Lara Gallardo: Art as a Journey of Inspiration and Impact
Lara Gallardo is a multidisciplinary artist from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who has called Miami home since 2008. A Parsons School of Design alumna, she seamlessly fuses classical artistry with contemporary vision, creating vibrant works that reflect her deep connection to nature, spirituality, and culture. Drawing on decades of creative practice spanning fine art, design, fashion, and healing, Gallardo’s art is imbued with color, movement, and meaning.
Currently, she’s working on a powerful series of 30 large-scale paintings inspired by the Everglades—an ambitious project that celebrates the environment and explores humanity’s role in preserving it. Her diverse career also includes a successful fashion label worn by celebrities and featured in major media. With a life dedicated to creativity and holistic expression, Gallardo continues to craft a legacy that bridges art, design, sustainability, and spirituality.
AMM. Your paintings channel everything from the cracked skin of the Everglades to the vibrations of the unseen—what’s guiding your hand: memory, muscle, or some other kind of frequency entirely?
LG. When I paint, I am not led by memory or muscle alone — I surrender to a frequency that feels like a living current. It’s part Earth, part cosmos. Sometimes it hums like a pulse; other times it’s almost like a whisper in my heart. I try to quiet the mind enough to become a vessel for it — not to control it, but to follow where it wants to go. The cracked skin of the Everglades, the movement of clouds, the vibration of unseen energies — all of it moves through me, not from me. As they say, we are all part of it all. I, like a camera, absorb this living consciousness and express its beauty and form on the canvas.
AMM. You talk about unveiling the unseen—vibrations, universal connections, quantum whispers. How do you know when a piece has said enough without explaining too much?
LG. A painting tells me when it no longer needs my interference — when the frequency feels intact, and the breath of the piece can exist without me forcing it to “make sense.” It’s a deep listening. If I overwork it, you can see it on the canvas; it feels heavy. When I honor that edge — that space where the unseen still shimmers through — the painting can remain open enough for others to step inside without being told what to find. There lives the inner alchemy.
AMM. With so many lives lived—fashion, acting, spiritual healing, visual art—how do you keep your artistic voice from becoming a collage of identities rather than a clear channel? Or is collage the point?
LG. I used to think I needed to choose, to streamline. But now I see that the collage is the point — every incarnation has honed a different sense: the tactile, the emotional, the energetic, the visual. Instead of fragmenting me, they all feed the same river. My work isn’t about stitching these identities together; it’s about trusting that the river knows where it’s going, even when it carries many currents at once.
AMM. Is abstraction your language of liberation? Or do you ever feel pulled toward the figurative as a way to tether the divine to something recognizably human?
LG. Abstraction is the most honest language I know. It allows me to speak the unspeakable, to give form to frequencies that don’t have human faces. That said, I am sometimes tempted toward the figurative — which I am very well versed in. I love it. Now I see beyond the obvious. A figure might appear like a vapor, a trace — not to anchor the divine to a body, but to remind us that spirit once wore skin, and memory still wears light. Light is everything, its information.
AMM. Your current work focuses on the Everglades—a kind of ecological soul-mirror. What are you hoping people feel when they stand in front of one of those massive canvases? Awe? Guilt? Reverence? Reckoning?
LG. I hope they feel a kind of holy remembering — awe, yes, but also tenderness. I hope they feel the Everglades inside themselves, not as a place “out there” but as something that has always lived with us through time. If guilt arises for not taking care of our ecosystem, let it crack open into action; if reverence arises, let it deepen into guardianship of this body. The Everglades are not asking for pity — they are asking for intimacy, for presence, for a reckoning that leads to rebirth.
