El Sofá

About the exhibition:

This work began with a concept I couldn’t stop thinking about: What is lost when a family chooses survival over closeness? As a queer Puerto Rican raised in the diaspora, I’ve spent much of my life navigating the quiet spaces between inheritance and assimilation, belonging and unbelonging. El Sofá: Sitting in Discomfort is a response to that tension; a tactile archive stitched with the fragments of memory, myth, and identity that I’ve had to piece together on my own.

The piece was born from a childhood memory: My grandmother’s plastic-covered sofa in our Brooklyn apartment. She lived upstairs from us and I remember her without clarity just echos, loud, animated, always speaking Spanish. But to me, as a child raised to speak only English, she sounded like she spoke in code. I didn’t understand her. I never got to know her stories, her personality, her history. That distance wasn’t accidental, it was a sacrifice. Like many children of immigrants, my parents chose assimilation over connection, hoping to protect us. But that choice also created a barrier between generations, language, and self.

This sofa holds that contradiction. Its embroidered surface tells stories of queerness, Puerto Rican folklore, fragmented memory, and quiet resilience. Every stitch is a small act of remembering and of mourning. The motifs are personal and cultural, mapped out on an object that is both ordinary and sacred, domestic and symbolic.

Wrapping the sofa in plastic, just like my grandmother did, is familiar to many of this experience. It acts as both preservation and suffocation. It protects the stories embroidered into the fabric, but also keeps them at a distance. You can’t touch them without feeling the barrier. It asks: what do we lose when we try to protect what’s ours?

To sit on this sofa is to sit in that discomfort, to feel what it means to live between worlds. Diaspora, like queerness, is not a fixed identity but a state of becoming, of returning, of translating what was never fully passed down. This piece is a document of that process.

A protest. A prayer. A declaration that says:

We are here. We have always been here. Even if you covered us up.

El Sofá will be on view in Gallery 2 at Da Vinci Art Alliance October 1 through October 19 with an opening reception on October 4th from 4-7pm.

Richie Wilde Lopezi on “El Sofá”

“For me, this show brings to light what so many of us live every day. How our past, family, and upbringing shape who we are, creating a shared experience that binds us. Whether we live between two homelands or come from one place, many of us have known what it feels like to never fully belong. The sofa is at its heart just a piece of furniture, but it’s also a symbol of home, of the domestic space where our true family life isn’t hidden. In the safety of home, things are expressed openly, where stories, traditions, struggles, and celebrations happen.

By bringing this couch into a public space, I want to disrupt the boundary between private and public, between what is often kept hidden and what demands to be seen. The plastic covering, both protective and suffocating, reminds us that preservation can come with barriers. It holds memories safe but also keeps them at a distance, just like the way our own histories and identities can feel protected yet constrained by the forces around us. Through the time and care of embroidery, these stories become visible acts of resistance and remembrance—threads of resilience stitched into the fabric of our lives.

Ultimately, I hope when people sit with this work, they remember that their stories hold power. That their histories, no matter how complicated, are part of a larger tapestry of community and identity. And that in sharing these stories, we create strength, belonging, and a louder, clearer voice.”

ABOUT THE FeATURED ARTISTS

Richie López is a Queer Puerto Rican textile artist based in Philadelphia. Raised primarily in New York, with formative early years in Puerto Rico, he developed a deep connection to storytelling as a vessel for cultural memory and identity.

He studied creative writing on scholarship at a private college in Massachusetts, where language became his first creative tool. Though always drawn to visual art, writing offered a foundational way to make sense of the world, an influence that continues to shape his textile practice. Today, Richie’s work merges narrative and fiber, weaving together personal and collective histories through embroidery and handweaving.

After college, Richie explored various creative and community-focused roles before discovering embroidery, which became a transformative and grounding medium. He later taught himself to weave and pursued further training through workshops and hands-on mentorship, building a strong technical foundation through self-guided study.

His current practice explores themes of memory, identity, and cultural preservation. Through textiles, Richie honors queer and ancestral stories, positioning fabric as both archive and altar, sites for holding, protecting, and transmitting the narratives that shape us.

ABOUT Michelle Angela Ortiz Track

Named after Michelle Angela Ortiz and her 25+ years of work in our neighborhood using art as a vehicle to represent people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. This Fellowship track provides an opportunity for one artist/curator to explore personal narratives of marginalized identities by engaging with local communities to examine, explore, and challenge Euro-centric narratives through an exhibition and related programming.