Don Porcaro: Lost Stories

WESTWOOD GALLERY NYC presents Don Porcaro: Lost Stories, a solo exhibition of recent sculptures. This is Porcaro’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and includes over 60 sculptures, curated by James Cavello. The exhibition is on view from November 6 to December 27, 2025.

For more than four decades, Don Porcaro’s sculpture has built on his lifelong engagement with ancient sites and civilizations, from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Serpent Mound in Ohio, and Mayan ballcourts in Mexico's Yucatán to the monumental stonework of Sacsayhuamán in Cusco, Peru and the complex architectures of Turkey, Chile, and Korea. Rather than replicate their forms, Porcaro seeks to convey an ineffable essence found in these places—the seamless integration of stone with structure and the enduring sense that history is nonlinear, shifting as civilizations repurpose materials and archaeologists reinterpret their meaning. These ideas converge in the two ongoing series—Art or Fact and Lost Stories—featured in this exhibition and originating after a recent formative trip to Egypt.

Both Art or Fact and Lost Stories emerge from Porcaro’s interest in the limits of what we know and don’t know about cultural and material history. In Art or Fact, small, handheld sculptures hover between abstraction and representation. They appear at once familiar and foreign, prompting questions about what future archaeologists might infer about our time if such objects were unearthed centuries from now. As Porcaro reflects, “The smallest artifact can tell a story about an entire culture—its time, place, history and function.” These stories, however, are not complete; “Instead, they invite the viewer to bring their own ideas and interpretations to fore.”

Lost Stories grew from Porcaro’s encounters in Egypt with its monumental architecture.  Egyptian temples often bundled stone columns together to resemble the forms of papyrus reeds, lotus, and palms, vegetation that rises from the Nile—a life sustaining force to the Egyptian people. Porcaro integrates a five-bundled column into his sculptural language, drawn not only to its formal elegance but to its dual representation of necessity—both as physical support and symbolic emblem. The motif unites nature, architecture, and culture, inviting a meditation on monuments as sculptural palimpsests.

Together, these series mark a pivotal moment in Porcaro’s practice, where decades of exploration converge with new discoveries, existing as both artifacts of the present and echoes of the past. Each work gestures toward histories still unfolding and futures yet to be imagined, leaving us to wonder: what stories will they tell centuries from now?