By Bernice Steinbaum
Aurora Molina was born in Cuba and, from a young age, longed to leave the island and reunite with her father, who had immigrated to the United States. For many years, she, her sister, and her mother were separated from him. As a young woman, Aurora imagined America as a place filled with possibility — a country that promised opportunity, education, and a very different political reality from the one she had known in Cuba.
Throughout her career, Aurora has worked across many media, though she has always been especially drawn to fabric. I have represented her for many years, and her early work often took the form of soft sculptures and embroidery, using these intimate materials to give shape to deeply personal concerns. The body of work you see tonight marks a shift — one that engages directly with sociopolitical themes.
In these works, Aurora collapses the human world and the animal world into a single, unsettling landscape. A donkey-headed salesman shakes hands with an iguana. A rabbit-faced officer kneels between a child and a tiger. In Beyond Fibers, Molina stages a surreal political tableau in which power, spectacle, and coexistence exist in uneasy harmony. Is she commenting on political theater? On authority? On complicity?
Here, embroidery becomes a metaphor for entanglement — threads of history, ideology, and identity woven together into a fabric full of contradictions. As you move through the exhibition, I invite you to see who you recognize in The Cabinet of the Absurd and in the other works. You may find that some of these figures feel uncomfortably close to something you know — or recognize — intimately.
Aurora is perhaps best known for her meticulous embroidery, a practice that honors a centuries-old tradition of artisans and weavers. In this body of work, however, she steps away from theatrical performance and sheds any protective cloak. She allows us fully into her world — and asks us to look closely at our own.
