Daniela García Hamilton at Charlie James Gallery

June 21–August 2, 2025

Daniela García Hamilton, La Sala (The Living Room) (detail) (2025). Hand embroidery and oil on canvas triptych, 27 × 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: © Yubo Dong.

Walking into Daniela García Hamilton’s Amanecer / Atardecer at Charlie James Gallery felt like entering a family photo album, snapshots and memories spilled out into magnificent form. Drawing from photographs passed through generations as well as recollections that exist only in memory, first-generation Mexican-American painter García Hamilton grants the viewer an intimate look into the textures of intergenerational domestic family life. We see a nephew midstride across tiled floors, a grandfather’s hat hanging on the wall. Her works on canvas, which utilize both oil paint and embroidery, transform these everyday gestures into portraits of memory, cultural resilience, and survival. You could read her work as a reclamation of craft, but her practice positions domestic embroidery not as nostalgia but as a conceptual strategy for resisting cultural erasure. The threads in her work function as connective tissue across time and place, binding family members who may have never met, and suturing together fragments of a diasporic family history into a resilient whole.

From afar, the works appeared to be paintings; thick swatches of linework build up her figures. Up close, pieces like Toyota (2025) and S.A.Hamilton (Mexicano/Americano) (2025) revealed themselves as intricately hand-embroidered canvases. Employed on surfaces as large as 48 × 48 inches, embroidery became monumental. In Toyota, García Hamilton’s technique allows thread to behave like paint. Against an oil-painted gradient background that shifts from blue to green, then to purple and pink, three men recline in the bed of a pickup truck, as if resting after a long day’s work. Their bodies press close and they lean into one another in a gesture of both rest and intimacy. Stitches in varying tones of purple, blue, and orange mimic shadow and light, producing the impression of sunlight glancing off a shoulder or folding into the creases of a shirt. The pickup truck and pants the men wear, reduced to embroidered black sketch-like outlines, contrast the dense, luminous surface of their colorfully embroidered faces and shirts. Here, the softness of thread on canvas transforms depictions of physical labor, memorializing fleeting moments of strain. In García Hamilton’s hands, embroidery does more than soften—it preserves, ensuring that these labors of survival aren’t lost to erasure. Her use of embroidery as both medium and metaphor aligns with a growing movement of Latinx artists such as Tanya Aguiñiga and Carolina Caycedo, who are reclaiming ancestral craft, domestic labor, and personal narrative as acts of resistance and remembrance.

Embroidery has deep roots in Indigenous and Latin American traditions. In Hidalgo, Mexico, tenangos are vibrant textiles that record ancestry, land, and spirituality; in Guatemala, huipiles, woven and embroidered blouses, encode community and identity. Similarly, in García Hamilton’s hands, embroidery becomes a vehicle for familial memory, stitching her relatives’ stories into the fabric of art history and creating a living record of personal, political, and spiritual life. By merging embroidery with oil painting, a medium long tied to the Western canon, she collapses the hierarchy between craft and fine art. Oil, once the pinnacle of mastery, becomes ground for embroidery’s narrative force—an inversion that privileges ancestral ways of remembering over Western traditions, binding past and present while resisting cultural erasure.

In the triptych La Sala (The Living Room) (2025), which occupied the left wall of the front room, figures are caught mid-gesture—a phone passed, a mother helping her daughter into a jacket. In the third panel, a figure outlined in black thread is depicted mid-step, only a third of his body visible, as if he might continue into the middle panel but instead disappears into the seam. His vanishing evokes the unseen presences that linger in these domestic spaces, ancestors that shape the room as much as its visible inhabitants. Behind the couch, windows open onto a bright blue sky painted in oil, and the floor is adorned with a traditional Spanish tile pattern stitched in purple thread. Through close crops and depictions of the quotidian, García Hamilton places the viewer among them, part of the living room’s quiet choreography, making them a participant in the scene so that they feel the weight of kinship. Through these intimate details, she conveys that despite waves of migration and inevitable change, these familial scenes affirm the resilience of family ties.

On the same wall, Jálale (2025) depicts an accordion, rendered in the exhibition’s signature blues, purples, and golds. The instrument, tied to Mexican Norteño music, honors the soundtracks of family gatherings while nodding to the “in-between” cultural space of the Mexican-American experience, as the music style was formed in south Texas but draws its influences from Mexican musical traditions.¹ In the back room, Sueña (2024) invited viewers into a more private space: A child sleeps under both a traditional Mexican blanket and an L.A. Rams blanket, his head resting on a pillow that features cartoon ghosts skateboarding. Taken together, these works use emblems of Mexican culture, music, and textiles as markers of both continuity and change. They honor cultural inheritance while gesturing toward the hybrid spaces of assimilation and preservation, tradition, and contemporary influence.

In contrast to much of the work in the show, White washed (2024) uses only ballpoint pen to create an image devoid of color. The piece depicts younger members of García Hamilton’s family, dressed in distinctly American attire—a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, Crocs—as markers of a present moment with no visible ties to ancestral heritage. Seen after the explosion of color in the embroidered canvases, this feels like a quiet meditation on the next generation, the children who will carry forward family stories and tradition. The title doubles as commentary, raising questions about assimilation: Has the vibrancy of certain cultural traditions faded over time? What happens to identity when parts of a family’s visual and material heritage are erased? The absence of embroidery is striking, as if to underscore that without the thread—those ancestral bonds—something risks being lost.

Together, these works form a portrait not just of one family but of a layered cultural experience shaped by movement across borders, inherited memory, and daily negotiations around preservation and erasure. In Amanecer / Atardecer, by orchestrating where embroidery appears and where space is left open, García Hamilton used thread to record transient family moments that might otherwise be lost to time, transforming everyday life into a living archive asserting cultural survival.