exposed, revealing the hidden systems that sustain life – veins, rivers, neural paths, and stories. In 2018, I presented this body of work in Between Presence and Absence at The Carrack Modern in Durham, North Carolina.
In 2004, I began The NeuroMorphic Universe, a project that continues to this day. Drawing from my background in medicine and neuroscience, I explore the parallels between neural networks and the emergent systems of the universe.
My 2006 MFA thesis exhibition, NeuroMorphic Universe – In a Universo NeuroMorphico Saxa Loquuntur by Hand and By Machine, combined large wall drawings, small sculptures, video, and paintings. The Eye Guy figures, which first appeared in 2003, emerged from this universe – small sculptures that later evolved into large-scale paintings, culminating in my 2019 solo exhibition Paintings for Children and Other Adults at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, North Carolina.
In 2011, I began my Face Pattern work, first inspired from digital drawings I made in my PC in 1998. My Face Pattern paintings came to fuller life during the isolation of the pandemic. These paintings merge portraiture and abstraction, exploring how individuality and connection coexist. In 2021, I exhibited this work in a solo show at Duke University’s Brown Gallery. After my Face pattern paintings I had an epiphany realizing that I had not painted the Canopy of trees, but taken their nurture for granted. My Canopy paintings were created.
In 2023, I launched Lo Que Tengo Que Decir – What I Must Say at the Diamante Arts and Culture Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. While I had included text in my art for decades, this series gave language a central role. Spanish and English intertwine on the surface, embodying the bicultural rhythm of my identity and the tension between silence and revelation.
🧶 Performance and Community Engagement
My performance projects, Ritual of Giving and In My Garden – the DNA of Memory, extend my philosophy of art as lived experience. Ritual of Giving, begun in 2002, transforms generosity into performance – each gift of art an act of connection. In My Garden, rooted in my lifelong practice of collecting seeds and gardening since 1988, explores regeneration, care, and the continuity of life. Both projects merge art, nature, and daily ritual, embodying the sacred in the everyday.
As an educator, I have taught painting, drawing, and printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, and St. Paul’s School Advanced Studies Program in Concord, New Hampshire, among others. In public installations, I often include crochet as a symbol of labor, care, and interconnection, transforming each work into a positive public health experience.
🖼️ Exhibitions, Recognition, and Creative Continuum
I have presented more than 13 solo exhibitions and participated in over 140 group exhibitions nationwide. In 2021, I received the Arts and Culture Award from the Diamante Arts and Cultural Center for contributions to Latinx arts in North Carolina.
Though my works span painting, printmaking, fiber, photography, installation, performance, and digital media, they share four essential principles:
- Interconnectedness – all life is part of one continuous system.
- Hybridity – the merging of cultural, biological, and conceptual worlds.
- Emergence – beauty and meaning arise from complexity and chaos.
- Healing – creation itself is a form of restoration.
🌺 Today
All my work, regardless of form, arises from the meeting of worlds: ancestral and modern, personal and universal, scientific and spiritual. My life and my practice are inseparable – both rooted in the belief that through art, we reconnect to what makes us whole.
“My art is a language for healing, reflection, and connection.
I create to understand the world and to help others see their place within it.”
🕊️ Note
This website serves as an archival record of my work. While it includes many of my exhibitions and projects, it is not comprehensive and may lag behind my current practice due to time constraints for updates.
Below are Links to some solo or special exhibitions:
MFA Thesis Aidekman Gallery Tufts University Boston, MA
MFA thesis video
SugiPOP! Portsmouth Museum of Art Snowboard
NeuroMorphic – Beland Gallery Essex Art Center Lawrence MA
NeuroMorphic – NKG Boston MA
Between Presence and Absence: Making Roots -The Carrack Modern Gallery Durham NC
Retablos – Waterworks Visual Arts Center Salisbury NC
Making Roots – CMAC Gallery Raleigh NC
Litmus Gallery Group exhibition interview
Eye am Witness – Paintings for Children, Waterworks Visual Arts Center Salisbury NC
Part I of Graduation speaker 2012
Part II of Graduation speaker 2012
2021 Arts and Culture Award
Face and Pattern solo exhibition 2021 Duke University
Art of the Mind Interview 2019
Herencia Group Exhibition 2019
Herencia 2021 Artist Panel
CanvasRebel interview September 2023
Other sites with my work:
Natacha.net established in 1998
Portfolio site
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