They Carved Their Names into the Kitchen Table, 2025, Bingo Gallery
They Carved Their Names into the Kitchen Table focuses on the preservation of memory, artistic lineage, and the practice of devotion in gathering around the kitchen table.
This exhibition uses imagery from family photo albums Romero inherited which date back at least five generations in northern New Mexico. Most of the images were cyanotype printed onto muslin fabric and incorporated various mediums including traditional colcha embroidery and tinsmithing, two mediums that were passed on by Romero’s family through many decades. It also incorporates a sound piece sourced from old VHS-C tapes from Romero’s childhood.
This work explores how we preserve memories and the informal spaces of gathering through which we create them. Most of Romero’s family life revolved around the kitchen table and it is the place where her great grandparents worked on their tin and colcha. Incorporating the mediums her family refined is an effort to thread together stories and people from her family's deep history in Santa Fe to the present. It isn't just a way of art making; it is a shared language that keeps the voices of those before us alive.
Photographs by Nicholas Valdés