Mayra Alpízar. Textile. Intimate Matter (English version)

 

Mayra Alpízar

This exhibition offers an anthological survey of the work of Cuban artist Mayra Alpízar (Matanzas, 1956), bringing together pieces created between 1994 and 2024. The selection traces a sustained arc through some of her most significant series—Eva sobre el tapiz (Eve on the Tapestry), Hilando fino (Fine Threading), Si Aristóteles hubiera guisado (If Aristotle Had Cooked), and Paños grises (Gray Cloths)—through which the central concerns of her practice come into focus. The presentation also includes two three-dimensional works and Avío de pesca (Fishing Tackle), a process-based work.

For Alpízar, sewing has been a way of feeling and thinking through life. Since textile emerged as her primary mode of expression, her practice has functioned as a kind of visual record in which the affective and the social intertwine. In this sense, her use of textile was never merely a technical choice, but an aesthetic and conceptual position. Sewing—traditionally associated with the domestic sphere and the feminine—is reclaimed by the artist as a field of signification through which she narrates and reworks her experiences as a woman, mother, friend, Cuban, and migrant. Her work thus moves toward a space in which a critical perspective takes shape through poetic ways of engaging lived experience.

Within this framework, the female body emerges as a central presence. In the works from series Eva sobre el tapiz—Three Months of Grace, Altar, and The Lovers, among others—the figure of Eve functions as an archetypal representation of the feminine. Through a semantic play on the expression “to lay one’s cards on the table,” understood as a gesture of revelation, Alpízar exposes emotions, relationships, and inner states through compositions that approach the universal through the autobiographical. Here, the female figure is not idealized but presented as marked by tensions and contradictions: desire, vulnerability, violence, resilience. The works in this series reveal the complexity of female existence beyond stereotype, situating the body in a zone of friction where love and its loss, the erotic and the sacred, the intimate and the social are deeply entangled.

In the series Hilando fino, the artist moves into a more explicitly critical territory, addressing the tensions of the social context of her native country. The title, a Spanish expression related to sewing, refers both to the need for subtlety in restrictive contexts and to the precision inherent in textile work. In pieces such as Interior with Shipwreck, The Excessive Light, and The Virgin of the Dry Tree, Alpízar engages in strategies of appropriation. In doing so, she draws on references from both universal and local art histories to reflect on the failure of the political model in Cuba and its impact on the fragmentation of the social and familial fabric.

Alpízar’s practice extends into a critical reflection on how domestic labor is perceived in Si Aristóteles hubiera guisado, a series inspired by the well-known phrase by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Here, the artist departs from the traditional tapestry format to experiment with textile objects, specifically aprons—everyday items associated with food preparation in the domestic sphere. The apron becomes a symbolic support through which emotions, narratives, and lived experience tied to women’s daily lives are explored. Patches, cuts, fasteners, and pockets form a visual language in which domestic labor is affirmed as a legitimate site of meaning-making.

The Cuban experience—particularly the fractures brought about by the crisis of the 1990s—becomes especially visible in the series Paños grises, where the artist constructs images marked by instability. Through scenes organized as narrative sequences, Alpízar arranges precarious structures, indeterminate spaces, and bodies that seem to sustain themselves in fragile balance. The stool, constantly on the verge of collapse, and the female figures in states of tension or vulnerability function as allegories of crisis and of the fragility of life it produces. Within this same framework, the three-dimensional work Yurisleydis can be understood as a figure that condenses this experience of precarity.

Across this body of work, each stitch and each fragment of fabric speaks to a creative process that, like memory, is built through discontinuity—out of remnants, traces, and intimate bonds. Sewing asserts itself as both gesture and method: to sew is to join, but also to mend, to insist on the possibility of making meaning where experience appears fractured.

Exhibited Works

Three Months of Grace, 1990. Patchwork, embroidery, and marker. 118.1 × 196.9 in.

This polyptych was conceived as the visual diary of a thirteen-week love affair. Each strip unfolds a sequence of days and nights, evoking the intensity of the experience. Embroidered fragments—drawn from a pop visual lexicon—become signs, charting the small events and shifting moods of each day. In certain passages, imagery gives way to verses by Rabindranath Tagore; in others, the empty field operates as a sign in its own right.

Altar, 1995. Patchwork and embroidery. 62.6 × 43.3 in.

In this work, the erotic and the sacred are intertwined. The composition engages with Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), in which the female sex assumes a central role. Here, that image is integrated into a ceremonial tabernacle, reaffirming the sacred dimension of life’s origin through fertilization and birth. The embroidered candles—at once votive and suggestively phallic—reinforce the tension between the spiritual and the corporeal.

Triangular Composition, 1996. Patchwork and embroidery. 72.8 × 35.4 in.

This work explores the complexity of a love triangle. Set within a metaphysical landscape drawn from De Chirico, three figures compose a scene defined by duality. One male figure commands attention through its luminosity; the other emerges as a dark presence, blending into the landscape. The artist thus evokes the coexistence of contrasting qualities of desire and affection—contradictory emotions that challenge the ideals of purity and simplicity traditionally ascribed to feminine love.

The Lovers, 2000. Patchwork and embroidery. 79.1 × 35.4 in.

This work draws a parallel between Akhenaten and Nefertiti—the celebrated couple of ancient Egypt—and a contemporary relationship marked by misunderstanding and adversity. The scene is framed by columns and the Ankh, symbol of life and of the union of masculine and feminine, as the lovers hold each other bare-chested, exposing their full vulnerability. The work thus suggests the persistence of love—and of its divergences—as a universal and timeless human experience.

Applause, 2010. Hand embroidery. 64.6 × 31.9 in.

This work, rendered in a drawing-based idiom, depicts a nude woman standing on stage before an audience. The figure conceals a brain behind her back—a gesture that evokes, and simultaneously subverts, the bouquet of flowers traditionally presented to actresses. The nudity underscores a sense of fragility, while suggesting, with quiet humor, the subterfuge that shields her from the social prejudices surrounding female intelligence.

Mandorla, 2018. Patchwork, embroidery, and appliqué. 56.3 × 39.4 in. 

This work reinterprets the mandorla—the aureole that, in medieval tradition, surrounds sacred figures—through a contemporary sensibility. In place of Christ, Alpízar positions the body of a woman in an expansive, joyous stance, surrounded by luminous dots and vegetal motifs. Without relinquishing its symbolic ambiguity, the work proposes an image of freedom, affirming a link between nature and the generative power of the feminine body.

Interior with Shipwreck, 2000. Patchwork and embroidery. 75.2 × 40.6 in. 

The title of this work alludes to Amelia Peláez’s Interior with Columns, while the central scene appropriates Hokusai’s iconic The Great Wave, shifting its meaning toward the shipwreck unfolding within it. The image evokes the domestic space and introduces a tension between interior and exterior, the intimate and the uncontrollable. The tapestry speaks to the losses, and displacements of contemporary Cuba, and to the ways in which that collective experience bears down on individuals and families.

The Excessive Light, 2003. Patchwork and embroidery. 55.1 × 35 in.

This work is a tribute to Cuban artist Antonia Eiriz, whose expressionist and critical practice left a deep mark on the art of her country. The composition, unsettling in character, presents a central figure—exposed and vulnerable—surrounded by fragmentary images that recall the intense visual universe of her work. The title, drawn from a verse by Eliseo Diego, alludes to a revelatory light, to the lucid, penetrating gaze Eiriz cast upon her social reality.

The Virgin of the Dry Tree, 2004. Patchwork and embroidery. 52.4 × 34.6 in.

This work appropriates a painting of the same name by Petrus Christus, a Flemish Gothic master. Alpízar replaces the original Virgin with the Virgin of Charity of Cobre, patron saint of Cuba, placing her within an environment of dry branches that take on symbolic intensity. The artist has stated that “Cuba is a dry tree, Cuba no longer bears fruit”—a reflection on faith, loss, and hope against the backdrop of her country’s profound social crisis.

Memory, 2005. Sewn fabric and appliqué with personal objects. Approx. 27.6 × 19.7 in.

Conceived as a container of memories, this apron brings together small objects and affective traces of deep emotional significance to the artist. Each compartment is an intimate repository where memory is carefully held. The translucent fabric adds a blurred, fragile quality that speaks to the nature of recollection. The work addresses memory as an affective archive—one that takes on particular resonance in contexts of displacement and migration.

In Heat, 2005. Snap fasteners on corduroy fabric. Approx. 27.6 × 19.7 in.

Alpízar constructs an image of powerful symbolic charge from a pattern of snap fasteners arranged in a spiral. The composition recalls the Swadhisthana chakra, associated with sexuality and located in the lower abdomen, evoking the vital energy linked to desire and fertility. Through an apparently abstract visual language, the exclusive use of the female part of the snap introduces a subtle yet direct reading of feminine sexuality and bodily receptivity.

A Few Small Nips!, 2005. Patchwork and razor cuts. Approx. 27.6 × 19.7 in.

This work addresses domestic violence through a frontal image of the female body, interrupted by cuts that pierce the textile surface. Executed upon a carefully elaborated ground, these violent gestures rupture the work, making damage a constitutive part of the image. The title, borrowed from a work by Frida Kahlo, introduces a disturbing dimension that underscores the normalization of abuse—a forceful metaphor for the violence inflicted upon the body.

Fishing Tackle, 2004–2012. Assemblage of used bras from friends and neighbors. Approx. 86.6 × 70.9 in.

This work emerges from a prior process of collection that is fundamental to its meaning. The artist gathered used bras from friends and neighbors, activating a network of exchanges in which trust, intimacy, and cooperation became the material of the work. The assembly configures a web that evokes, with humor and irony, a fishing net—a collective device where material precarity interweaves with forms of everyday solidarity.

Yurisleydis, 2005. Sewn fabric with batting. Life-size

From its title, this figure evokes the Cuban context of the 1990s—the “Special Period”—when invented names proliferated alongside acute material scarcity. The work alludes to the harsh living conditions that pushed many women to confront extreme decisions in order to survive. Made from available materials and rough stitching, the figure emphasizes helplessness and abandonment. Its nudity exposes a vulnerable body, marked by an extreme social context.

Pincushion, 2005. Sewn fabrics with stuffing. 5.9 × 11.8 × 7.9 in.

This object, typical of the practice of sewing, is reframed by Alpízar as a form charged with meaning. Conceived functionally “to receive pricks,” the pincushion becomes here a metaphor for normalized dynamics of aggression. Resolved as a torso—a classical subject in sculpture—and pierced by multiple pins, the volume articulates a tension between functionality and bodily image, suggesting a reflection on the subtle forms of violence that persist even within the everyday.

Niké, 2024. Patchwork and embroidery. 38 × 25 in.

The Noise, 2024. Patchwork and embroidery. 38 × 25 in. 

Amazon, 2024. Patchwork and embroidery. 38 × 25 in.

These works belong to the series Gray Cloths, in which Alpízar addresses the fractures brought on by the Cuban crisis of the 1990s. Conceived as a narrative sequence, the pieces articulate distinct scenes of displacement and loss, where the female body appears upon unstable structures within an indeterminate space. In Niké, the figure—caught between impulse and restraint—embodies an experience of uprootedness and separation; in The Noise, the onset of rupture is suggested, as social stability begins to crack; in Amazon, the female body alludes to survival strategies marked by vulnerability.

Katherine Chacón

Curatorial text and exhibition wall texts for Mayra Alpízar. Textile, Intimate Matter, held from June 11 to July 30, 2026, in Gallery C at Miami International Fine Arts (MIFA), Miami.