Installation with wire, papier-mâché, found furniture, digital mixed-media collage on Café Bustelo, chains, faux ivy, foam, acrylic paint and found items (beads, aluminum foil of Modelo beers, ashes of palo santo, dried flower petals, dandelion petals and seeds) with a written scroll in glass jars
2021
Wave Hill, Bronx, NY

Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Photo: Stefan Hagen

Katherine Miranda draws from their Mexican, Puerto Rican and American heritage to investigate personal and collective experiences as a non-binary Latinx artist based in the Bronx. Inspired by their familial and ancestral history, most notably their maternal grandparents’ love story, Miranda’s mixed-media installation combines found and recycled objects to transform the Sun Porch into a reverential space for contemplation and remembrance. The title of the exhibition, I Answer Back, is derived from the lyric “Mi Abuelita Me Contesto (My Grandmother Answered Me),” from “Café (Coffee)” by Eddie Palmieri, a song Miranda’s paternal grandfather loved. Begun during the Winter Workspace, I Answer Back is an amalgam of personal narratives conflating past with present, and reality with desire, as the artist explores longing, loss and hope.

During the Winter Workspace, Miranda developed an affinity for the Chinese wisteria outside Glyndor Gallery. Planted more than a century ago, it survived a fire in 1926, and now surrounds the southwest corner of the Sun Porch. As a symbolic representation of love, wisdom and longevity in East Asian cultures, Miranda relates the wisteria to their grandparents’ enduring adoration for each other. The installation consists of suspended, branch-like, papier-mâché sculptures made from homemade paper pulp that was dyed using coffee grounds. Hanging from the branches are “wish jars” containing dried petals, dandelion seeds, beads, ashes from Palo Santo and a scroll with a wish written to their ancestors. Facing the sculptures is an upcycled couch transformed into a throne. It is covered with faux ivy and paper made using personal notes to the artist’s ancestors. Secured to the couch is a framed, digital, mixed-media collage of their grandfather’s nuclear family. This family portrait is both a meditation on loss and a dream, as their grandfather did not live long enough to know some of the family members digitally placed next to him in the photograph.

Miranda pays homage to their ancestors through various rituals of communication and mediums. Through the works in I Answer Back, Miranda attempts to insert themselves and effectively answer back, continuing the conversation with their grandparents and their legacy. After the exhibition closes, Miranda will move the organic materials to Wave Hill’s compost pile, allowing those elements that make up this installation to decompose and nourish the garden—continuing the cycles of time in a reciprocal exchange of energy.

- curator: Eileen Jeng Lynch