SCALING UP

Lucia Hierro’s interest in fabric and felt is matrilineal. Growing up in New York City’s Little Dominican Republic — the diasporic neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood — Hierro spent her childhood watching her mother sew baby-blue drawstring Tiffany bags en masse in their apartment or taking trips with Hierro’s grandmother to buy fabrics at Woolworths. Hierro completed her first hand stitch during her second year at the Yale School of Art, which instigated a decades-long love affair with soft sculpture that brings together her Dominican roots, her playful approach to material, and her preoccupation with our relationship to the objects that surround us.

This persistent sense of item-consciousness recently took on a commercial scale at the Hermès flagship store on the Upper East Side in October: Hierro designed the scenography of the Petit h installation, the brand’s offshoot that asks craftspeople to upcycle remnants of unused Hermès raw materials into new pieces, with a whimsical cityscape littered with plush apple ottomans, street signs redesigned like clothing racks, and milk-crate stools. “Hermès was drawn to Lucia’s work due to her ability to synthesize the iconography of New York streets and neighborhoods,” says Peter Malachi, Head of Communication at the French fashion house. “The ambition for this petit h project was to recreate the experience of strolling through the city; passing by the dry cleaners, stopping into the bodega, browsing a vintage store, picking up produce from the green market. Lucia’s ability to communicate the city’s multi-cultural landscape through her work imparted a vital urgency and pop-art energy to the project creating a dynamic setting for the presentation of petit h objects.”

With works in the permanent collections at the Guggenheim, the Boston MFA, and El Museo del Barrio, among others, Hierro’s sculptures amplify the quotidian, always hyper-cognizant of scale. In her Mercado series (2017–2022), she fuses the pop-art language of Rauschenberg and the oversized replicas of Oldenberg, fashioning large transparent tote bags holding everyday consumer products reflective of Dominican-American life, such as baseball cards and lottery tickets. Her digital prints on fabric from her series Objetos (2020–2023) reference Palmolive soap, Chinese food takeout bags, Tabasco hot sauce, and Goya’s Canilla rice. Her objects are larger-than-life, yet they remain recognizable and imperfect. Instead of deifying commonplace commodities, she draws a scrutinizing eye to them. PIN–UP caught up with the artist to map her relationship to New York, from Madison Avenue to Washington Heights, how capitalism embeds itself within art, and her sustained interest in slang and sound.

Katharina Sauermann: I’d like to start with your connection with fabric and how you started incorporating that into your work. Do you remember the first piece you sewed for yourself?

Lucia Hierro: I think my first memory of textiles is going into a Woolworths with my grandmother when I was four or five years old. It’s a very early sensory memory, because when fabric is stacked and gathers dust, a smell comes with it. She was already sick and must have realized she was leaving this world, so she wanted to pass on her knowledge of fabric and materials to me. I remember her being very strict and telling me to check for details like stains and snags before buying it. We were there to pick out some fabric for my doll’s dress — after my grandmother passed, my mom made my doll’s dresses. My friends who had fancy Barbie dolls with store-bought clothes would say, “Forget the Mattel clothing, your mom is making custom stuff.” We would flip through magazines and tell her which outfits we wanted and she would make all these cute dolls clothes.

When did you start exploring printing on fabric?

My first stitch was a hand stitch for a piece in my second year at Yale. I had wanted to make some collages as studies, but I accidentally ordered felt instead of paper, and I freaked out. Someone advised covering my walls with it, but when I started cutting and pinning it up, it seemed too precarious. I called my mom and she suggested I hand stitch them. At some point, I realized I needed a sewing machine. Shortly after, during a studio visit, I found out about a material that looks like felt but has a paper backing, so you can put it through a digital printer. I started printing out pages of The New Yorker that I liked, and I would highlight or collage right over them, inserting my New York into them. After graduating, I started experimenting with soft sculptures, not just with The New Yorker series, but also printing out images and things that I felt were connected to my culture.

Your works often play on everyday, accessible, found objects. How does this approach subvert the Eurocentric art canon?

In my undergraduate program at SUNY Purchase, my professor and late mentor George Parrino had us create a still life. He told us to choose our objects wisely and let them tell a story. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, I saw so many still lifes everywhere, like a fruit bowl in a restaurant. That brought something up: still life painting is a useful tool, but also history within context. The paintings we studied in my undergrad Dutch Art History Class were of objects that were taken in conquest from the Caribbean. Later at Yale, I took a somewhat revised version of a Caribbean Art History class with Carribean scholar Erica James, where we directly looked at still lifes by artists like Francisco Oller and Jaime Colson. Now this coconut, this plantain, is being painted by a Dominican  artist. What does it mean to take that back? I used to dismiss these artists, thinking they were simply picking up European styles, but I realized how powerful and political those images were.

There’s a beautiful specificity in your work that stems from your personal history, but your pieces also resonate with a broader audience. How do you navigate the balance between deeply personal cultural references and universal resonance?

I always liked those indie slice of life films. I don’t think people realize that the more specific something is, the more relatable it becomes. We’re all just humans who deal with the same things — Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (2023) explores this well. In that same way, I felt so connected to the silly, sad human works of Oldenburg — a soggy cigarette butt or that droopy toilet. They are so human. We all have to sit on a toilet. We all have to use a refrigerator. It’s about reflecting on the monotony of survival. The more specific one gets, the less it’s about a performance of identity and more about implicating the viewer. I’m implicating myself, too.

Your contribution to the exhibition YES, CHEF at WSA in October 2024 portrays consumer culture through the medium of food. What do food systems and consumerism mean in the context of your work?

It’s the history of the world. You can capture the nuance of society through what we consume: music, visual culture, food. Take Dominican food. Everything is embedded in that food. It tells the story of the Dominican Republic’s relationship to its neighbor Haiti and to the Afro-Atlantic slave trade. In New York, it tells a history of migration and of what remains. I remember something Robert France Thompson said about the Afro-Atlantic slave trade: “we focus on what's lost, and not what remains.” What remains is the real story, because, holy crap, against all odds, it’s still here, right? When a 13-year-old on Dyckman Street chooses to eat rice and beans instead of pizza or a burger, that’s what I think of.

It’s very interesting how materiality influences scale in your work. You often blow up food objects, like takeout bags or grocery items, whether through murals or even soft sculptures. Can you explain what scale means to your work?

Scale is really important to my work because in trying to monumentalize an object, it almost fails to happen. It’s not quite that grand, you know? It’s not a giant sugar sphynx — it’s just a four foot tall sculpture of a Domino sugar bag. It’s not quite there. That “almost there” quality is really important to the work. Economists talk about “scaling up.” If you break “scale” down etymologically, you’ll find definitions over time: scale as imbalance, scale as the process of divvying something up.

Is there any object that was very present in your childhood that you’d like to blow up?

The Café Bustelo object is an interesting one because I didn’t want to make it — it seemed too obvious. But that red rubber band wrapped around the bag — that made sense. Every time I went to my mom’s house, I saw her do that little gesture, wrapping the bag to save the leftover.

The Hermès collaboration was almost an experiment in scaling down. You tried to pack New York City into a showroom without losing all of its specificity, like the tiles in Central Park. It’s the first project that you did scenography for. How did you design a set that would do that while highlighting the Petit h artisans’ work?

This project is about the things that disappear and become backdrops, things that are so ubiquitous that we tend not to really think about them, like bodegas. The history of bodegas is a story of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and New York. If they were so important and so quintessential to this city, you would think that the people behind them are also. Everything gets glossed over.

Do you have a favorite logo?

There’s a chocolate brand called Embajador, which is the earliest packaged and branded product that came out of the Dominican Republic. I grew up seeing that box. It was so elegant and had such a classic feel to it. In terms of American logos, nothing will ever top FedEx. That’s why I kept it simple with the Hermès space, because the signage is clever enough. We replaced the Central Park horse and carriage with the Hermès logo, and it works because it has those visual references.

Is there any particular technology you are interested in working with?

I want to get better with printing on certain surfaces. There’s so much new technology that I found out about working with Spacecraft, the company that fabricated most of this Hermès project. They have large printers — it directly prints on an object and maps it. There are also larger CNC cutters and different substrates that you can put into 3D printers now, which are fascinating. I want to work more with that industrial material. One gets tired of working with something soft. Now, I want to work with something like steel. On the Hermès project, we mostly went with hard surfaces and architecture because I wanted the emphasis to be on the artisans’ work — I’m just presenting it.

Is there any art medium you secretly love but have never incorporated into your practice?

I’m very into billboards and signage. There’s a work by Rauschenberg called The ¼ Mile that I saw at LACMA. It’s been installed very few times, and it’s such a cacophonous installation. You can see he was just making major connections about world politics, color, and form. Billboards and flashy image culture is the reason why we over-consume. I want to explore that overconsumption in my work. Architecture has evolved from and in the service of advertising, so I want to work on telling that story.

I know your art is also influenced by music and language, things that are not necessarily visual culture. What role does sound and the mixture of languages like English and Spanish play in your work?

Sound became a part of my practice only a few years ago. My brother is a Grammy Award-winning producer, and we did a joint project. He was the one who arranged it. I edited it with him, but he knows all the technology. For the Hermès installation, I wanted to include the cacophony of sounds that exist uptown, so I walked around the Bronx and Inwood and recorded what I heard: ice being scraped off a windshield, all the overlapping music blasting from each car and street corner, and Dominican slang. As for language, when I title a piece, I’m really intentional about when I title something in English or Spanish. I’m very much against this whole narrative that “Spanish is the colonizer's language.” Not anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Spanish, as it exists now, is very much an innovation of Black and Indigenous people. We co-opted it and made it our own. It’s a beautiful story of history and humor. 

What are you working on next?

I’m working on another sound project now with the evangelical folks that stand on street corners in New York. I want to think more about music. Music is just like food; way more nuanced than people even know, with histories of rhythms, patterns, and note configurations. It is based on a beautiful relationship because it is based on shared history. There are some things that can’t be pillaged — they have to be shared.