exhibition.
Imaginary Tapestry: Intergenerational Memory, Material Kinship, and the Fabric of Becoming
Curated by Sophie Bonet
The Frank C. Ortis Gallery
Pembroke Pines, FL
Jun 13 - Aug 24, 2024
Imaginary Tapestry is not simply an exhibition of fiber art—it is a generational gesture, a tender architecture of lineage, care, and becoming. At its center is the dynamic relationship between Cuban-American artist Aurora Molina and her daughter Stella Gaia Vandermey, whose respective bodies of work—shown in dialogue alongside pieces by Molina’s Atelier Students—map the ways in which memory, pedagogy, and material labor entwine. This is textile not as static object, but as living verb: stitched, layered, inherited, and reimagined.
In her foundational text Fray, Julia Bryan-Wilson writes that textile practices often exist in tension with dominant art historical narratives because they are “both intensely personal and densely political.”¹ Imaginary Tapestry embraces this tension, positioning fabric as a medium through which cultural transmission, identity formation, and collective memory unfold. Whether through Molina’s figurative fiber sculptures or Stella’s exuberant multimedia portraits, thread is never neutral—it is evidence of time spent, hands at work, and bodies remembered.
Woven Narratives: Family and Memory in Fiber and Form
In this first section, Molina’s work mines the textures of postmemory and migration. Her stitched figures—elder women in wheelchairs, suspended children, archival images in hoop frames—evoke a tender critique of patriarchy, nationalism, and ageism. These works carry the aesthetic weight of domestic labor, as well as the conceptual force of mourning and survival. Textile here functions as what theorist Ann Cvetkovich calls a “repository of feelings,”² holding cultural memory not through monumentality, but through the small, repetitive acts of embroidery, sewing, and stitching.
In contrast, Stella Gaia Vandermey’s works are luminous and imaginative—yet no less rooted in emotional truth. Her playful portraits, constructed through layered paper, digital print, and textile elements, extend her mother’s themes of familial intimacy into her own visual language. As the daughter of an artist, Stella occupies what art historian Jane Blocker terms “the performative lineage”—a space where one’s subjectivity is shaped not only through biology, but through the shared performance of creative inheritance.³
Figure 1. Installation view of Imaginary Tapestry, works by Stella Gaia Vandermey, 2024. Photo: Zaire Kaczmarski. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
Dream Weavers: Atelier Students’ Magical Creations
This section invites us into the pedagogical ecosystem fostered by Molina’s mentorship. The self-portraits by Atelier Students—many of them young girls—use recycled materials, hand-dyed fabrics, and found objects to visualize dreams, fears, and identities still in formation. These works demonstrate what feminist educators like Maxine Greene and bell hooks have long argued: that arts education can be an emancipatory space where marginalized voices articulate themselves through creative resistance.⁴
Here, Molina’s role is not simply that of teacher, but of intergenerational conduit. Her mentorship affirms that fiber art—long relegated to the private, the decorative, the feminine—is a site of critical engagement. As Rozsika Parker asserts in The Subversive Stitch, embroidery and fiber are never just aesthetic—they are always entangled with histories of discipline, rebellion, and care.⁵
Figure 2. Installation view of Imaginary Tapestry, works by Aurora Molina, 2024. Photo: Zaire Kaczmarsk. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
Dialogues in Thread: Participatory Memory-Making
The final component, a participatory installation wall, invites visitors to respond to prompts with their own drawings and reflections. Here, the gallery becomes a collective loom: individual memories and community narratives interlace into a spatial archive. This aligns with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s assertion that making is not just production—it is a “way of knowing,” a relational process that binds humans, materials, and environments through time.⁶
In this context, the exhibition becomes a temporal fabric: past (Aurora), present (Stella), and future (the students, the audience) are not discrete points but continuously co-constructed. As each thread is added—literally or metaphorically—the gallery space becomes a living tapestry of artistic inheritance, feminist pedagogy, and embodied memory.
Figure 3. Installation view of Imaginary Tapestry, 2024. Photo: Zaire Kaczmarsk. Courtesy of the City of Pembroke Pines.
Imaginary Tapestry is a soft provocation. It insists that art—especially fiber art—is neither passive nor peripheral. It is central to how we remember, how we raise each other, and how we create shared meaning across generations. Through the loving labor of mothers, daughters, mentors, and children, this exhibition reminds us that to stitch is to care, and to teach is to believe that memory can be held, reshaped, and passed on.
Notes
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Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10.
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Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
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Jane Blocker, “This Being You Must Create: Transgenerational Art and the Body,” in What Is Contemporary Art?, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 79–90.
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bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41–58.
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Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1984).
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Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 8.
Bibliography
Blocker, Jane. “This Being You Must Create: Transgenerational Art and the Body.” In What Is Contemporary Art?, edited by Terry Smith, 79–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 2013.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press, 1984.