RETRATABLOS
Retratablos is an ongoing socially engaged art project that connects children and traditional artisans across countries and continents through drawing, portraiture, and textiles. Since its inception in Oaxaca, Mexico, the project has evolved into an international platform for cultural exchange, creating encounters between generations while preserving and reactivating endangered textile knowledge.
The project begins with a simple question: How can children become aware of the cultural language embedded in the textiles that surround them? Through workshops, children create symbolic self-portraits inspired by their families, memories, communities, and cultural traditions. They learn that textiles are more than decorative objects—they are systems of communication. Like written language, woven structures, embroidery, color, and pattern carry histories, identities, spiritual beliefs, and collective memory.
The children’s drawings are then entrusted to master artisans who reinterpret them using the textile traditions unique to their own communities. Rather than reproducing the images, the artisans translate them through their own visual vocabulary, allowing every portrait to become a collaboration between two ways of seeing: the intuitive imagination of childhood and the accumulated knowledge of generations of makers.
Each chapter responds to its local context. In Oaxaca, children explored the architectural motifs of a church whose decorative language originated in lost embroidery traditions, later reinterpreted by local embroiderers. In Guatemala, children of Guatemalan descent in Florida created portraits that were transformed into woven textiles by the Indigenous women of Trama Textiles using traditional backstrap loom techniques. In Little Haiti, here is Miami, children’s drawings were interpreted by Haitian artisans in Haiti through the country’s rich textile traditions and the symbolic language of Vodou flags. In Indonesia, portraits created with children from two orphanages were transformed by local textile artisans using regional techniques before being exhibited as part of my residency. In India, the project similarly connected local children with artisan communities, creating works that reflected the visual language and textile heritage of the region.
Although every iteration is rooted in a different place, the methodology remains the same: children become the authors of new narratives while artisans become their interpreters. Authorship is shared, knowledge flows in both directions, and cultural traditions are experienced as living practices rather than historical artifacts.
As an artist, my commitment is to create these encounters. I see my role not simply as producing objects but as designing systems of exchange that connect communities separated by geography, language, and generation. My practice investigates how contemporary art can serve as a catalyst for cultural preservation without freezing traditions in time. Instead, traditions remain alive by being reimagined through collaboration, education, and collective creativity.
Retratablos proposes a different understanding of cultural heritage—one that is participatory rather than archival. Each collaborative textile becomes a portrait of two communities meeting through craft, demonstrating that the future of traditional knowledge depends not only on those who preserve it, but also on those who inherit it. By bringing children and artisans together across continents, the project weaves a global tapestry of shared memory, identity, and belonging, where textiles become both a material and a language through which cultures continue to speak.
Little Haiti Cultural Center
Quilting Stories, Narrating Through Their Eyes is a project that aims to collect personal narratives of immigrant Haitian children, revitalize traditional Haitian drapo through art education and exhibition, and develop intercultural exchanges that serve important cultural, social, and economic roles in the maintenance and development of textile crafts. We believe that this project will not only preserve the rich heritage of Haiti but also promote intercultural understanding and appreciation.
Reclaiming Traditional Textile Arts from Guatemala
The phrase Retra Tablos is a play of words between “retrato” (portrait) and “retablo” (altarpiece). The show gathers a group of portraits by sixteen artists, ages 6 to 12. Every image narrates an immigrant child’s story embedded in their Mayan ancestry, legend, folklore, and his/her assimilation as recent migrant, or as a child of immigrant parents. By combining Mayan deities, symbols, Catholic iconography, and American pop culture, the works relate to the aesthetics of the Catholic “retablos” tradition. A retablo is a framed votive painting that forms part of the Catholic altar. Its iconography was often adopted by the peoples colonized by Spaniards and turned into bright, vibrant folk art of their own. Also on view in the gallery are backstrap woven and embroidered replicas of the young artists’ drawings created by artisans from the collective of weavers Trama Textiles, in Guatemala. These works are meant to bring further the children’s voices.
Retra-Tablos is the product of a year-long arts-in-education program. For this project, Molina and Rodriguez worked with immigrant children from The Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth, Florida, in coordination with its school director, Xiomara Guerra. By collecting and documenting the cultural narratives of Mayan children and highlighting the textile arts and huipiles of Guatemala, Retra-Tablos also pays homage to the memory of Policarpia Gaspar, co-founder of the center. Mrs. Gaspar was a Guatemalan civil war exile who devoted her life to helping refugee children and families. She passed away on this May, 2019 after a lifetime of social work.
Oaxaca, Mexico
The workshop will replicate the concept of the session held in Santa Ana Zegache, where participating children interpreted local Indigenous symbols and incorporated them into their self-portraits. In this workshop, the emphasis is on including such symbolism. Once the portrait is finished and the negative space around the face has been filled with symbols—whether geometric, organic, figurative, or in any other style—the participant, under the guidance of master embroiderer Doña Cecilia, will render their drawing in embroidery.
I worked with a group of 25 kids ages 5 to 12 years old. I introduced to the kids the work of Chuck Close an American painter that works in segment pixels self portrait. we talked about color theory and i made them conscious about this idea of building up an images made of little images. The kids had to sketch 20 different design from the facade of the church, which i learned it was inspired by the town's lost hand embroider tradition.
Yogjakarta, Indonesia
Worked with a group of kids introducing elements and principles of designs. The kids worked with a self portrait image that was segmented with patterns. This drawings were later done in batik by artisians in the community that interpreted the kids work using a textile tradition. The pieces were then, stretched and mounted to be exhibited, this way creating a crossover between cultural traditions and new aesthetics.
The kids worked on creating paper masks, taking the topeng traditional concept into a more contemporary aesthetic. They used paper and makers and traced their mask onto fabric that later were make batik pieces by artisians in the community.
Kota, India
Intuitive drawing techniques, the kids developed a great amount of freehand strokes while listening to music, traditional hindu music. It developed from an abstract drawing to a figurative piece. At the same time another group of kids were working on self portrait, where they filled in the negatice spaces of the face with patterns and designs related to the aethetics of their cultural traditions, very intricate and detailed embelishments.
Portfolio Development
Through this series of hands on exercises, students have incorporated all elements and principles of design to their self portrait. Students were prompt to describe themselves through elements that told their stories. Elements of repetition and visual narratives were use by students to represent themselves.
