Vicky Lowe (Group Exhibition) | Aurora Hughes Villa & Janimarie Lester DeRose

Exhibitions open Sep 14 through Oct 23, 2026.

Fri, Sep 18, 6–9pm: Opening Reception & Salt Lake Gallery Stroll
Fri, Oct 16, 6–9pm: Salt Lake Gallery Stroll

Vicky Lowe K'ulub (Curator): Weaving Memories: Textile Art as Cultural Knowledge

Artists:
- Alejandra Quechol
- Allison Martínez Arocho
- Calixta Chávez
- Deyanira Cerrito Hernández
- Elpitha Tsoutsounakis
- Fanny Guadalupe Blauer
- Gerónimo Bazán
- Jem
- Maria Elena Lowe Gomez K'ulub
- Maria Garcia

Exhibition Statement
Weaving Memories brings together local artists whose work reflects the many ways textile traditions continue in their communities today. From backstrap weaving to wool weaving, fine needlepoint lace, beading, embroidery, natural dyes, and fiber arts, each piece represents knowledge shared by communities across generations and cultural backgrounds. The exhibition includes Indigenous and diasporic perspectives, recognizing that textiles continue to connect people to identity, community, and the land in different ways. Together, these works remind us that textile traditions are living practices, carried by people and communities who remain present, visible, and keep these practices alive.

Biographies
Vicky Lowe K'ulub (Curator) is a Maya Tseltal artist and educator from Chiapas, Mexico, now based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her multidisciplinary practice explores family memory, cultural continuity, and community through painting, handcrafted paper, foodways, and weaving. For the past two years, she has been learning backstrap weaving, a family practice passed down through generations. She is the curator of Weaving Memories and creates programs that connect communities through art, storytelling, and intergenerational learning.

Alejandra Quechol is an artist and photographer from Puebla, Mexico, who began exploring photography and the arts at age 15. She holds a degree in Communications from Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla and has worked in community-focused communications and nonprofit organizations. After immigrating to the United States in 2022, she found connection and belonging through Utah’s art community, volunteering with organizations including UMFA, UMOCA, and Artes de México en Utah. Her work explores the female experience, belonging, identity, and communal love.

Allison Martínez Arocho is a Boricua artist, folklorist, and cultural educator from Borikén (Puerto Rico), now based in Utah. Working with painting, ceramics, coconut carving, papier-mâché, and mixed media, she explores Puerto Rican folklore through the iconic Vejigante mask, a symbol of cultural resilience and identity. Through her art and community workshops, Allison celebrates Puerto Rican traditions while creating spaces for connection and belonging within the diaspora.

Calixta Chávez is a Zapotec textile artist from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, where she learned to weave from her parents as a child. Now living in Utah, she continues creating traditional wool textiles inspired by ancestral Zapotec designs while sharing this cultural heritage with her family and community.

Deyanira Cerrito Hernández is an Hñahñu fiber artist, educator, and cultural advocate from Cardonal, Hidalgo, Mexico. Inspired by her grandparents, who wove with ixtle (maguey fiber), she continues this important tradition while sharing the history and significance of ayate weaving. Now based in Utah, she collaborates with community organizations to preserve and celebrate Indigenous knowledge through education and fiber arts.

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis is a Cretan-American designer, multidisciplinary artist, and independent scholar based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her creative practice spans architecture, graphic design, book arts, fiber arts, printmaking, and product design, exploring relationships between craft, material, and place. Her work expands to teaching at the University of Utah, being part of the founding of the Field Studio Gerontological Survey, a collaborative platform for creative research and community-based making. She is the founder of Books & Supply, an architecture, art, and design bookstore and project space that supports creative exchange and community.

Fanny Guadalupe Blauer was born and raised in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, a place whose layered histories and cultural life shaped her understanding of identity, community, and social justice. She later learned of her Nahua ancestry from Milpa Alta, a heritage she has embraced with pride alongside the Mexican and American traditions of her family. Fanny moved to the United States at age 22 and eventually made Utah her home. Her experiences navigating language, culture, and belonging have shaped her commitment to cultural exchange and community building. Today, as the former director of Artes de México en Utah, she promotes Mexican arts and culture while creating connections across communities.

Gerónimo Bazán is a Zapotec textile artist from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. He learned to weave as a child in his family's workshop and has spent his life preserving the tradition of handwoven wool textiles inspired by ancestral Zapotec designs and renowned artists. Through his work, he continues a cultural legacy that he proudly passes on to future generations.

Jem (they/them; siya) is diasporic Ilokano-Pangasinense. They grew up with woven materials like banig and inabel as commonplace items in family members' homes. Both banig and inabel describe woven items that can take on different forms and be used for different purposes, but Jem associates them primarily and so fondly with rest—as places to sit, play and sleep on, or be blanketed by. While Jem lacks the ability to trace weaving as a practice among those who came before them, they engage in learning as a way of ancestral veneration, desiring to reconnect with what might have been erased and disappeared from their lineages—including the opportunities that might have been possible to cultivate relationships of reciprocity, care and knowledge sharing with others across lands, across oceans. Jem is humbled and grateful for the opportunity to engage in weaving traditions of chosen family members Maestra Maria Elena Lowe and Vicky Lowe K'ulub.

Maria Elena Lowe Gomez K'ulub is a Maya Tseltal weaver and cultural educator from Navil, Oxchuc, Chiapas, Mexico. She learned backstrap weaving from her mother at the age of five before being separated from her community through residential school. Today she teaches her daughter and grandchildren, co-leads Textiles Lum, a Maya weaving collective in Chiapas, and is dedicated to preserving traditional weaving, natural dyes, brocade, and embroidery.

Maria Garcia, originally from Sololá, Guatemala, has lived in Utah for 20 years. She learned to weave as a child from her mother, a tradition she continues to practice and share with others. Maria weaves because it connects her to her ancestors and brings her peace, especially through the colors and their meanings that she learned growing up. She has taught weaving at BYU, in schools, and in community settings, and continues to share this knowledge with younger generations.

Aurora Hughes Villa & Janimarie Lester DeRose: Patterns of Place

Exhibition Statement
Patterns of Place brings together the evocative ceramic and mixed media works of Aurora Hughes Villa and Janimarie Lester DeRose. Grounded in a shared exploration of memory, domestic life, and the decorative arts, this two-person exhibition explores how domestic objects carry memory and navigate loss. Together, Villa and DeRose trace how objects narrate our shared experience of life.

Combining ceramics, printmaking, drawing, painting, and layered materials, Aurora Hughes Villa creates works that weave together architectural elements, botanical motifs (wallpaper), decorative patterns, female figures, and domestic objects. Influenced by Victorian decorative arts and inspired by the architecture and ornamental ironwork encountered while traveling in Italy, Aurora’s work examines how personal and cultural histories are embedded within places and everyday objects.

Janimarie Lester DeRose’s work explores grief, identity, and domesticity. Originally focused on adorning women’s generational wisdom on the pottery’s thin skin, her decorations of sweet recipes, paper dolls, and floral apron themes abounded. Over time and through personal grief, the work evolved to become unintentional self‑portraiture; precisely thrown edges morphed into torn and textured vessels. She began incorporating powerful poetry, empty chairs by windows, and inherited kitchen utensils deeply impressed into the body of the clay. Paper dolls became silhouettes of daughters and of herself.

Biographies
Aurora Hughes Villa is an artist and educator. She is an Associate Professor and the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Endowed Program Director for Elementary Arts Education at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Before moving to Utah, Aurora was a full-time art professor at North Central College (IL) where she taught sculpture and ceramics. Aurora holds degrees in art education and ceramics. After completing her MFA in Ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL), she exhibited her work nationally, with her artwork appearing in Ceramics Art and Perception.

Janimarie Lester DeRose is a Ceramic Artist, Educator, and mother of two vibrant daughters. Her personal studio, Salty Peach Pottery, is nestled in Cache Valley Utah. She earned a BFA in Ceramics from USU, a BS from WSU, and currently teaches Ceramics at Sky View High School.