INTERTWINED NARRATIVES: CASSANDRA MAYELA ALLEN EXHIBITS IN NEW YORK
The Venezuelan artist presents a body of work at the Instituto Cervantes in New York that stems from a desire to create from the distance imposed by forced migration.
The Instituto Cervantes in New York presents until June 28, 2026, Aquel Amplex, the first institutional exhibition of work by Venezuelan artist Cassandra Mayela Allen, curated by Fabiola R. Delgado and Carlos Núñez.
In the show the artist steps back to examine her process-driven textile practice within the legacies of Venezuelan and Latin American modernism and informalism, interrogating the circumstances of her self-taught approach. Amassing two years of communally woven braids, Aquel Amplex evolves in a spatial and personal exploration that casts, in its collective materiality, an infinite outward net.
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Cassandra Mayela Allen. Por aquí venden barbacoa, 2026. Color pencil on paper, 25 x 22”. Photo: Carlos Núñez. Courtesy of Instituto Cervantes New York
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Cassandra Mayela Allen. Hazme de todo menos daño, 2026. Oil pastels and acrylic on wood panel, 30 x 40”. Photo: Carlos Núñez. Courtesy of Instituto Cervantes New York
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Cassandra Mayela Allen. Premeditada y Divina, 2026. Oil pastels and acrylic on wood panel, 16 x 20”. Photo: Carlos Núñez. Courtesy of Instituto Cervantes New York
Aquel Amplex—“that embrace”—derives from a 1969 letter written by Hélio Oiticica to Lygia Clark, when both Brazilian artists lived in exile. The phrase bears a protest longing to create from the distance of forced migration. For Mayela Allen, it becomes a means to activate her inherently collaborative work to deconstruct her national and artistic heritage, with the embrace as genesis for a new narrative of Venezuela.
Paintings and drawings explore the enduring modernism that reached Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s under a right-wing dictatorship, importing from the United States and Europe forms and ideals disconnected from local social realities. Braided sculptures respond from a Latin American lineage of disruptive, corporeal experimentation. Here, Mayela Allen expands her textile practice from the artisanal to the architectural, fracturing space and the façade of a modernist Venezuela, and materially reshaping their conception. Braiding gatherings transform a set of flags from the Instituto Cervantes into a new work of union, seeking not a utopian “activation,” but a welcoming into the artist’s way of existing: inhabiting the constant political acts of conversation, memory, community, and reinvention.
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Cassandra Mayela Allen. Aquel Amplex, 2024-2026. Found fabrics and garments, braided collectively, Dimensions vary. Photo: Camilo Fuentealba. Courtesy of Instituto Cervantes New York
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Cassandra Mayela Allen. Aquel Amplex, 2026. Photo: Camilo Fuentealba. Courtesy of Instituto Cervantes New York
With Aquel Amplex, the Instituto Cervantes inaugurates its initiative Spring at Amster Yard, an annual exhibition dedicated to an emerging New York-based artist.
Cassandra Mayela Allen is a self-taught artist based in New York City, where she’s lived since her forced migration from Venezuela in 2014. Working across mixed media, textiles, installation, and socially engaged practices, her work explores memory and forms of belonging shaped by migration and collective care. Her practice often unfolds through collaborative processes that position art as a space of encounter, rather than a fixed object.
