Beyond the Veil
Beyond the Veil marks the first exhibition at Mindy Solomon Gallery of Miami-based artists Pangea Kali Virga, Andrea Spiridonakos, and Lisu Vega, curated by Sophia Ballesteros. Bringing together three distinct textile practices, the exhibition considers cloth as both object and conduit, capable of carrying memories that extend beyond a single body or lifetime. Through processes of felting, weaving, stitching, and assemblage, each artist engages fiber not only as material, but also as a structure to record inheritance and reflection.
At the center of the exhibition, Andrea Spiridonakos creates a sense of ascension with an twenty-foot hand-painted silk swath shifting from the ground upwards, adorned in colors of turquoise, pink, and red. The silk becomes a metaphorical veil between Heaven and Earth as one walks below the drapery, illuminated from above by the natural skylights of the gallery space. The title wall holds two felt archways, one of which depicts a rocky passage opening onto an expanse of deep blue sky and a soft pink horizon line. The title of this work, Ad Te Solo (2026), references The Canticle of the Creatures by St. Francis of Assisi (1225), a poem praising God through the personification of the natural world, including “Brother Wind and Air,” “Sister Earth,” and later “Sister Death, from whose embrace no mortal can escape.” Across these works, the felt becomes a slow accumulation of gesture with simultaneous surrender. There is a peacefulness captured within the bright, scenic, colors of Spiridonakos’ work, complemented by the softness of her choice materials.
For Lisu Vega, weaving and stitching become acts of remembrance. Her central installation is Tan Cerca (So Close) (2022–2026), a work in which the image of her late grandmother, “Yiya,” emerges through a series of textile transfers stitched together with waxed thread. Taking the form of a hammock, the work recalls memories of being gently rocked beneath the branches of a mango tree. Using vertically paralleled mirrors above and below, the hammock is transformed into a vessel for both nostalgia and grief. Vega further emphasizes the loss of her grandmother in Tarde o temprano siempre llega (Sooner or Later, It Always Comes) (2026), a wall-work made up of stitched and woven black rope lying stark against the white wall. The labor of repair (and healing) is also considered in Vega’s wall-works, which have a habit of growing in size in the studio, yet, in the gallery hang frozen in time.
Constructed from materials sourced from community swaps and family heirlooms, as well as up-cycled fashion waste, each panel of Pangea Kali Virga’s triptych carries its own symbolic constellation, representing past, present, and future, respectively: History Will Always Find You and Wrap You in Its Thousand Arms (2023), I Watch the Illusion With Unbearable Compassion (2022), and Behold I Show You a Mystery (2026). Together, these tapestries view history as something continually active, reflecting on the roles that “ancestral stories, genetics, childhood, and existence through experience” play in shaping the moment. In these works, inevitability is in the balance — seen precisely in the 2023 panel imagery of a spun thread dangling between the arms of beaded scissors.
In Beyond the Veil, the three artists represent textiles as a threshold condition rather than a static form. Between Kali Virga’s observations of conception, love, and destiny, Vega’s memorial of her grandmother and persistence through heartbreak, and Spiridonakos’ release to something greater than oneself, each artist brings life into the exhibition through the lens of passage. Through their works, there is a strong sense that what appears to fade away does not vanish, but rather gets threaded into the next iteration of existence.
About the Artists
Pangea Kali Virga was born and raised in New York and lives and works in Miami, FL.
Social responsibility and environmentalism is pivotal to her art, as she attempts to communicate urgent, difficult messages in beautiful and fun ways through narrative layered fiber art works, dramatic experiential art and performance, free and public sustainable art and skills workshops, and other collaborative projects with public and private institutions.
Pangea has dedicated herself to helping transform the art and fashion industry to be a more sustainable and equitable one, creating art and wearables out of up-cycled materials and nature using zero waste practices, supporting her belief in the power of art and clothing as storyteller, cultural marker, and political catalyst. Outside of her core practice, Kali Virga is a sustainability advocate and lecturer, arts event producer, and educator to hundreds of student artists of all ages.
The artist has been showcased in over 60 international publications, exhibited in over a dozen exhibitions including solo shows at the Deering Estate (2025), Miami Beach Botanical Garden (2021), group shows at Green Space (2023+2024), CAMP Gallery (2024), and MOCA (2022+2023), has been awarded multiple grants and residencies, including, but not limited to the Knight Art Champion Grant (2022); Foundation House Residency (2025), Deering Estate Artists in Residence (2023+2024), ProjectArt Residency (2021-2023), Peter Bullough Foundation Residency (2023), Miami Dade Individual Artist Grant (2022+2023+2024) and the first Community Advocate Award for the annual Zero Waste Miami Coalition Awards. Pangea Kali Virga is a current Artist in Residence at Oolite Arts.
Andrea Spiridonakos (b. Winsted, CT) is a fiber artist and experimental designer based in Miami Beach. She has exhibited work internationally at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France, in collaboration with the Métiers d’Arts CHANEL and in solo shows at Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island (2024); Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami, FL (2023); Miami Design District (2022) and the Coral Gables Museum (2019). Her work is acquired into permanent collection at deYoung Museum, San Francisco. It has been featured on the covers of Fiber Art Now (2024) and Assouline’s “Miami Beach” book (2020) as well as Glamour Magazine and Marie Claire Mexico.
After a successful career as a professional ballerina performing lead roles to literary acclaim, she graduated from NYC’s Fashion Institute of Technology with a degree in Fashion Design and a Critic’s Choice Award. In 2019, Andrea founded her label, Spiridonakou, with a debut collection of felted garments that sold at the legendary retailer, Bergdorf Goodman, and were featured in their iconic windows. She is a recipient of a Knight Foundation NEW WORKS grant. She has developed hand-painted textiles for Isabel† & Ruben Toledo and has designed 2023, 2024 and 2026 world-premiere commissions for Miami City Ballet. Andrea is a resident artist at Bakehouse Art Complex.
Lisu Vega is a multidisciplinary artist born in Miami and raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela. She works across engraving, photography, fiber and textile art, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores sustainability, migration, memory, and identity through material-driven processes. Vega presented work in the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL (2025), and is a recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, North Miami, FL (2026). She is also a recipient of the Oolite Arts Ellies Creator Award, Miami, FL (2026). Her work appears in Le Fil / Thread in Contemporary Art (Pyramid Publishing, France, 2025). Selected solo exhibitions include: Material Matter / Las raíces hablan… El recuerdo susurra, Gladwell Project, Jersey City, NJ (2026); Weaving Landscapes of Memory, Miami Dade College Kendall Campus, Miami, FL (2026), curated by Rina Gitlin; That Which Inhabits Me, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, Pembroke Pines, FL (2025), curated by Sophie Bonet; Memoria Perdida, Tunnel Projects, Miami, FL (2025); Calle Chile, Callejón San Benito, Spellerberg Projects, Lockhart, TX (2025).
