Artist: Kandy G Lopez

ACA Galleries presents Taking up Space: New Works by Kandy G Lopez.

Afro-Caribbean American multidisciplinary portrait artist Kandy G Lopez honors the power, dignity, and layered identities of communities historically rendered invisible. Born in New Jersey and raised in South Florida to Dominican parents, Lopez’s practice is shaped by diasporic experience and the negotiation of identity across cultures. Her bold use of color reflects the vibrancy and hybridity of Caribbean and urban American life, while her commitment to portraiture becomes a means of reclaiming visibility for those historically overlooked.

The individuals she portrays are people she has met and engaged in her daily life. They are not symbolic stand-ins, but real people whose presence carries cultural memory, resilience, vulnerability, and unmistakable swag.

Textiles are central to Lopez’s practice. Fiber evokes domestic labor, migration, ancestral knowledge, and intergenerational storytelling—histories deeply embedded within Caribbean and African diasporic traditions. Her layered threads mirror the layered identities of her subjects—complex, hybrid, and in motion. To be seen fully, without erasure, is an act of power.

Lopez has had numerous solo and group exhibitions across North America, including a recent exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida, where she was honored with the 2025 People’s Choice Award. In fall 2025, she debuted her first international solo exhibition at the Florence Foundation in Paris, alongside museum presentations at Ringling College of Art + Design, the Armory Art Center, and the North Dakota Museum of Art. She was awarded the prestigious 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art by the Gibbes Museum in Charleston South Carolina in 2026.

Lopez currently has a traveling exhibition which was recently at the Houston Museum of African American Art (HMAAC), and will continue to additional venues at Hiram Van Gordon Art Gallery, Tennessee State University, Nashville and Reading Museum of Public Art in Pennsylvania in 2027. Her public collections include the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Gibbes Museum, the Orlando Museum of Art, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Bunker Artspace, the Girls' Club Collection, and the Nova Southeastern University Museum Fort Lauderdale.