Los Angeles-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga transforms the albertz benda gallery in New York into a cosmic vessel—part body, part landscape—where grief, resistance, memory, and community coalesce through fiber, form, and ritual. Her debut solo exhibition with the gallery, Weighted, is structured somatically from head to toe, channeling the artist’s embodied relationship to land and space while conjuring a mythic femme spirit whose presence pulses through each sculptural gesture. Aguiñiga’s work resists categorization, oscillating between the personal and the collective, inviting viewers on a journey of empowerment. In this conversation, we discuss her approach to site-responsive making, the politics and poetics of craft, the role of pleasure and grief in her process, and the radical necessity of collective care.
Francisco Donoso: Weighted transforms the gallery into a cosmic body. What inspired you to structure the exhibition along a physical, somatic narrative from head to toe?
Tanya Aguiñiga: As a person who has been marked by land and place, I try and first navigate what my physical connection to a city, building, or community is before I make a body of work that I feel can be in conversation with the place in which it is shown. It's like making a body in a language that is bespoke to a place.
For my show at albertz benda, I felt that New York itself was too large of a physical and symbolic concept in the imaginations, so I needed to pair my approach down to a guttural connection with the space of the gallery itself. When I first visited and shot images of the space so I could reference them in LA, I saw the space as a birth canal, with a cosmic femme trapped inside the space. Once I began to explore the parts of the body that hold different emotions, pieces started to form in my mind that could begin to flesh out her story.
FD: The labor of craft, specifically of weaving, braiding, and repetitive—and obsessive—engagement with fibers, is something I relate to pleasure. I see it in the tactility, the color, and the forms in your work. Is pleasure something you consider in your practice, especially as you’re navigating resistance and liberation work?
TA: I wish that pleasure was something that drove my work, especially after reading Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown! But no, sadly, I am mostly thinking about language, translation and access for marginalized bodies to take space and reshape narratives in a place that wishes to erase us. I do take great pleasure, though, in the act of making communal work. I adore being in community with folks who have different lived experiences and learning from them while we channel care work and activate materials with our memories.
FD: The show centers marginalized bodies—border, femme, trans, Indigenous. How do you navigate honoring these experiences while grounding the work in your own experiences?
TA: I try to include different communities in the making of works, both physically and emotionally. I grieve and process the obstacles and atrocities of all who are othered, and all who cannot safely exist through material, technique, color, sharing of knowledge and resources.
Having grown up in spaces of neoliberal neglect, I’ve come to understand one cannot navigate the world thinking that we all have the same access to resources or safety. So I sometimes make work to speak in support of, together with, or in place of friends and relatives who cannot safely do so on their own. Getting to make art for a living is a platform I like to share, so that we can work toward us all being free, empowered and supported.
FD: In a world increasingly hostile to marginalized bodies, what does collective empowerment look like to you right now?
TA: I think that we need to continuously work against the forces that want to keep us apart from each other. I think we need each other always. Radical care and radical inclusion is the only way we will survive each other. Communal, collaborative additive is the antidote to harmful systems destroying the planet. We all have enough to share, we just need to take account of our strengths and offer them up to others freely. Together we can help one another heal, process and thrive—not just survive.
FD: Weighted feels both intimate and monumental. What kind of emotional or spiritual experience do you hope visitors carry with them?
TA: I hope that visitors can find themselves enveloped in a safe harbor. I hope that they get to feel the works with all senses and that the boundlessness in which I work reminds them that we are not meant to be controlled or regulated by reductive structures.
FD: And lastly, are there rituals that you perform in your studio, or daily practices that you return to, that you feel nourish you?
TA: Yes, I love, love rituals! In the studio we do cleanses regularly, do offerings of copal and plants and work with Mesoamerican rituals to connect with ancestors. We also fully lean into connecting with nature by spending time in the LA River every day—my studio is connected to the part of the river that is still naturally lush with wildlife and plants. We are so grateful to be in the river’s presence, to sit with her through the seasons, to watch her interweave both human and natural debris amidst currants, and to be still enough to try and listen to her teachings.
