Exhibition at ACA Gallery, Textile Truths: Faces of Resilience (2024-2025). Portrait of artist Kandy G. Lopez in her studio, surrounded by yarn and fiber works in progress. Melo, Yarn and spray paint on hook mesh mounted on a fabric background. (2024), Poetic Justice (2025), Featured in Vogue. Photo by Roman Dean, Tierra, (2023), all work is Yarn and acrylic or spray paint on hook mesh.
An Afro-Caribbean American artist based in South Florida whose practice centers on large-scale fiber portraiture, building monumental, often room-sized figures out of yarn, hook mesh, spray paint, and stained glass. For Lopez, scale is not a stylistic choice but a statement: her subjects, drawn from her own community and historically rendered small, peripheral, or invisible in traditional portraiture, are built to command space rather than recede into it.
GFA’s Field Notes
We first say here: the work was recently shown at the ACA Gallery, a gallery nearly a century old and family-run since its founding. The work is as much about material as it is about image. Layered threads become a metaphor for how BIPOC individuals "disappear and reappear" within dominant narratives, while gridded, woven backgrounds evoke both neighborhood street patterns and the structure of weaving itself: transparency, layers, vulnerability. True to that ethos, Lopez leaves the back of each piece exposed rather than neatly finished, refusing to tidy away the labor embedded in the work. Each portrait is titled after its subject, a way of naming and honoring the people she portrays, and she stays in relationship with them long after the piece is complete.
Lopez describes her practice as "a necessity to learn something new about her people and culture," work rooted in reclaiming visibility for the historically overlooked across Caribbean and African diasporic traditions. She is connected with Tarisse Iriarte through our Afro-Caribbean heritage and ACA Gallery.
ACA Galleries artist page — https://acagalleries.com/artists/kandy-g-lopez/
Colossal feature (original) — https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/05/kandy-g-lopez-embroidered-portraits/
