Women Reshape Textiles in South Florida
Words by Veronica Pesantes
A Momentary Whole by Lisu Vegu, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Gladwell Projects, New York.
Photo by Pat Garcia.
Textiles have long served as a means of communication, shelter, identity, and resistance. The recent institutional and art market embrace of textiles is a testament to their ubiquitous presence in our lives. Covering us from birth to death, they have carried symbolic, political, and spiritual messages across cultures, from the Inca Empire to the quilters of Gee’s Bend to the Chilean “arpilleras.” Across the U.S., fiber art emerged as a radical movement that developed alongside the struggles for women’s liberation and civil rights. Rejecting the male-dominated modernist canon, this feminist art movement embraced quilting, embroidery, and weaving — crafts historically gendered as female and devalued as “women’s work.”
Artists such as Faith Ringgold and Miriam Schapiro blurred the lines between political activism, craft, and art, paving the way for textile art’s growing popularity. In South Florida, women textile artists use embroidery, weaving and upcycling to reclaim agency, combat cultural erasure and honor their heritage and communities. The pairing of craft and activism endures in the work of Kandi G. Lopez-Moreno, who explores Afro-Caribbean identity through monumental portraits of fellow Miami creatives.
“My work is about community and will always center those living in the margins trying to be seen,” Lopez-Moreno says. “I immortalize my people.” For the artist, depicting fellow textile artist Diana Eusebio was a natural fit. “Diana was a perfect person to choose to immortalize because she represents the multicultural-ness of living in South Florida, and we connect in many ways: being a female artist working in fiber, also of color, and culturally, both come from Dominican parents.”
Lopez-Moreno has perfected her iconic fiber-based portrait technique during the past four years. Each one takes about a week and a half to complete. For Lopez-Moreno, whose art embodies an ethos of care, community, and agency, recognition matters because of who has historically been left out. "My work is centered around representing the community and those that are erased throughout the history of art," she says. "Miami is a special place to be raised in as an Afro-Caribbean American. There are so many connections and divisions in the inner cities of South Florida.”
She admits to feeling erased by some Hispanic groups, and seen by others: “At times I felt appreciated once the work was taken out of Florida and celebrated in New York. This is a common problem for artists of color in Miami." The use of textiles to address cultural erasure is also present in the work of artist Kelly Tapia-Chunning (b. 1997, California), who recently won the “The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Acquisition Prize” at Untitled, Houston.
A new Miami transplant, Chuning is a mixed Chicana artist of indigenous heritage whose textile work and research explore themes of cultural hybridity, colonial rupture, and the legacies of assimilation. Her practice centers on the “serape,” the iconic Mexican blankets which she takes apart and reassembles as a way to address the inherited trauma of centuries of assimilation, and as a tool to recover lost connections to her family history. “Being that I’m from the Southwestern U.S. and my ancestral ties are in the desert regions of Northern Mexico, I have never been near so much ‘water’ in my life,” she shares. “This pull towards the center has sparked an emphasis on design and semiotics within the serapes — pushing the boundaries of the material rather than viewing them as a launching point. This breaking down brings me back to the serapes themselves and their history, which is the origin of my work.”
The practice of up-cycling textiles is also at the core of artist, designer, and sustainability activist Pangea Kali Virga who recently co-curated the exhibition “Piecework Legacies, Experimental Quilting in South Florida” at the Miami-Dade Public Library Downtown Branch. Virga, like many artists, credits Miami as a source of inspiration.
“Living in Miami has brought color to my life and my art. The dense lush nature here has guided my maximalist aesthetic tendencies and inspired me to integrate environmentalism,” she shares. “I regularly consider Miami’s history, its connection and disconnection from that history, and the subtle passing of time without definitive seasons.”