Lucia Hierro

Lucia Hierro (born Dec 02, 1987, New York Presbyterian) is a Dominican American multimedia artist known for soft-assemblage, painting, sculpture, and digital media collages that represent the intersectionality between Dominican American identity, capitalism, and community through a culturally relevant lens. Her most notable works infuse "bodega aesthetics" with pop art, minimalism and Dutch still life styles. She has a studio in South Bronx.

Biography Lucia Hierro was raised in Washington Heights and Inwood, home to Dominican diasporas in New York. Her parents, both Dominican immigrants, were artistically inclined: Her father was a singer-songwriter and her mother a vocalist.

Hierro decided to pursue art in high school and began taking free classes at Cooper Union through the Saturday Program.

Career Lucia Hierro trained as a painter. She began working with fabrics (felt) after her formal art education. Hierro had not considered fabric as a medium because she associated it with labor and her family. Hierro's family had survived in New York as fabric factory workers. Once she found out that her grandma had dreamed of being a fashion designer, she felt empowered to reclaim the medium.

Hierro collaborates with Art of Change to make prints of her works and donate the profits to United We Dream, an immigrant youth network.

Works

Mercado Series, (2014-) The Mercado series was seen Hierro's first solo gallery show. It was shown in the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2018. The series originally consisted of large-scale transparent tote bags filled with hand-sewn soft-assemblage structures of novelties familiar to Dominican American communities. The series now includes the same materials found in large-scale single use plastic bags.

The Mercado series serves to highlight the relationship between [Dominican] individuals and capitalism. Hierro's original inspiration comes from the relationship immigrant Dominicans held with objects from their native land. Hierro's mother and grandmother would often bring souvenirs back from the DR at the request of nostalgic New York community members. The bags that hang on the gates demonstrate the typical state in which such gates are found in the Latinx communities in these districts. The circulars found on the gates point to the unseen labor of the many immigrants that work to distribute them throughout the neighborhood.

Marginal Costs (June 2021-January 2022) Marginal Costs, located at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, is Hierro's first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition includes pieces from the Mercado and the specially commissioned Gates series and wall murals. Marginal Costs is organized by The Aldrich's Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart. The essay touches on minimalism, and especially on spare, repetitive forms. Throughout Hierro's exhibition, it is apparent that the artist incorporates the minimalism style as vinyl decals and sculptures are stand alone and sparsed throughout the exhibit. However, the pieces also go against the narrative as they infuse very branded and obvious pop-art elements.

Vecinos/Neighbors (2020) Lucia Hierro's solo exhibition Vecinos/Neighbors was exhibited under Primary Projects in Miami, Florida.

Notable works in public collections

Can I Borrow a Cup of Sugar (2020), Pérez Art Museum Miami