Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present Kira Dominguez Hultgren’s fourth solo show with the gallery. A textile artist, Dominguez Hultgren uses her practice to explore the ways her family has negotiated race in the U.S. This interest started at 19-years-old when she received her first research grant to do a family-history project. Dominguez Hultgren spent the summer of 1999 interviewing her grandmother and separately her great-auntie Ina while looking through photo albums with them, learning that the same childhood backdrop is never the same childhood experience. Because while her grandmother grew up Indian and Hawaiian, her auntie Ina grew up Black. It is between the stories of these two women that Dominguez Hultgren was raised with the parentheticals of race in America (“you never can outrun your place”).
This show was built from these parentheticals. Imagery and inspiration are drawn from two separate archives. First, photo slides from another auntie’s art gallery at the Air India offices in
Los Angeles in 1961. These photo slides show textiles, sculptures, prints, murals, paintings, and other objects that her auntie Joyce collected and sold. At that time, Air India held one of the largest Indian art collections in the world. Today, many of these textiles and sculptures from auntie Joyce’s collection still live in Dominguez Hultgren’s family.
The second archive is a study of the imagery of the Virgin de Guadalupe in Chicana art from the 1960s to present. While Dominguez Hultgren draws on many sources for this assembled archive, she is particularly indebted to Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López’s Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López's “Irreverent Apparition” (2011); Maria Esther Fernández and Laura E. Pérez’s curation of the retrospective exhibition, Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (which Dominguez Hultgren had the opportunity to see at El Museo del Barrio in 2024); and ongoing conversations with Consuelo Jimenez-Underwood about the slippage between images of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and the Virgin de Guadalupe often visualized in Jimenez- Underwood’s work.
Weaving allows Dominguez Hultgren to step into seemingly disparate archives and mix-up the parenthetical backdrops (California, the 1960s, four-petal and egg-shaped imagery, the ways race and culture were negotiated). Writ-large in this looking, in her making, is the use of the loom, particularly the site of the “heddle” (like an eye of a needle or a closed parentheses) through which each yarn must pass through (at least on a European floor loom). Interestingly, indigenous, portable looms have a very different kind of heddle structure: an open loop, made from a continuous string of yarn. The indigenous heddle structure can be moved around onto different threads while weaving, so there is a lot of flexibility in the final fabric. But the tradeoff is that the weaving progresses slowly. In Europe, this open loop string heddle was turned into steel (more durable and efficient for weaving) and suddenly the fabric was fixed from the outset. Threads were easy to divide and control. And so, for the artist, the heddle pulls the conversation back to race. How do we go about restructuring a fabric? To finding compassionate synergies in parentheticals? It is not without a sense of irony for Dominguez Hultgren that most of the work in this show was made using immovable heddles (1,200 lbs of steel to be precise).
