This article is part of my first written assignment for the Executive Masters in Art Market Studies 2023-25 in the University of Zurich and eventually will be incorporated in my final thesis. Writing about digital artists was born out of arguments with lecturers (not going to name any names) and the need to shed light on artists whose work escapes the narrow confines of the majority of NFT criticism.
The third artist to release is Ana Maria Caballero (see first, second). Ana was kind enough to chat with me over a call about her practice and I also had the honor to meet her in person in Venice and participate in one of her upcoming projects. I am especially fond of the honesty in her work and how she stands as a beacon of establishing poetry as art.
Ana Maria Caballero is a multidisciplinary artist, born in 1981 in Miami, raised in Colombia, and currently based in Madrid, Spain. She is a distinguished poet and author with her work exploring motherhood and the tension between biological processes and their cultural implications. Caballero has created waves for poetry in the NFT space not only with her works but also with the foundation of theVERSEverse to support other poets and the establishment of poetry as art.
Writing was a passion that came up as early as middle school when Caballero would find herself making regular trips to the drugstore to buy new notebooks because she would constantly fill them up with writings. She graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a BA in Romance Studies. A bit later, at the start of the 2010s, blogging was her foray to the online world with her blog called The Drugstore Notebook.
From very early on, Caballero showed her creativity not only by publishing poems and other types of texts but also in the ways she was trying to uplift other poets. She started organizing poetry contests in her blog, sometimes with interesting rules such as only accepting submissions of poems that have been rejected from publications at least three times. “A poetry contest for rejects” as she funnily points out in a recent podcast.
Caballero’s first success in the world of writing would come in 2014 with a collection of her Spanish poems submitted under the name Entre domingo y domingo winning Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize and making her the first woman to win that specific award. She will later proceed to publish this set of poems in her homonym book.
One big driver for Caballero was that the traditional publishing route of poems is very cumbersome as it involves submitting poems to publications, having to pay fees for the publication to review the submission, and waiting for many months to hear back without any guarantee of acceptance. Plus most of the time poems are rejected and furthermore the readership of these publications is limited. Hence, while Caballero was in the process of digitizing her poems to make them more accessible to her audience, she gets to discover NFTs in 2021 and realizes this new technology is perfect to offer an alternative publishing route for poets.
Her first poems to sell as NFTs are 7 poems in August 2021 as part of the Etherpoems: Spoken Word collection, a sale which also included 20 other poets and 160 poems in total.
Three months later, in November 2021, Caballero co-founded theVERSEverse, the first digital gallery dedicated to poetry, with the core mission being to empower poets creatively and financially, promote poetry as art, and establish the future of literature on the blockchain.
Throughout 2023, Caballero performed her poetry in numerous venues across the world, inviting audience members to write down one-word responses to her poems on sheets of paper. One audience member left an origami swan. She was so moved by the small pieces of paper and by the swan. Subsequently, she used them as input to generate digital origami paper structures with the use of AI, wanting to pay homage to paper by presenting it as the message in and of itself, not solely as a medium for messages. 100 resulting digital paper origamis formed the Paperwork collection that was released in November 2023.
artifacts is a collection of 100 digital coins that Caballero released in September 2023 in collaboration with Alex Estorick. This is another project where, similarly to Paperwork, Caballero expands her artistic practice beyond poetry. The digital coins display AI-generated images of alternative histories focused on motherhood, family, and domesticity, thereby posing the question: what might these kinds of images mean when minted onto currency? “A coin is never just a coin. It’s a token of cultural value” the artists utter in a short clip that presents the collection. The stories of the subjects are simple but their identities remain unknown. In this way artifacts contests history by displacing value from established, patriarchal power and situating it in everyday homes. The collection was sold out in under 24 hours for ~$16,000.
The epitome of Caballero’s success is the Sotheby’s auction of Cord in January 2024 for $11,430 which will make Caballero the first living poet to ever sell a poem at Sotheby’s and Cord the first digital poem to be sold at Sotheby’s. Cord is about the ties that bind, both visible like umbilical cords and invisible like family relationships. When Caballero was asked to provide a poem as part of the Sotheby’s auction, she immediately thought of using Cord as minting it on the blockchain would also be a play on how relationships form both visible and invisible ties in the digital art space too.
Beyond the use of technology, Caballero will use her own body to perform while reciting her poem in Waiting Room (2024). A strong influence for the artist to explore performative poems has been the crowd’s reaction to her public poem recitals. Hence she goes on to perform her verse on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem, exploring how her physical body ties to her verse. As of April 2024, the work is on offer via the Gazelli Art House.
In parallel with her journey in the NFT market, Caballero’s manuscripts are starting to garner more attention from the writing world. Her first nonfiction manuscript, A Petit Mal, was awarded the International Beverly Prize and was a finalist to myriads of other contests, eventually published in 2023. Mammal, her most recent manuscript, was awarded the 2022 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize and will be published in 2024, making it Caballero’s 6th book. While on the topic of books, Caballero created The Wish in 2023, a book that contains a single poem printed 197 times. Only one edition of the book was printed as a gesture that proposes the book as a sculptural artifact in Caballero’s pursuit “to see poetry transacted in a way that reflects its cultural value”.