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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The work of Kandy G Lopez is on view now in Chelsea at her first New York solo show. Lopez was born in Jersey but grew up in Florida, where she still lives now, and also works as an arts professor. She makes all kinds of work, paintings, collages, prints, you name it. This specific show displays some of her fiber portraits she's made over the last few years, capturing different people in her life and in her weapon of choice, this time yarn.

Each piece has tightly weaved yarn of various colors, creating almost 3D layered textures with their own individual styles and looks. The show is called Kandy G Lopez: Situational Identity, New Works in Fiber. It is on view now at the ACA Galleries' new second location, that's at 173 10th Avenue. There's also a public reception tomorrow at the gallery space from 6:00 to 8:00. Kandy G Lopez joins me now in the studio. Welcome to the studio.

Kandy G Lopez: Hey, thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: For listeners, if you want to check out some of Kandy's work, go to our Instagram, our Insta stories. We've posted several of the pieces we're going to talk about so go check them out. They're amazing.

Kandy G Lopez: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Each of these pieces is a portrait of a friend or someone you know, right? When you see a photo or a picture of somebody, when do you first start thinking about, "Huh, that could be a portrait? That's something I want to try to make in this specific medium?"

Kandy G Lopez: Immediately. Usually, I know the person or they have a friend of a friend, they end up coming to one of my shows or it's at a party or something. The minute that they walk in, it's like, "I am in a different world. Who is this person? What's their name? What do they do?" I become one of their biggest fans immediately, and then I get to know them. I ask them, "Are you interested in being immortalized in one of my pieces?" Who would say no to that?

Alison Stewart: It's quite a good question. Would you like to be immortalized? Thank you very much. Yes, I would.

[laughter]

Kandy G Lopez: Then I go from there.

Alison Stewart: What is it about getting to know them? How does that help you?

Kandy G Lopez: Because it's easier to tell the story. I don't ask my models to wear a certain thing or pose a certain way. It's just like, "Oh, I'm going to come to whatever space you're more comfortable in, and I'll take pictures from there." We put some music so there's some kind of a vibe so they don't feel too uncomfortable. Usually, I'm there telling them how awesome they look and how awesome they are so that they can bring down that guard that they have, and yes.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. The way you're describing it these aren't professional models.

Kandy G Lopez: Not at all. One of the first ones that I did in fiber was my husband. He's gorgeous, but he's not a professional model. It was just like, I liked what he had on that day. I asked him if it would be okay and if he said no I'll still take a picture, it's my husband. That's usually how it works. I have a lot of people within that show that the reception is on Thursday, that two of them are my cousins. I have one that braids hair in Miami, her name is Cuevia, and there are friends that I just like, "What are you wearing? Please let me take a picture of you."

Alison Stewart: Is there a certain kind of person or a certain type of person that makes your job easier or that you really feel like you're particularly good at interpreting?

Kandy G Lopez: I think minorities. It's not like white people don't have swagger, maybe it's a way of identifying myself within these people instead of doing self-portraits, they are my portraits. Since I'm brown, it just comes more naturally to me to be intoxicated with minorities.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kandy G Lopez. The show is called Situational Identity, New Works in Fiber. It's at ACA's New Gallery that's at, I think, 10th and the 20th, 21st.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, they just opened up a new space on 10th and 20th, and they're inaugurating the space with my solo, which is-

Alison Stewart: Huge.

Kandy G Lopez: -crazy, yes.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Kandy G Lopez: I'm excited.

Alison Stewart: That's big.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, it is. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about yarn as a material. When did you first start working with yarn?

Kandy G Lopez: I started playing around in 2016. I made really small ones. I tell people all the time, things happen in the studio by accident but also on purpose, like there's happy accidents. I like to coin that from Bob Ross. A piece of string fell on one of my prints. I was collaging at that time, and instead of drawing in power lines because I was really interested in cityscapes of these neighborhoods that don't have the resources or eventually people come in and then they gentrify them.

The string fell, and I was like, "Oh, I could just make power lines with thread," and then that turned into, "Well, I could make people from thread to see what they look like." I left that alone for a while, and I went back to painting and then I got pregnant. I was like, "Well, I can't paint my gigantic oil paints of these people anymore, so I did dabble in thread. Let's see what that can look like." That was one of the mediums where I felt like it made sense because it's fibers, like fibers of our being. It's also soft. I'm making these people look or they are confident but also vulnerable at the same time. Those are the two things that I really enjoy about painting minorities because they have that in them.

Alison Stewart: When you were a kid, did you have any experience with yarn? Did you have a grandmother, an auntie who crocheted, and all that?

Kandy G Lopez: My parents are Dominican, and my grandma is Dominican too, so she was a seamstress for people within the neighborhood in Santo Domingo. She would make little Barbie clothes for me when I needed it. We didn't have that much money growing up either, so she would make our Halloween costumes, which we got made fun of. I seen her crochet and make things, but I didn't connect the dots until recently.

She showed me how to crochet. I lost that ability and then when I got into my undergrad, I was like, "I need some hats. It's cold over here. I don't have money to buy any hat, so I'm going to crochet my damn hats," so I crochet them. There was some things there, but what I'm creating now, I didn't take a class. It's just something that, "This looks good. Let's tie a knot and let's move on to the next one."

Alison Stewart: What does yarn give you as a medium creatively? Something that you can do with it that you aren't able to do with the other mediums you work in.

Kandy G Lopez: I'm interested in detail. Like I said, I'm a technical portrait painter. I've been painting for a really long time. I'm 36, but I've been painting since I was 12, so it's part of who I am. Because I'm so technical, even when I want to be loose in my paintings, I try painting with my left hand. Sometimes I just let the paint fall to see if I would leave it alone but because of the technicality of it, I need it to have really clean, crisp lines. What yarn does for me and thread is that it lets me let go of the ability to be so detailed. I know that sounds crazy because my portraits look super detailed, but in my opinion, they are not as detailed as my paintings are, so it's a way of letting go.

Alison Stewart: Is it scary to you at all?

Kandy G Lopez: No, I love that.

Alison Stewart: You like letting go?

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, I'm just like, "This piece is done. I already have 10 other pieces in my head, so let's go on to the next piece."

Alison Stewart: I would think with the yarn like once it's there, it's there.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, sometimes I cut it up because sometimes it looks a little strange, and I'm like, "I don't like the way this eye looks," so I just end up cutting it and trying it again, and then letting the second time go because I'll just keep cutting it, and the piece will never get done.

Alison Stewart: I want to just circle back to something you said so 12 years old is when you first realized you were an artist?

Kandy G Lopez: No, 12 years old is when I started painting.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Kandy G Lopez: I don't think I realized that this is what I wanted to do until maybe high school, but I didn't see it as like, "Oh, I'm going to become an artist." It was just like, "Oh, I'm really good at this, and this makes me happy," but like every other young kid and their parents, they're just like, "Well, how are you going to make money from that? That's great that you love to paint, but like--

Alison Stewart: How are you going to eat?

Kandy G Lopez: Right. I decided, "Oh, I'm going to go into business" because I thought, "I'll have time to make art and I'll also like be able to make money." I was depressed that year that I didn't take any art classes. That was the worst year but I would still paint. I was outside of my dorm painting. Painting the buildings, painting people coming by and someone stopped by and they're like, "Oh, you're part of the art department?" I was like, "Oh, no, there's an art department?" Then I double majored, so I got my painting BFA and I got my BS in business in marketing and management.

Alison Stewart: Wow. You use both sides of your brain.

Kandy G Lopez: I wanted to get a psychology degree too, but they were like, "Girl, you have too many credits. You got to get out of this school."

Alison Stewart: There's still time. My guest is Kandy G Lopez. The name of the show is Situational Identity, New Works in Fiber. There'll be a reception tomorrow at the ACA gallery from 6:00 to 8:00 PM with Kandy, by the way. Let's talk about some of the pieces. Brooklyn Betty, it's from 2021. She's got hoop earrings, white Nikes, wear a mask, a down jacket. Who is Brooklyn Betty?

Kandy G Lopez: Sometimes I get my inspiration from Instagram. I would say I'm late to the apps or the platforms that are hip to people. I didn't get Facebook till years after. I'm one of those people. I had Instagram. I have friends who I think have swagger. I follow them and then their friends are tagged in their photos and I'm like, "Who is that?"

Alison Stewart: You go down the rabbit hole.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, on Instagram. I'm like, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God." I met Brooklyn Betty through there, and I've done so many pieces of Brooklyn Betty. Thank you, Jesus. I always ask for permission. Can I use your photo? I'm an artist, but we have years now where I've been looking at her images and she was probably the second Instagram person that I fell in love with. Her images are just so fire. Where she gets her clothes from, she's a thrifter as well and she's become so big in her fashion sense. She's a stylist at this point.

Alison Stewart: I'm looking at her and one of the things that's really interesting people will see when they see her face is, to your point about using yarn for people of color, there are maybe six different browns-

Kandy G Lopez: That was one of the first-

Alison Stewart: -to make her face.

Kandy G Lopez: -ones that I did with color. Usually, I've done two that are black and white. I had a residency in Georgia, and I was like, I'm going to try color. Let's see how I feel about these large pieces and colors. Like I mentioned, portrait painting is all about color and how you place color together, and color theory. I think about those things. There wasn't brown yarn like there are for lighter skin tones and I'm like, "I need a fine brown." There were only those six colors of brown. It's not even six. I think there were four back then. Then they have rolls where the colors bleed into each other like four colors bleed into each other.

Alison Stewart: A ombre kind of thing.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes, like ombre. I have to cut them so that I have the ombre colors and separate them which takes time so that I can have a variety of color. Now all of a sudden, there's all kinds of browns. They're called skin tones at Michaels and even then there's three. I'm like, "Yo, there's purple brown, there's blue brown, there's red-brown, there's yellow-brown, there's black brown, there's green brown." There's so many browns that you can create from yarn. I'm like, "Where do I have to go to make my own yarn, to dip my own dyes to make the browns that I need because the details now are becoming a problem for me?"

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kandy G Lopez. We'll talk more with her about her show, Situational Identity, New Works in Fiber after a quick break.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Kandy G Lopez. We're talking about her new solo exhibition at ACA Galleries called Situational Identity, New Works on Fiber. It's on view through October 21st. We were talking about [unintelligible 00:14:54] your precision in your painting and how you've taken that, you've transferred that over into the yarn but there's this one piece which is really interesting and I'm showing you a picture of it now.

It's a woman and she's in a red business suit but we can see that some of the yarn is hanging off of the piece. It's not been woven in and her hair is not completely finished. Tell us a little bit about the unfinished and the raw nature of this one piece when the rest are so completely finished and so detailed.

Kandy G Lopez: This is a part about letting go of certain things and also letting people know that it's yarn because people see them in photographs and they think that they're painting. They're like, "Oh, yes, that's a nice painting." Until you see, "Oh no, it's yarn," and having the ability to just let the yarn flow and sit on the floor and become pools of paint instead of real paint, but it's yarn, I found interesting. There's certain times where I'm working on a piece and I'm like, "I don't need to fill that in because people's brains will fill it in for them." I also think about like, they become political and social issues too about what we do to minorities within this country. It's not just here too, but I'm Dominican.

There's that issue with colorism and otherness within the Caribbean as well and how we're so easily erased. Like a major thing happens, a Black man gets shot or someone gets beat up and it's on video and it's like the thing for a month and then some other thing happens and then that becomes a thing for the month and you forget about well, this is a person's life that has just been forgotten. I talk about those things just a little bit more subtle within the work.

Alison Stewart: There's a piece when you first come in and you look to the left and it's a young man on his back and his sneakers foot is prominent. Tell us a little bit about that piece and why it was one of the ones you wanted up front.

Kandy G Lopez: That's Lamenting Lewis. I am an educator, as you mentioned. I also teach art history. When I was an undergrad, I really wasn't interested in it but as time has progressed, the history of art is extremely important to me. That piece is inspired by Mantegna's lamenting Christ where for the first time in art history, they're thinking about perspective. Within that piece, Jesus's foot is closer to the viewer. It's not mathematically correct but again, they're learning how to do that by that point. For this piece, I had my cousin lay down. His name is Lewis and he's actually coming to the opening, so I'm so excited because I wanted to talk about those kinds of political issues where we have a colored person laying on the floor. Some people think that it looks like he is walking over you and not laying down which is also interesting to me.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Kandy G Lopez: Depending on the person coming into the space and how they see certain things.

Alison Stewart: Even their height could make a difference.

Kandy G Lopez: Correct. Those kinds of things interest me. I also picked monochromatic tones because it also references the monochromatic fleshy tones of Mantegna's paintings. For those paintings, it was more like pinks and yellows and browns. I wanted to go with a different color palette. It's blues and purples and again, browns within that. The background is a really dark dioxazine purple for my painters which is a really hard purple, but the color purple is a religious color. It's like a religious connotation. It's supposed to be royal. I was thinking about religion, political things, even within the beauty of the yarn.

Alison Stewart: When did you become an educator?

Kandy G Lopez: Right after my undergrad, I went to get my master's. In my master's, I was given the opportunity to teach and after I've taught my first introduction to drawing class, I'm like, "Oh, this is it. I want to do this. This makes me happy."

Alison Stewart: What guidance do you see young artists need these days?

Kandy G Lopez: I think that they need representation. They need mentors that look like them. I teach in South Florida, so there's a variety of people there, and being able to see yourself is important. To have people that understand your culture is also important. I remember grad school and talking about swagger and most of my committee members were older and White. This was Boca Raton so they didn't understand what swagger was.

I was just like, "How am I supposed to explain to these people what a swagger?" That was a whole thing for three years [laughter] trying to explain, no, you cannot have a fruit with swagger, bro. These are like people that have it. I think it's important to have people like me [laughs] in those kind of spaces so that the student feels connected, their committee members understand what it is that they're saying or trying to say.

Alison Stewart: Their lived experience.

Kandy G Lopez: Right.

Alison Stewart: In the show, there's an enormous piece in the back. It also seems like it uses repurposed clothing as well.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's Tayina and Jordan?

Kandy G Lopez: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right. Tell us a little bit because-- first of all, what are its dimensions?

Kandy G Lopez: It's 12½ by 7½ feet.

Alison Stewart: 12½ feet by 7½ feet.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes. I'm really short for those that are coming on Thursday. I'm 5 feet so 60 inches straight. [laughter] I have the Napoleon complex so everything needs to be big.

[laughter]. Yes, I use repurposed clothing for the background because I want to talk about the urban spaces, impoverished neighborhoods. I went to a middle and high school that were not in the best locations in Miami. People usually think, oh, Miami and beaches and clubs but the people are not like that that live there. I wanted to commemorate a space or at least an idea of what city looks like. Because I'm from Jersey. I was born in Jersey so I have that cityness within me.

What people ask often, "Where are you from?" Even in Miami, even though I grew up there so it's still in me. I wanted to create this collage background where it's like put together but also falling apart at the same time but also connect that to the people. The power lines being connected to the people are also important because I'm giving the people power within their own space, even though their space is deteriorating, but the space is still part of them.

Alison Stewart: In our last moment, almost every one of these pieces, the eyes-

Kandy G Lopez: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: -look at you, they follow you.

Kandy G Lopez: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How much time do you spend on the eyes?

Kandy G Lopez: A long time. My favorite part and the first thing I do are the eyes because I want it to follow you in the room. I want it to be confrontational but also sweet. There's some people in the space that look at you and you can like, aw, that hurts inside because there's a story behind it. Eyes are extremely important, especially with the history of art as a female.

Alison Stewart: You can see the work of Kandy G Lopez at the ACA Gallery on 10th Avenue. The show is called Situational Identity, New Works in Fiber. There's a reception tomorrow at the gallery from 6:00 to 8:00. Kandy will be there. It is open to the public. Congratulations on your show, Kandy.

Kandy G Lopez: Thank you. Thank you so much.

[laughter]

 

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