INTRODUCTION
The following portfolio spotlights a current exhibition featuring Las Hermanas Iglesias at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas (17 December 2022–9 July 2023). The conjoined pieces plumb and fathom and sea change will also travel to the group exhibition How to Survive, which will be mounted at the Anchorage Museum from 6 October 2023 to 2 September 2024. The text that follows is courtesy of Las Hermanas Iglesias and Claire Howard, Associate Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Blanton Museum of Art.
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Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaborative team of Lisa and Janelle Iglesias, sisters born to Dominican and Norwegian immigrants in Queens, New York. The moniker anchors the artists’ identities within the contexts of feminism, teamwork, and multiplicity. For the past fifteen years, the two have maintained their mixed-media, genre-blurring collaboration alongside their individual practices rooted in drawing and sculpture. Las Hermanas undertakes this collaboration while living in different cities, usually through formal and informal residencies and extended on-site collaborative installations. Their practice has evolved to include a number of team efforts and variations, such as a further collaboration with their mother, Bodhild. Employing playful structures that respond to the community and geographical context of each project, Las Hermanas Iglesias creates artworks that disrupt borders, engage absurdity, tie the personal to larger cultural systems, and promote the benefits of working together.
Their collaborative work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, Arizona State University Art Museum, New Mexico State University Art Museum, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, among others. It has also been featured in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Bombmagazine.com and supported by the Queens Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.
Lisa Iglesias is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College. Her projects incorporate expansive histories and potentials of drawing and painting, take into consideration the translation of patterns, images, and gestures across materials, and reflect her role as a caregiver. Her work has been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts and residencies at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, among others. Lisa divides her time between Western Massachusetts and Queens.
Janelle Iglesias is an assistant professor of Studio in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego and works on site-responsive projects in a variety of contexts. Her work is invested in the metaphors, history, and agency of objects/materials. An alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, her work has been supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, through which Janelle conducted research on bowerbirds in the rainforests of West Papua.
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Las Hermanas Iglesias’ exhibition in the Contemporary Project gallery at the Blanton Museum debuts work that draws on the sisters’ own navigations of fertility, pregnancy, loss, birth, and new motherhood. Both Lisa and Janelle Iglesias gave birth during the Covid-19 pandemic, when parenting-related concerns such as essential labor, healthcare access, childcare costs, paid leave, and reproductive justice came to the fore. The artists’ understanding of caregiving as part of a complex network of social issues shapes the themes and forms of their project. They were also inspired by the biological phenomenon of microchimerism, the flow and recombination of cell populations between gestational parents and children. The term derives from the mythological chimera, a hybrid, fire-breathing female monster with the body parts of a lion, goat, and serpent.
These themes of interconnection appear most clearly in the hands and weaving patterns that recur across the installation. Casts of the artists’ hands and those of their mother, Bodhild, and Lisa’s son, Bowery, offer gestures of comfort, support, and resistance, and hold symbolic objects, including shells and plants. The crisscrossing warp and weft of textiles imply the strengthening of single threads through interlacing and a metaphor for networks of mutual support. Likewise, the use of wordplay and collage suggests the power of multiple meanings and recontextualization that echo the artists’ resistance to a singular narrative of parenthood. Las Hermanas Iglesias instead aims to normalize a range of experiences and emotions tied to parenthood and caregiving, while advocating for support for caregivers on a personal, political, and societal level.
Images © 2023 Las Hermanas Iglesias. Photos: Manny Alcalá, courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art.