- November 7 to 10, 2024
Aurora Molina was born in La Havana, Cuba, in 1984. She emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, where she opted to pursue an education in art. Molina received her Associates of Arts in Visual Arts from Miami Dade College, a Bachelors in Fine Arts specializing in Mixed Media from Florida International University and Master Degree in Contemporary Art at the Universidad Europea de Madrid completed in 2009.
She currently resides in Miami, Florida, where she works as a full time artist, represented since 2011 by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. Using the tools of embroidery, sculpture-making, drawing, photography, and video, she uses the potential of fiber art to communicate ideas about social and political issues.
Her multifaceted platform provides a sustained and powerful critique of a society that “dismisses” the most vulnerable as they become invisible and hidden from everyday life. My early work is concerned with the objectification of beauty and the growing anonymity of the elderly in our society. I believe a clear connection exists between the media-fueled manipulation, edification and standardization of physical beauty and the increasing denial of the actual process of physical aging.
To be old today is to slowly become invisible. My work is, in many ways, a critique of this postmodern iconography as it attempts to highlight not only the natural process of aging but society’s concomitant refusal to recognize it as such. My pieces attempt to draw attention to the ways in which this self-absorption is encouraged by an unfettered individualism which unchallenged serves only to fracture family ties, friendships, and the larger social consciousness, creating an awkward integration when the individual no longer conforms to the established standards.
I examine this growing need to connect by focusing on individual narratives. Whereas society has slowly created “fictions” and “virtual realities” to replace the real, I instead direct the spectator’s attention to the everyday real happenings of ordinary lives.
Using the tools of embroidery, sculpture-making, drawing, photography, and video, she uses the potential of fiber art to communicate ideas about social and political issues. Her multifaceted platform provides a sustained and powerful critique of a society that “dismisses” the most vulnerable as they become invisible and hidden from everyday life. With a commitment to Advanced Fiber Art in Miami, Molina is a co-founder of FAMA, Fiber Artists-Miami Association a newly artist collaborative that builds community through textiles and weaves Miami together.