September 13-November 15, Th-S 11 am-5 pm
Opening Reception: Sep 13th 4-6 pm
Strange Forest, a solo exhibition by Diana Guerrero-Maciá, presents a poignant and tactile body of work exploring abstraction as a vessel for memory, migration, and material histories. Guerrero-Maciá’s hybrid textile-collage paintings blur the boundaries between painting and textiles, between the personal and the political, between past and future.
Rooted in quilt-making traditions and infused with the language of post-painterly abstraction, Guerrero-Maciá’s new works are meticulously stitched, cut, dyed, and composed from collected textiles and hand-dyed fabrics. Many originate from recycled or sourced materials and imagery, repurposed to build what the artist calls “new unpainted pictures.” Using traditional quilt blocks like the Nine Patch, Flying Geese, and Solomon’s Puzzle, Guerrero-Maciá reshapes and disorients their patterns, creating windows into a landscape that is both quiet and chaotic, structured yet deeply emotive.
“Strange Forest” refers not only to the organic and galactic imagery — clouds that become moons, trees from Sea Ranch, France and Cuba — but to the larger question of how we situate ourselves in a world shaped by climate, displacement, and collective memory. Guerrero-Maciá speaks through color and composition, developing a visual rhythm tied to the cadence of sunrise and sunset, guided by an intimate palette of hand-dyed dawns and dusks. The scale of her works — based on the California King bed —further emphasizes the body’s role in the work: these pieces are both seen and felt.
Highlights of the exhibition include Glasier no. 2, a riff on the Log Cabin quilt block reimagined as a luminous architectural window; Clouds no. 2, an expansive work where hexagons from a past project float like cosmic way finders; and Parlay, where the language of peace treaties meets the tactile symbolism of patchwork. Works from the Nomad (Nomad no. 1 & Nomad no. 2) series navigate questions of migration, using abstraction as a means of holding history — buttons, driftwood, and scraps become markers of movement and memory.
In this body of work as in her larger practice, abstraction is never empty. Guerrero-Maciá confronts the legacies of exclusion in modernist art histories, reclaiming color, texture, and pattern as legitimate carriers of meaning. “My work is informed by humanity and brings the language of the personal,” she notes, “as a radical way of exploring the existing world.” Working from an archive of material collected and a dye palette developed over the course of her career, each element carries a story: worn clothing, army blankets and deadstock wool all have histories and evoke the human presence — a memory of touch, loss, or belonging.
Drawing from her family’s exile from Cuba and a life lived between cultural and geographic borders, Guerrero-Maciá challenges viewers to rethink the grid, to feel the weight of abstraction, and to engage with the picture plane. Strange Forest is a quiet, radical space — one of beauty, resistance, and care.
This exhibition opens in timely dialogue with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s landmark exhibition, Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, running concurrently. Together, these exhibitions celebrate and critically expand the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of textile-based abstraction and quilt-making in California and beyond.
Diana Guerrero-Maciá lives and works in Chicago, IL where she is a Presidential Professor at the School of the Art Institute. She is a 2023 Lenore Tawney Fellow, 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow. Guerrero-Maciá’s artworks are held in multiple collections both public and private. She has exhibited extensively at noted public institutions including the Kohler Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Pace San Antonio, Elmhurst Art Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago and the Crocker Museum of Art. She is an alumnus of Skowhegan School of Painting & Drawing, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Penland School of Craft, and Villanova University. She has also created multiple public art commissions for the Public Art Fund, NYC, and the City of Chicago.