Volume Gallery announces Coyolxauhqui Imperative, a solo exhibition by Tanya Aguiñiga, opening Saturday, June 13, 2026, from 3 to 6 p.m in gallery two. Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist raised in Tijuana, Mexico. Her ongoing investigations of identity and belonging made with meaningful materials are both deeply personal and an expression of her community.
In this new body of work, Aguiñiga strategically removes threads from the warp and weft of delicate gauze to create images — a subtractive process like reverse embroidery. Mounted over black velvet, sections of open weave catch light and shadow to outline animals long held sacred across Mesoamerica: opossums, coyotes, vultures, snakes, and bats. These creatures occupied central roles in Indigenous life and cosmology, and some of their Nahuatl names, tlacuatzin and coyotl, persist in daily language as quiet evidence of their cultural significance. Today, they are largely vilified as pests or nuisances, despite their vital ecological roles. Aguińiga’s imagery is inspired by depictions of these sacred animals in Pre-Columbian codices, pictorial manuscripts covering everything from history and geography to mythology.
The opossum — today dismissed or even feared — was among the most revered figures in Mesoamerican cosmology: a Robin Hood-like hero who stole fire from the gods and delivered it to humanity and who was credited in Maya tradition as an embodiment of feminine creative force, linked to the earth-lunar goddess. The vulture was also seen as far more than a scavenger; across Mesoamerican and South American traditions, it was understood as a transformer, converting death and filth into life and light. Known to the ancient world as a cathartic cleanser, the vulture appears throughout mythology as a keeper of fire and a shamanic figure associated with celestial brightness.
These animals were venerated figures, woven into creation myths, healing practices, and the highest expressions of spiritual life. Indigenous Peoples have understood that these animals perform quiet, necessary labor in our ecosystems, consuming decaying materials that spread disease. Performing an essential role, they are indispensable and deserving of respect. Ultimately, Aguiñiga’s new textile works are about perception and the effects of misunderstanding. These essential animals are metaphors for those whose value goes unrecognized, whose presence is treated as a burden rather than a gift. Like the migrants who cross the same borderlands these creatures inhabit, they are fundamental to our society, yet widely maligned.
For Aguiñiga, this work is also an act of ancestral recovery. Patterns referencing Otomi weaving and the craft traditions of Michoacán and Jalisco — regions tied to her own family history — speak to a Mestizo lineage fractured by colonization, now accessible only via fragments: a tourist object, a surviving codex, a persisting craft tradition. By working with gauze-like textile — used across Mesoamerica for everything from lacework to fishing nets — she draws on a material lineage that is at once sacred and utilitarian. Through material, image, and pattern, she reaches toward what has been lost, making meaning out of erasure.
Coyolxauhqui Imperative will be on view through July 25, 2026.
Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years, she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border. Aguiñiga is a 2024 Center for Craft Catalyst Award Recipient, a 2023 Loewe Craft Prize finalist, a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellow, a recipient of the 26th annual Heinz Award, a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC Grant Recipient, and a Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has been the subject of numerous articles in American Craft Magazine and has been featured in Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century, KCET’s Artbound, and PBS’s Craft in America Series.
Recent museum exhibitions include m\other at The Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, Border Fall Height at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga & Porfirio Gutiérrez en Conversación/in Conversation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, Intertwined: Weaving in Community at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, Ketchum, ID, In the Shadow of the Wall at Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT, Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living as part of AMBOS at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time curated by U.S. Art in Embassies, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C., Hella Feminist at the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA, LatinXAmerican at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL, Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Oakland Museum of California, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Mint Museum in Charlotte, and The Wichita Art Museum.