GROUP EXHIBITION

HELD IN THE MAKING

INTRODUCTION

Gallery Sonder is pleased to present Held in the Making, a group exhibition of painting, textile sculpture, and works in paper and pulp by Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, Ana María Hernando, Sheng Lor, Susan Maddux, Kelsey Overstreet, and Pilar Wiley. Each works in abstraction, and each begins with something lived or inherited: a walk through a landscape, a family habit of sewing, a technique handed down, belongings from an earlier life.

The memories in this exhibition are rarely pictured. They show up in how the work is built, in the way a canvas is folded, tulle is gathered, or paper is soaked and pressed into shape. That labor is plain to see on the surface. The histories behind it, the reasons a hand moves the way it does, take longer to come into view.

Kelsey Overstreet's paintings start outdoors, on foot. She pays close attention to light and to the physical feeling of moving through a place, then brings those impressions back to the studio, where they return as gesture. Her marks answer to what the paint is doing as much as to what she remembers, so each canvas holds both the walk and the act of painting it. One title, Pay Attention, Be Astonished, Tell About It, is taken from Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes."

Lauren Goldenberg Longoria and Pilar Wiley both work in paper, though they come at it from opposite ends. Goldenberg Longoria starts with finished things, personal and found belongings, which she soaks and compresses into layered forms. The objects are not lost in the process so much as remade, given a second presence. Wiley starts from pulp. In sculptures such as Pollinator (2026), she builds form gradually, layer on layer, combining paper pulp and rice flour glue with aluminum, foam, and acrylic, and leaves the marks of that building in place.

For Susan Maddux, Ana María Hernando, and Sheng Lor, working with cloth and fiber is knowledge passed from hand to hand. Maddux draws on her background in textile design, folding painted canvas into sculptural reliefs and handling the painting as if it were fabric. Hernando gathers tulle into full, buoyant forms that suggest things growing. She grew up in Buenos Aires watching the women of her family sew and crochet together. "I come from a family of textiles," she says, "so that's a language I feel comfortable with." Lor presents one of her Loom sculptures, rooted in Hmong tradition, which joins yarn and the frame used to weave it into a single form, so the structure of weaving becomes part of what we see.

All three draw on the long history of women's textile work, which shaped modern art well before museums gave it credit. That case was made at full scale in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, seen at MoMA in 2025. The exhibition argued that abstraction can't be understood apart from the woven and knotted materials that helped form it.

The works in Held in the Making look very different from one another. What they share is a starting point: something remembered, carried into the work by hand. A fold, a pressed layer of paper, a gathered length of tulle are small and ordinary acts, repeated many times over. The exhibition asks what those acts hold on to, and how much of a person stays in the things they make.

Held in the Making is on view 21 November 2026 through 07 February 2027, with an opening reception on Saturday, 21 November, from 6 to 8 pm.

PRESS RELEASE

MEET THE ARTISTS

Lauren Goldenberg Longoria is a Los Angeles–based artist working in handmade paper, a practice she approaches as a way of holding memory and loss. Trained in printmaking, she tears down earlier works, studio scraps, and personal belongings, pulps them, and forms the pulp into new sheets and thick reliefs, sometimes embedding hair, fabric, or foam. Little in the studio is thrown away; it is folded back into the next piece. The resulting works sit between drawing and sculpture, hung on the wall like paintings but often at odd angles, their surfaces perforated and worn. Goldenberg Longoria received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2024 and her BFA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2018.

Ana María Hernando (b. 1959) is an Argentine multidisciplinary artist known for her vibrant textile sculptures, installations, and works on paper. Her practice explores femininity, cultural heritage, memory, and the traditions passed between generations of women. Working with layers of brightly colored tulle, embroidery, and crocheted textiles, Hernando creates richly textured compositions that celebrate the expressive possibilities of fabric and the histories held within it. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she studied at the California College of the Arts and currently works between Denver, New York, and Buenos Aires. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Madison Square Park in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. She was named a Joan Mitchell Fellow in 2023.

Sheng Lor (b. 1987) is a Los Angeles-based textile artist working within the context of sculpture, painting and drawing. Her work draws from Hmong histories and experiences of fugitivity, especially those parts which are secret and silent. Born in a Thai refugee camp to parents who survived the Secret War in Laos, Lor has spent her practice unraveling memories, dreams, and folktales that are full of hidden information, exploring the motifs of personal and collective traumas through pattern and material.

Susan Maddux (b. 1969) is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, collage, and painting. She received her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and her current practice transforms paintings into wall-based sculptures through origami-influenced folding and collage. A former surface and textile pattern designer, Maddux developed this tactile approach in pursuit of a deeper spiritual connection to her materials. Her folded, pigment-stained canvases echo garment construction and domestic craft, exploring the tension between concealment and revelation. Inviting contemplation of transformation and inner expansion, her work is held in collections across the United States.

Kelsey Overstreet (b. 1981) is a San Diego–based artist whose abstract paintings begin with long walks, which she treats as a form of listening, and with close attention to light and shadow, both in the landscape and in herself. Working with water-based paint, oil stick, thread, and spray paint, she lets the materials lead as much as she directs them, and her canvases record personal history alongside the present moment. Overstreet received her MFA from Azusa Pacific University in 2018 and studied printmaking at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy. She teaches visual arts at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Pilar Wiley (b. 1976) is a Los Angeles–based artist whose practice centers on ceramic vessels that function as sculptural canvases for her repeating patterns and pictorial motifs. Her surfaces reveal the immediacy and idiosyncrasy of hand-drawn mark making, drawing influence from global traditions of decorative abstraction, plant forms, and memories of her childhood spent overseas. Inspired by the techniques and silhouettes of West and South African pottery, Wiley uses the repetitive nature of ceramic process to build a personal mythology. Through form, pattern, and gesture, her work explores how cultural memory and lived experience can be carried through clay.