Mexico’s Women Artisans Share Their Stories Inside Onna House
Lisa Perry’s “Made in Mexico: Women Artisans” turns the spotlight on local craft and collective engagement
Over the last decade, Mexico’s moment in the design spotlight has become a movement. This long-overdue respect for the region’s historic innovations in art and craftsmanship comes with risks, including extraction from—and exploitation of—local artisans in a global marketplace, and reducing traditions to brief trends. But designer Lisa Perry’s new exhibition, “Made in Mexico: Women Artisans,” seeks to resist those risks by highlighting collective engagement—specifically, some 18 collectives comprising 350 artisans across Mexico.
Perry has filled her vast SoHo loft, once the home of famed SoHo gallery OK Harris and now home to her own Onna platform, with assortments of textiles, ceramics, furniture, and more. Each is shown with accompanying information about the women who made them, often including photographs and stories, in an effort to put credit where it’s due and invest the object with personal significance.
Perry first encountered the work of these collectives while staying at the Four Seasons Resort Tamarindo on the Pacific coast of Mexico. There, she saw an exhibition presented by the Fundación Haciendas del Mundo Maya’s initiative Ensamble Artesano, a group of artisans and NGOs seeking to raise the income levels of Mexican artisans. Perry worked with the organization to build the list of artisans for her show in New York. “One of the pieces that caught my eye from the very beginning,” she recalls, “was a set of Lienzo Índigo wall hangings, a stunning work in henequen fiber woven on a treadle loom.”
Created by the Taller Colibri collective in San Antonio Yaxché, the work expands traditional sisal weaving into explorations of color fields and textural juxtapositions. A similar restraint lends interest to monochromatic work by Mexico City artisan Ana Paula Noriega, whose pedal loom weaving creates moments of tension and release via sansevieria and henequen fibers and nubby cotton. “I’m so impressed by how she takes a very traditional material and makes it modern and fresh,” Perry muses. “Her work is resonating with people: on the first day of the show, we had already sold many of her
pieces.”
Whimsical explorations of sisal gather around the more minimalist work. Renacer Unidas Venceremos Lool Kiij’s Taburete Zamma, for example, offers stools with legs carved from local wood and a structure crafted using a circular pattern of sewing. Fringe whooshes from them like long tails. The Purépecha artisan Leticia Magaña engages with the natural world even more directly, in Alfaeria pottery embodying armadillos. As does Taller Nana Elvira, in clay pots with flopping fish for handles. And a series of trays by women artisans and carpenters from the Kuxan Che and Chuytikab artisan groups in Yucatán fashion a canvas of teak for hand-drilled perforations and remarkably detailed hand-embroidery of dragonflies, blossoms, and fluttering birds.
Perry has placed remarkable objects like Ana Holshneider’s bulbous papier-maché-and-textile-flower Biznaga around the house, demonstrating that pieces not necessarily tethered to utility can still work a room. But Made in Mexico’s biggest revelation might be the ceramics of Celia Veloz, a third-generation potter from the community of Mata Ortiz in Chihuahua, Mexico. She traveled to New York for the exhibition, and showed me how an ingenious brush made from a plastic pen allows her to create ceramics decorated with dizzying precision. Across her curving, perforated pots, grids seem to arc, and boxes become galaxies. “My favorites are hers,” Perry says. “Her painting is so intricate, and the level of craftsmanship is extraordinary.”
Veloz and her colleagues offer ample evidence that Mexico’s contemporary craft ecosystem is varied
and world-class, more than ready for the platform Perry is seeking to provide. “The pride these women take in continuing multigenerational practices is very inspiring,” Perry says. “These pieces invite us to slow down and appreciate the process. Through their work, these women tell us something about their culture, their families, their communities, their territory, and themselves. I want people to understand the stories behind the pieces.”
“Made in Mexico: Women Artisans,” is on view at Onna House through April 2027.