Memory is not static. It drifts, erodes, and reappears in unexpected ways. For contemporary artists like Lisu Vega, Amanda Linares, and Cornelius Tulloch, memory is a living material: something to preserve, reconstruct, and share. Together, these artists, featured in the 2025 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art, demonstrate how family and community histories and place influence our sense of belonging.
Lisu Vega: Reweaving What Time Takes Away
For Venezuelan-born, Miami-based artist Lisu Vega, remembering is an act of devotion. Her textile and installation work, The tree of my memories, rises like a monument: a towering woven interpretation of her grandmother’s white chair, which still sits under the mango tree at the heart of Vega’s childhood home. When her grandmother passed away, Vega turned to her practice to hold onto that connection. Unable to return to Venezuela safely, she commissioned photos of her grandmother’s home, printed them on fabric and unraveled rope material, and stitched them together with connecting threads, echoing the fragmented, delicate nature of memory.
Vega’s body of work shows that threads and ropes serve as metaphors for family ties across borders and generations. The installations such as Las raíz que abraza tu casa are almost portals into another world, textured and immersive, celebrating everything from loss to resilience and the stories that bind us inextricably together. Each twist and turn compels the audience to acknowledge that even acts of nourishment, such as her grandmother teaching her how to make clothes for her doll, export love through time.
Amanda Linares: Sediments of Belonging
Amanda Linares, Cuban-born and Miami-based, also mines family history for inspiration. Her immersive installation, “Yo vengo de todas partes, y hacia todas partes voy,” titled after a line by poet José Martí, invites us to consider how identity is layered and shifting. A large graphite drawing of her great-grandfather’s home in Spain anchors the work, but parts have been carved away, leaving absences that speak to memory’s imperfections. These missing pieces reappear as sculptural “sediments,” layered with concrete, fabric, and resin, materials that evoke the feeling of artifacts unearthed from a buried past.
Linares uses soil in varying hues throughout the installation to imply cultural cross-fading and a softening of harsh borders. As she walks through the works in her performances, histories meld, and identities become one. Even in the designs of her smaller pieces, like Epígrafe, she recalls the tiles from her childhood home of Havana, a revelation she learned of herself only recently, a nod to how deeply rooted memories resurface through art.
Cornelius Tulloch: Dwelling in the In-Between
For Miami-based artist and trained architect Cornelius Tulloch, memory lives in the walls and landscapes we inhabit. His large-scale installation, Porch Passages: Creole Collage, transforms a shotgun house, a familiar form in the American South and Caribbean, into a sanctuary of stories. Archival photographs adorn weathered walls, not as decoration but as living testimony to Black life in Florida. Each portrait merges with the lush tropical environment, recalling how Maroon communities found refuge in the land.
Tulloch’s works draw from his Jamaican and African American roots alongside the layered background of the Everglades and Caribbean. In his painted portraits, people appear and disappear in the foliage, not in a ghostly manner, but as camouflaged in order to survive, an homage to the adaption and resilience of ancestors. In addition, by collaging archival images into his composition, Tulloch demonstrates that architectural culture is also imbued with memory, a relic that holds hidden meaning in plain sight.
Honoring the Stories We Carry
Across fiber, soil, and space, the works of Lisu Vega, Amanda Linares, and Cornelius Tulloch express the fleeting nature of memory and the lasting resonance it has with our present existence. Each work is a gift to memorialize, reflect upon, and celebrate the legacies that shape our identity.
