Laura Veles Drey is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the intersections of migration, labor, geography, and the American landscape through sculptural installation, material investigation, and storytelling.

Working with agricultural packaging, burlap, plastic mesh, thread, soil, and other materials tied to cultivation and commerce, she creates sculptural installations and mixed-media works that examine how histories are recorded, valued, and made visible.

Through stitching, weaving, accumulation, and repetition, she transforms utilitarian materials into alternative forms of mapping, storytelling, and archival representation. These processes draw attention to the often-invisible labor embedded within the materials themselves, while challenging conventional ideas of permanence, value, and monumentality.

Her work considers how materials and histories typically relegated to the margins might occupy the physical and symbolic space traditionally reserved for monuments and civic structures. Rather than representing labor through conventional monuments, she uses material and labor themselves to construct new forms of remembrance.

BIO:
Drey holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA (Honors) from the University of St. Thomas. She received support from The Idea Fund for her research project By Way of the Crop. Her work has been exhibited at Artpace (Texas, 2025), Redbud Art Center (Texas, 2024), Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery (New York, 2024), Asia Society Texas (Texas, 2021), and MECA(Texas, 2019).

Earlier exhibitions, projects, and publications may appear under the name Laura Drey.