Ronald Rael

Exhibited at DESIGN MIAMI. 2023

Created exclusively for The Book of Love fundraiser for the Books & Books Literary Foundation, this limited-edition print, titled Tierra / Agua / Cielo / Mundo,  features Ronald Rael’s original artwork celebrating Bless Me, Ultima, one of hundreds of beloved titles subject to recent book bans and challenges.

According to Rael: “Bless Me Ultima can be read as a cosmological framing of the dualities between an understanding of identity, worldview, spirituality, and the origin stories of people with reverence for earth, water, and sky in layered and complex ways. In this image, the sky is framed by earth in the form of adobe, a building material made of soil and water, as in the dwellings in which the characters of the book reside, and yet the sky evokes the planet Earth in all its glorious reflectivity as a planet made of water and land. “

All proceeds benefit the Books & Books Literary Foundation’s urgent fight for the right to read.

About Ronald Rael:

Ronald Rael is a designer, activist, trained architect, author, and Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. He is both a Bakar and Hellman Fellow, and directs the printFARM Laboratory (print Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials). His research interests connect indigenous and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies and issues. He is also an author, design activist, and thought leader within the topics of additive manufacturing, borderwall studies, and earthen architecture. The London Design Museum awarded his creative practice, Rael San Fratello (with architect Virginia San Fratello), the Beazley Award in 2021 for the design of the year—one of the most prestigious awards in design internationally—in honor of the duo’s Teeter Totter Wall, a guerilla-style intervention that connected persons on opposite sides of the US-Mexico border and reinforced the delicate nature of the relationship between the two nations. In 2014 his practice was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. 

About Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya:

This coming-of-age classic from "one of the nation's foremost Chicano literary artists" follows a young boy as he questions his faith and beliefs after a curandera woman introduces herbs and magic into his life (Denver Post).

Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima comes to stay with his family in New Mexico. She is a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic. Under her wise wing, Tony will probe the family ties that bind and rend him, and he will discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past—a mythic legacy as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America. And at each life turn there is Ultima, who delivered Tony into the world...and will nurture the birth of his soul.