Ilka Robles

Ilka Celeste Robles-Torres is a Puerto Rican educator, poet, and versatile artist living in Hartford at the time of the exhibits and now based in Puerto Rico. She trained in visual arts, special education, and clay sculpture in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and has traveled extensively through Europe, Central America, and the Caribbean. Ilka has been an art teacher in the Hartford School system for many years. She is a skilled ceramicist, and specializes in pottery plaques with painted and glazed scenes of Puerto Rican life, and casitas, little houses made of pottery. She was a central advisor on CCHAP’s Herencia Taina exhibit project, the Que Bonita Bandera exhibit project, as well as the Mano a Mano exhibit project and its five Puerto Rican traditional arts workshops, serving as assistant instructor in the two pottery sessions. In 2002, she was the instructor for a painting on silk workshop as part of CCHAP’s Traditional Arts Workshops for Adults and Older Teens. Ilka donated a clay plaque with a design of the Three Kings to CCHAP, which is now in the CHS collection (2015.197.0).