The Family of The Artist

“The Family of the Artist” is a site-specific exhibition curated by Aluna Art Foundation at the historic Tower Hotel in Little Havana. Featuring 24 multicultural artists, the show explores family, memory, and acts of care through photography, video art, textile, sculpture, painting, and installation. Inspired by Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man, and with curatorial text by Adriana Herrera, the exhibition transforms personal histories into collective narratives, highlighting migration, intergenerational memory, and hybrid identities. Presented in a space charged with architectural and cultural meaning, the show reaffirms the vital bond between art, life, and belonging.

Image: “Bath” by Leslie Gabaldón. Fine art photography scanned and printed on Fine Art Baryta archival pigment print.

What rescues us when everything around us is on the verge of falling apart? What sustains us? What allows our species to endure? Among the myriad answers that art can offer, we find a guiding principle in the landmark

exhibition Edward Steichen curated seventy years ago—in 1955—with photographs from sixty-eight countries: The Family of Man. In the opening lines of Carl Sandburg’s unforgettable prologue to this celebration of “the stories we

all share,” dedicated “to the dignity of man,” he wrote: “The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zamboanga, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and the same intensity; each one says, ‘I am! I have arrived! I belong! I

am a member of the Family!’” Revisiting that foundational sense of belonging, the Aluna Curatorial Collective invited twenty-four artists to transform

the Tower Hotel in Little Havana with works inspired by their own families. Beyond the iconic history of familial bonds in artistic creation—from Dürer’s Praying Hands to Picasso’s Paul as Harlequin, from Anguissola’s The Chess Game to Gerhard Richter’s Aunt Marianne, and not least Carrie Mae Weems’s Family Pictures and Stories—this curation reaffirms the inseparable relationship between art, life, and the care that family provides within our multicultural city.

The Family of the Artist’s openly embraces deeply personal narratives, weaving together works across diverse media with true stories that cement our membership in the human family—a genealogy where hybrid cultures converge.

The exhibition also resonates with the spirit of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, which reframed everyday acts of care—both in the household and within institutions—as vital artistic practice. In a world captivated by the new and the novel, Ukeles championed “the care of what already exists,” beginning with the family itself and extending to the invisible labor that sustains our shared lives. Here, participating artists evoke countless acts of care: their works nurture memory, presence, and even collective dreams, celebrating art’s power to uphold the familial ties that sustain us through all times.

The curatorial vision not only showcases works created through acts of care and connection, but also the life stories hat inspired each piece, told in the artists’ own words. Ángela Bolaños honors the matriarchal memory of her

Honduran family with an abstract textile piece made from embroidery and fragments of a worn maternal blanket and her own dresses. Brazilian artist Liene Bosque gives new life to her Portuguese family’s traditional tablecloths by

recreating them in a cyanotype installation. Venezuelan artist Jacqueline Reis evokes in her thread-based works the textile legacy of her seamstress mother and textile-chemist father, as well as the influence of the cyber-electronic

circuits that flood her home due to the work of her husband and son.

In the lab uniforms adorned with photographic imprints and embroidery, Debora Rosental remembers her mother, born in Argentina to Polish immigrant parents, who worked as a pharmacist—the same job that Rosental found

after immigrating to the United States with a doctorate in biology. Cuban artist Leticia Sánchez-Toledo’s oil painting recreates the legacy of her mother, an artist she grew up watching paint large-scale landscapes. Meanwhile,

Colombian multimedia artist Manuel Zapata captures domestic photographs of fleeting moments, like his young daughter (who is just learning to read) pretending to paint at an easel or skillfully sketching a sink. Argentinian artist

Flor Godward paints her two granddaughters “dressed in blue,” referencing a Spanish-language children’s song, but with penetrating gazes and holding fast-food products. She also creates a portrait installation of her closest family

members on wooden blocks that end up spelling with letters in their names the word “Family.”

Brazilian artist Priscila Schoot explores the experience of having a twin sister by creating two constructive pieces made with identical elements that form different, unique compositions. KX2 Art is a collaborative duo formed by American sisters Ruth Avra and Dana Kleinman, who tie strips of abstract canvas paintings to metal sculptures to recreate childhood games like braiding each other’s hair, while evoking inspiring, usually female mythological figures. Colombian artist Juliana Zapata, who studied film, documents a performance created in collaboration with her sister, in which the two dress up in their grandmothers’ clothing, reaching back two generations to reaffirm a timeless presence of affection.

Using diverse media such as video art, photography, ceramics, cut-paper collage, and embroidered canvas, several artists create scenes reminiscent of family photo albums. These works multiply cultural reflections, representing the

artists’ life stories within contexts of migration and hybrid identities rooted in intergenerational memory. These artists include Venezuelans Carola Bravo and Leslie Gabaldon, Brazilian Heloisa Maia, Cuban Aurora Molina, Panamanian-born and Chinese-descended MaiYap, Haitian Carl Juste, and Argentinian Sebastián Elizondo. The four mixedmedia three-dimensional works by Karla Kantorovich pay tribute to her Polish grandmother Fanny Waserman, who

managed to emigrate to Mexico in 1936 using a passport whose cover is incorporated into her portrait in one of the pieces. The series includes mixed-media photographs of her great-grandmother and other close relatives, including

the children who did not survive the Holocaust. In fact, Fanny was the only one who did survive, and today she has 63 descendants. The work serves as a rite of healing intergenerational memory and confronting the hatred that breeds violence. Muriel Hasbun’s photographs also hold a powerful story. A descendant of both Jewish and Palestinian Arab families, she grew up in El Salvador navigating the “hermetic silence” of her parents and grandparents. Her portrait

of Afife—a mirror image of her Jewish grandmother Ester, whom she has captured in a floating, poetic image—was taken in the late 1990s while she researched her family tree and Palestinian ancestry. In the photo, her relative holds another portrait containing multiple generations of ancestors: a gift to her.

The exhibition features several portraits of hands, or where hands play a central role. The columns made of hands or he repeated praying hands in Valeria Montag’s photographic works evoke both prayer and the solidarity of women

during the healing process of her son, who received a kidney from his sister. The historic diptych by Consuelo Castañeda, simply titled Hands, represents the spiral of life. In the first, the spiral is formed by her mother’s hands

holding hers; in the second, the artist’s hands wrap around her mother’s. Ramón Williams interviews his mother during the final stages of a terminal illness, recording her courage as she knits endless scarves, calmly awaiting

her time of departure. In How a River Is Born (2011), Martha María Pérez-Bravo presents her hand as the hand of the Creator, with extended fingers to release water—life—flowing endlessly through infinite space. Woven from the micro-histories and personal archives of the artists gathered, the exhibition leaves open the question: What story of the Human Family will we choose to tell?

Adriana Herrera