Lisu Vega, Calle Chile, Callejón San Benito
Exhibition • Through Saturday, May 3, 2025
Gallery hours
Saturday, April 12, 11am-5pm
Sunday, April 13, 11am-5pm
Saturday, April 19, 11am-3pm
Saturday, April 26, 11am-3pm
Friday, May 2, 6–9pm – First Friday
Saturday, May 3, 11am-3pm
Artist’s Reception
Friday, May 2, 6–9pm
About the Artist
Lisu Vega (b. 1980, Miami, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist born in Miami and raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela. She works in engraving, photography, fiber art, sculpture, installation, and fashion art. Her work explores ideas of sustainability, migration, memory, and identity. Selected Solo exhibitions include Everything I Forgot?, Edge Zones, Miami, FL (2024); Captive Body, Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, FL (2021); El Cuerpo de la Obra, Laundromat Art Space, Miami, FL (2019), and a special guest invitation for a solo project at Pinta Miami Art Fair, Miami, FL (2019) with her installation El Nido, and another special project at Pinta Miami (2021), both curated by Felix Suazo. Selected group exhibitions include Natura at CICA Museum in Gimpo-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea; EBB & FLOW, Exploring the Womanhood Continuum at The Frank Art Gallery in Pembroke Pines, FL, curated by Sophie Bonet and Pamela Zee Lopez del Carmen (2024); DREAMART at Clandestina Art Fair, Miami, FL (2024) in collaboration with Ocovisual, and a collaborative exhibition at Kates-Ferri Projects in New York City, NY (2024), Territorio Visceral, Lisu Vega and Juan Henriquez, curated by Dainy Tapia; Women of Vision Exhibition: South Florida Women Artists at Large (2021), Doral Contemporary Art Museum, Doral, FL, and Fashion Art Exhibition at Appleton Museum, Ocala, FL (2019). Vega was recognized as Designer of the Year at a Miami Art Fashion Week competition in 2014. Vega’s work is in private collections in Florida, South Carolina, and New York. She lives and works in Miami, FL.
Artist’s Statement
Lisu Vega’s artistic practice is a rich, multi-layered exploration of identity, migration, and memory, deeply rooted in her heritage and her commitment to sustainability. By blending textile art, sculpture, and experimental weaving with photography and engravings, she creates immersive installations that speak to the personal and collective experiences of displacement and transformation.
Her Wayuu heritage, particularly its ancient weaving techniques, is integral to her work,linking her to a centuries-old tradition while offering a personal and contemporary lens through which to express her own journey of migration and self-discovery. The tactile, labor-intensive process of weaving is not only a means of artistic expression for Vega
but also a form of emotional and psychological release—an active meditation on loss, belonging, and resilience.
Vega’s commitment to the environment further amplifies the significance of her practice. By focusing on recycled materials and striving for a zero-waste approach, she challenges the disposable culture of modern life and brings attention to sustainability in both art-making and daily living. The way she combines traditional techniques with experimental processes highlights the intersection of past and present, offering a critique of contemporary life while respecting the wisdom of the old.
At the core of Vega’s work is the tension between memory and the present, between what is physically left behind and what can be re-imagined and woven into the future. In using fiber as her central medium, she not only explores the connection between materials and the human body but also questions how the spaces we occupy shape our sense of self. Through her intricate, labor-intensive work, she creates a space where her past and future meet, where the scars of migration are transformed into vessels of hope and continuity.
Curator’s Statement
“Calle Chile, Callejón San Benito is the address of Lisu Vega’s maternal grandmother’s house in Cabimas, Venezuela— a home that at least four generations of her family inhabited at various times of their lives.
It is a house where her family lived ‘a puertas abiertas’—with open doors from morning to night, inviting the breeze to flow through. It was a place where everyone was welcome. Family, neighbors, and friends stopped by often for coffee or a friendly chat.
This exhibition takes us on a journey through the open doors of this house, offering us a glimpse of it as family, friends, and neighbors once knew it. Lisu seeks to recreate her grandmother’s daily life, inviting us to envision the spaces she inhabited. Abuela Yiya’s days were marked by rituals, like sitting under the mango tree at 3 p.m. every day, seeking respite from the relentless Cabimas sun.
This and other daily routines live on in Lisu’s imagination. Her memory of playing at her grandmother’s feet while Yiya worked the pedals of her sewing machine remains vivid. It sparked her lifelong love for textiles and sewing, with the teaching of sewing and weaving hammocks serving as a strong thread that united them.
Yiya passed away in this house in 2021, leaving behind a great emptiness. The pain of this loss inspired Lisu to embark on a new artistic project. Her grandmother’s passing and the sorrow it brought gave rise to a new artistic language, one shaped by their shared memories. In this recent work, using experimental engraving techniques, Lisu prints and transfers photos from her family albums—both old and new—onto a one-of-a-kind fiber support. These photos, taken from childhood places and recent trips, are transferred onto “thumbprint-like” fiber pieces created by sewing the inside of nautical rope into flattened, irregular shapes—each one unique and unrepeatable. These pieces are spun from the moment’s inspiration, shaped by her constant back-and-forth on the sewing machine.
At Spellerberg Projects, Lisu presents photos of her grandmother’s house in its current state—empty and spent yet still filled with cherished memories. Suspended at the center of the room, a large, irregular piece titled La Casa showcases a view of the back of the house, prominently featuring the towering mango tree her grandmother planted and loved to sit under. Its roots and branches now embrace the home, transforming it into a sacred space where four generations once lived.
On the back wall hangs another sizable rectangular piece, The Bougainvilleas Always Bloom (approximately 58″ x 99″), which presents a view of the front of the house. This piece combines the textures of rope and organza, with the rope adding tactile depth and the organza imparting an ethereal, translucent quality.
To the left, a medium-sized photographic collage titled Cafecito Time evokes memories of Abuela Yiya’s coffee rituals. It features elements like a backyard chair, a water tank, and a hint of the kitchen. Two other small, irregularly shaped pieces, showing fragments of different points of the grandmother’s house, float freely against the wall on the right side. They are like fleeting memories—small fragments that bring Vega back to her childhood at Abuela Yiya’s, which could also be the home of families anywhere, but particularly that of so many Venezuelan families who have been forced to leave their country behind due to economic and political hardships, allowing time to take its toll on their once-loved homes.”
Dainy Tapia
ArtSeen365 founder and curator
April, 2025