Join us in the gallery for an artist talk by our current Artist in Residence, Amalia Galdona Broche. After the talk there will be Q & A with the audience followed by an open studio where visitors can see what Amalia has been creating while in residence for the month of January.

FREE to attend.

Artist Biography
I am a fiber artist working with textiles and mixed media to materialize a psychological landscape of nostalgia and remembrance in order to weave alternative histories and mythologies. Originally from Santa Clara, Cuba, my family moved to the US in my adolescence. I earned a BFA and a BA in Sculpture and Art History from Jacksonville University, and have participated in residencies at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA and WOC Residency. My work has been exhibited at The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, the Parachute Factory, Patricia Sweetow Gallery and Field Projects, amongst others. I currently live in Lexington, Kentucky, where I am expected to earn an MFA in Visual Studies this spring at the University of Kentucky.

Artist Statement
The cultural rift created by growing up in Cuba has heightened my memory of a world of scarcity and the socialist education of my childhood, contrasted by the consumer-driven lifestyle and the expansive opportunities of my adulthood. This duality exists in tension and opposition, feeding my sculptural practice and materializing a psychological landscape of nostalgia, accumulation, and memories that fester. The complexities of identity-building as a woman touched by displacement, migration, and transculturation are present in my manipulation of textiles. Layers obscure individual objects and textiles, complicating and entangling their embedded histories via knotting, weaving, ropemaking, and wrapping.

My artistic practice feeds from the cultural, aesthetic and natural environment in which I reside. Through accumulative reconfiguration, I explore the role and definition of textiles in today’s world, focusing on the woven plane as a second skin, a weather -protective and complex recomposition of material, ideas, and memories. My latest work investigates my relationship with lost or silenced histories of my ancestors and explores textiles as extensions of the protective clothing worn to shield an individual from physical, social, emotional, and spiritual threats.

Furthermore, referencing European and West African belief systems, rituals and imagery from my upbringing, my work seeks to acknowledge and honor the violent manner in which these cultures interacted and resulted in new nations that endorsed or endured the process of colonization. Through generative, female, and organic forms, I am crafting a language where verbal communication has been rendered ineffective to convey the multiplicity of conflicting identities within all of us. In a soft and malleable manner, my work is meant as an offering, and act of sharing and expressing an identity that is multilingual, abstract, and obscured, yet nuanced and familiar, as is the process of living in liminality.