The Brooklyn Rail

Lucia Hierro’s most recognizable pieces are often compared to the expressive soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen—abject, charming works that inflate commodities to provocative proportions while imbuing them with personality—with whom she concurrently appears in Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now. Like that European immigrant couple who came to know and love their adoptive hometown of New York, Hierro, a born-and-raised city kid, intimately understands the conditions that have shaped her objects just as she understands the lives they inhabit, hold, and represent.

Across her oeuvre, the artist’s project has always been semiotic. As Justin Kamp writes for her first European solo exhibition Capital M:

The M means Manhattan: Lucia’s home, and the inspiration for so much of her work. The commodities in her sculptures, like a brick of Bustelo or Tropical brand queso, are not just paeans to product. They represent a cultural connective tissue, a shared sensate memory among the people she grew up with.

Though the title Moving Day alludes to an historical instance of the New York rat race—itself a product of scarcity of housing, resources, and opportunities—the objects in the show resist this accelerationist impulse, demanding time and close attention as they don the Pop-art costume of readymade advertisements.

Hierro’s production methods are decidedly analogue. In her meticulous attention to fabric, stitching, and edges lies a traditional legacy of textile artisanship passed down from her late mother, Lucia Guzman Garcia—a collaborator on many of the artist’s older pieces whose portrait appears in the shrine-like Uhaul Box: Sentimental Items (2026)—and grandmother. But in this new body of work, Hierro operates in dialogue with the organizing principles of “new media” and the neoliberal infrastructure of global trade just as she captures its daily manifestations in the commodity-textures of our lives on New York’s streets and in its stores. Here her forms are near-impossible chimerae of the technical, the personal, and the universal.

Even Hierro’s three-dimensional works—which are digitally screen-printed on each side with corresponding photographs of the objects to which they gesture—contend with the conceptual problem of flattening that characterizes the image economy. Indeed, the sheer prevalence of the digital image has given rise to figurative metaphors and literal algorithmic frameworks for the compression and circulation of many other human elements—social norms, beauty standards, aspects of culture and identity—that have been securitized and shaped into commodities. This is the concern at the heart of her practice.

It follows that the specific nature of these images becomes crucial. El Especialito (2026) depicts one of the vanishing newspaper boxes that characterized borough landscapes for decades. The piece is named for the box’s contents: a publication popular in Hierro’s Washington Heights neighborhood—its title happens to conjure Walter Benjamin’s critique of the “specialty items” that inhabited nineteenth-century Parisian arcades. The artist prints the image of the newspaper onto fabric “inside” the image of its time-worn yellow container, creating a false display window “exposing” the available wares. It is hard to tell where the photograph buckles, capturing distortions in metal, and where the cotton sateen hangs slack; blurring the materialities of both the original and her layered representation underscores the impermanence of these objects.

In a different kind of box labeled “FRESH YAMS,” Hierro employs a deliberate mismatch between advertisement and content that reproduces itself in the title of this work: Fresh Yams Plantain Street Vendor (2026). A photograph of plantains sourced online emerges optically from the object’s “interior.” The trompe l’oeil effect produced by careful color grading of this foreign image belies the fact that said plantains have been enlarged beyond a reasonable scale. Its sibling, Fresh Yams Empty Box (2026), appears to contain nothing at all. This is not an empty cardboard box, of course, but a foam form draped in fabric, its promises also incomplete. Together these sculptures investigate language and image as self-contradictory containers that only “resolve” through the introduction of an external, contextual dimension.

The system of image circulation mirrors that of conventional concrete commodities within the international economic order: even the language of imports and exports remains the same. In her seminal 2009 e-flux essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Hito Steyerl studies the degraded resolution of packaged, mass-distributed, unconventional images that reflect the displacement imposed by borders and trade networks alike. Much of the produce available in the South Bronx originates from Ghana; like the photograph that traps their likeness, these confused plantains have been plucked from elsewhere and recontextualized. In Vendor Crate (Street Seat) (2026), the Richteresque blur peeking through the plastic hexagonal “grid” was not inserted, but instead photographed organically with the walls of the crate itself. It is an artifact of a depiction of the original object’s spatial and temporal reality. Other images—like the Yankees hat, blue jeans, and Timberland boots printed onto Cliche Paradox (2026), a flat sculpture affixed to the wall, neighboring a high-resolution decorative decal of a shopping cart—are crisper, harder-edged: reinforced by the algorithmic feedback loop of stereotypical perception and memetic performance that establishes limiting clichés of identity.

El Especialito is not a moving-image work, but it formally evokes the structure of a screen, as do Fresh Yams Plantain Street Vendor and, to a less obvious extent, Vendor Crate (Street Seat). These resemblances raise questions about the relation between art-at-large—a surface for the projection and emanation of thoughts and feelings—and the screen, a surface for the projection and emanation of images.

It’s difficult to look at the felted, blown-up renditions of plastic whistles from the 99¢ store in Party Favors: Noise Makers (2026) without recalling the use of similar devices in anti-ICE protests across the country, footage of which spread across TikTok like wildfire for a moment. Media theorists including Steyerl and Trevor Paglen note that screens and associated autoplay features flatten all content into a non-hierarchical arrangement of items while simultaneously dispersing large quantities of information rhizomatically. If you refuse the deadening of your senses to critically consider the images with which you’re presented rather than simply accepting the fact of their oversaturation, contemporary information systems put an unprecedented amount of knowledge in your hands. A screen actively offers content: you are invited to see something’s most blatant qualities—which, like artificial flavors, perform the best to the aforementioned deadened senses—or, in rare cases, its most essential.

On Grand Street, right outside Marc Straus’s doors, Hierro’s objects appear in slant-rhymed guises: similar bags of products and produce, newspaper boxes that display Chinese characters instead of Latin letters, world-framing crates. The ambiguity of the phrase Moving Day is apt; this is a transportive show on multiple levels. It expresses the highest transcendental power of art—a concept that sounds trite, but is ultimately just true—you see your environment through different eyes that become, at once, your own.