Exhibition - Global Spotlight: Tactics for Remembering

Featured artists: Amalia Caputo, Reynier Leyva Novo, and Lisu Vega in collaboration with Carlos Pedreañez

In the face of migration, political rupture, and cultural erasure, Tactics for Remembering  invites viewers to reflect on the notion of home as a fluid and emotional space-shaped by memory, by the body, and by absence. It reflects on how we anchor ourselves to the world through the repetition of gestures, the intimacy of objects, and the spaces we try to recreate even when we are far from where we began.

Conceived as part of MoCA Arlington’s Global Spotlight series, the exhibition intentionally “bends the frame,” expanding the lens beyond national boundaries toward an affective geography: Cuba-Zuela. This neologism recognizes a historical and cultural kinship between Cuba and Venezuela, two nations bound by the Caribbean Sea, marked by parallel struggles, and linked by two sister diasporas. The sea –a body that simultaneously connects and separates– becomes a symbolic axis in the exhibition: connecting people on “the other side of the water” and holding within its cyclical tides stories of power, migration, survival, and rebirth. Through this grouping, the exhibition resists narrow nation-based curatorial models and instead honors the porousness of Caribbean identity and the solidarities born out of necessity and generosity.

The artists featured in the exhibition build a visual language rooted in memory’s material and immaterial dimensions. They work with personal archives, domestic objects, architectural references, and embodied gestures to evoke their sense of self. Memory here is not static, but in vulnerable motion. It lives in a grandmother’s weaving technique, in an imagined building, in a vase that remembers the shape of its emptiness. Together, they map emotional territories that transcend borders and statehood, and embrace the radical tenderness found in holding memory alive. The artists insist on presence, ultimately sharing stories not of what we’ve lost, but what we carry.

Global Spotlight: Tactics for Remembering is organized by Fabiola R. Delgado, Guest Curator

About the Artists

Amalia Caputo (born Caracas, Venezuela, 1964) is a Venezuelan American visual artist, art historian, educator, and researcher. Her practice involves photography, video, and installation, exploring the role of visual culture in shaping archives and memory. Caputo’s work reflects on human and natural experiences, the symbolic significance of photography, visual archive construction, and complexities of memory. Recent explorations include permeable landscapes, the natural world, photography in the digital age, historical omissions, and the creation of women-related cosmologies.

Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the Deering Estate (Miami, FL), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Venezuela), The Baker Museum (Naples, FL), MiFa Miami, and ModA Curations (New York, NY). Recent awards include the Corral & Cathers Artist Grant, Miami Individual Artist Grant, Ellies Creator Award, Red Bull Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. Her work is in collections including Miami International Airport, Fundación Banco Mercantil (Venezuela), Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection (Miami), Galería de Arte Nacional (Venezuela), the Museum of Latin American Art (Los Angeles, CA), among others. She’s a PhD candidate in Art History at the Humanities and Communication Department at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain. Caputo holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and a MFA in Studio Art and Photography from New York University’s dual program with the International Center of Photography. Caputo lives and works in Miami.

Reynier Leyva Novo (born Havana, Cuba, 1983) is a conceptual artist and activist based in Houston, Texas. His multidisciplinary practice explores the symbolic weight of power, memory, and ideology through historically grounded, research-driven works. Combining installation, sculpture, painting, digital media, and data systems, Novo examines how invisible forces—political, spiritual, economic, and environmental—materialize in public space and collective memory. His projects emerge from long-term investigations and collaborations with historians, scientists, programmers, conservators, perfumers, military analysts, and communities.

In 2022, Novo received the Pommery Prize at The Armory Show for What it is, what it has been, a layered meditation on political symbols and their material decay. He has participated in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), Shanghai Biennale (2017), Aichi Triennale (2019), FotoFest Biennial (2022), and 00 Havana Biennial (2018). His work is held in public collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Walker Art Center, MFA Houston, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Phoenix Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum, AGO, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. For Novo, art is not a mirror but a tool—cutting through ideological sediment to make space for friction, doubt, and re-reading. Not to echo the past, but to look again—differently.

Lisu Vega (born Miami, FL, 1980; raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, migration, memory, and sustainability through material-driven processes. Trained as a printmaker and raised in a family of seamstresses, Vega uses fiber, photography, sculpture, and installation to memorialize personal and collective histories. Her practice is deeply informed by her Wayuu heritage –particularly its ancient weaving traditions– and by the early influence of her grandmother, who taught her to sew with fabric scraps as a child.

Vega’s art is a labor-intensive meditation on the emotional landscapes of displacement and transformation. The textiles in her work aren’t just recycled, but they hold the feel and weight of memory and care. Weaving, for Vega, is both a form of storytelling and a ritual of healing. By engaging the tactile qualities of fiber and the body, she creates spaces where loss is acknowledged and continuity is imagined.

Vega’s work has been exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, FL) as part of the 2025 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art; the CICA Museum (Gimpo-si, South Korea); Pinta Miami Art Fair; The Frank Art Gallery (Pembroke Pines, FL); Clandestina Art Fair (Miami, FL); Kates-Ferri Projects (New York, NY); Spellerberg Projects (Lockhart, TX); Edge Zones (Miami, FL). Vega is based in Miami, FL.

Carlos Pedreáñez (born Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1981) is a multimedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice bridges traditional visual arts with contemporary digital media. His work spans VJ-ing, reactive/procedural visuals, and immersive environments for music performances, installations, and festivals.

Pedreáñez began his artistic formation at the Fundación Instituto de Expresión y Creatividad (FIDEC), where he studied visual, corporal, and literary expression. Collaboration is central to his practice, and he’s worked with Lisu Vega on DREAM ART at the 2024 Clandestina Art Fair in Miami, fusing her textiles with his audiovisual content to create a multisensory environment. His work has been exhibited across The Americas and Europe, including the Universidad del Zulia (Maracaibo, Venezuela); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Maracaibo, Venezuela); the Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez (Venezuela); the Memorial da América Latina (Brazil); Estação da Luz in São Paulo (Brazil); the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium); the University of Bucharest (Romania); the Prague International Triennial of Graphic Arts (Czech Republic); and the Argentine Biennial of Latin American Graphics (Argentina). He’s currently based in São Paulo, Brazil.

About the Curator

Fabiola R. Delgado (b. Cabimas, Venezuela 1990) is an independent curator and creative producer based in Washington DC. A former Human Rights lawyer and political asylum seeker from Venezuela, she brings a deeply personal lens to her work, and channels her commitment to justice through artistic and cultural experiences. Recognizing storytelling as the essence of her practice, she develops socially engaged projects that recenter perspectives and foster intergenerational creative learning. Her work spans exhibitions, scholarship, editorial projects, and public programming for all ages.

Delgado is a recipient of the first National Leaders of Color Fellowship (a collaborative program from the six U.S. Regional Arts Organizations,) as well as a Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her practice bridges formal and alternative art spaces, working with a wide range of institutions-from major museums like the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, National Museum of American History, Brooklyn Museum, and Smart Museum of Art, to experimental and public art initiatives including Washington Project for the Arts, Times Square Arts, Transformer, apexart, Foggy Bottom Biennial, and the FUNDRED Project by MacArthur “Genius” Mel Chin. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, BmoreArt Magazine, Artishock Magazine, Arte al Día, and Intervenxions by The Latinx Project at NYU, among other publications.

Location: Truland And Experimental Galleries, Lower Level