I first encountered Kandy G. Lopez’s larger-than-life fiber paintings at ACA Galleries’ booth at the 2024 Armory Show. As New York City’s Javits Center is not exactly known for its charming and distinctive ambience, I typically race through it, in search of art to cleanse my proverbial palate.
Exploding with style and personality, pattern and color (think neon orange bucket hats, leopard pants, and bug-eye specs), Lopez’s portraits of her diverse Miami community stopped me in my tracks, much in the way that the portraits of Barkley L. Hendricks—a major inspiration for the Afro-Caribbean artist—do.
As instantly arresting as Lopez’s portraits are from afar, the real magic happens when you’re up close, basking in the meticulously and fully hand-embroidered figures. The 38-year-old artist, who also works in prints, paint, and glass, has spent the last four years perfecting her fiber-based portraits, each of which typically takes a week or a week and a half to complete, if she’s in the studio six to eight hours a day. (In addition to being a practicing artist, Lopez is an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Arts at Nova Southeastern University. She also has two young children.) 2025 has marked several milestones for the artist: she won the Orlando Museum of Art’s People’s Choice Award; was granted a residency with the Galleries of Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, where she will have a show in 2026; and she had her first international solo exhibition at the Florence Fondation in Paris.
This November in New York City, ACA Galleries opened “Textile Truths: Faces of Resilience” (through January 17, 2026), Lopez’s sprawling second solo exhibition with the gallery, where her technical prowess continues to impress. With each portrait, whether solo or group, bust or full-body, the photorealism from afar is stronger than the last, the close-up detail more astounding. It’s clear Lopez is growing more confident in her practice, as she experiments with adding three-dimensional touches like cowrie shells, playing with outlines and negative space to contrast heavily worked sections, and allowing the figures’ hair or shoes to venture beyond their rectangular grid—an effect that the artist likens to paint dripping. It’s as if Lopez is breaking the fourth-wall, asserting the figures’ agency in not only the daring outfits they wear but also their commanding poses. They proudly take up space.
Bey’s street portraits additionally inspired Lopez to push beyond her comfort zone and ask strangers she spotted with “serious swagger” to sit for her. Otherwise, she tends to work with friends and family—in her Hispaniola series, for example, which features Haitians and Dominicans in traditional dress, such as the cultivo de la vida, a flouncy white dress with red and blue stripes, inspired by the Dominican flag. When it comes to capturing contemporary garb, Lopez simply asks sitters to come in their “swaggiest” outfit, which she then photographs, shooting low to the ground so that the figures seem “larger than life, extremely long, and powerful.”
In the case of City Girls, a 14-foot-wide group portrait, Lopez knew four of the sitters and asked them to bring friends, because she wanted a “seven-women badass piece.” Soon, the artist had herself befriended the entire crew. “This is a way of connecting with community and getting people into spaces where they wouldn’t normally go,” she says. “It might be the Hispanic part of me, where we engage, we laugh, we cry, we talk, we eat, we drink.”
Relatedly, when people view her portraits, “I want it to feel like family,” Lopez says—and it was a family reunion, of sorts, when City Girls debuted at Expo Chicago this past April, and all seven women surprised her at ACA Galleries’ booth. “There were lots of waterworks,” she says.
For “Textile Truths,” Lopez debuted a companion piece, called City Boys. Alongside both large-scale compositions is a series of individual bust portraits of the figures, celebrating their distinctive spirit and characteristics. The latter works also represent Lopez’s first foray into handmade frames, in this instance, a transparent epoxy/resin structure molded to evoke gilded Rococo ones. “I wanted the frames to feel like water, as a reference to the Atlantic slave trade and how water connects all of us,” she says.
Experimentation remains crucial to Lopez, whose 2026 projects include a group exhibition at the North Dakota Museum of Art and a solo show at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. She’s currently playing with incorporating fiber into glass and ceramic works. “I like the metaphor of having something that’s super hard but also very fragile. It speaks to the people that are being represented in the works,” she says. At one point, she refers to their clothing and self-presentation as “armor.”
The duality of the materiality is further echoed in Lopez’s embroidery technique, where the “niceness” of the front of her portraits contrasts the “violence” of the knot-covered back. She observes, “The figures may have this tough exterior, but there’s a softness on the inside.”
