Apuntalados — Yanira Lopez & Alexis Oliva

Baker—Hall Gallery is thrilled to announce Apuntalados, a two-person exhibition featuring South Florida–based artists Yanira Lopez and Alexis Oliva. Taking its title from the Spanish word for “shored up”—a term used to describe structures propped with temporary supports to prevent collapse—the exhibition presents works that reflect on resilience, memory, and the architectural and emotional frameworks that hold us together, even as they begin to deteriorate.

Both artists, born in Havana and now living in South Florida, engage with themes of cultural inheritance and the shifting landscapes of place and identity. Within these respective series—rooted in thread-based wall works and geometric abstraction—converge a shared inquiry into the structural and psychological supports that persist in the face of personal and societal transformation. Together, their works speak to the fragility of shelter, the textures of memory, and the quiet strength embedded in rebuilding.

Yanira Lopez is a multidisciplinary artist whose intricate, thread-based compositions draw from her Caribbean upbringing and experience as a political refugee. Her recent works are inspired by the colorful mosaics and tiled floors of buildings in Havana, Miami, and Mexico City—architectural motifs that serve as vessels of both personal and collective memory. Lopez meticulously builds her pieces thread by thread, creating rhythmic surfaces that echo the vibrancy and complexity of place. This series acts as a personal archive, preserving disappearing cultural spaces while drawing attention to the effects of power and gentrification in urban life.

Alexis Oliva’s work engages with modernist abstraction and the formal language of Cuban graphic design from the 1960s and ’70s, reimagined through a contemporary lens. In his series Apuntalados, he responds to the precarious apartment buildings in Havana—structures braced by wooden supports to prevent collapse—as potent metaphors for human endurance. Working in a poster-like style, Oliva translates these physical interventions into abstract compositions that suggest emotional scaffolding. By reassigning the function of everyday objects, he imbues them with spiritual weight and explores the quiet rituals through which we assign meaning, create refuge, and shape reality amid instability.