Keisha Lopez’s Biomimicry at The Electric Shed
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In December 2025, Biomimicry, Keisha Lopez’s solo exhibition at The Electric Shed, curated by David Onri Anderson, offered Nashville audiences more than a visual experience. It proposed a way of seeing, making, and relating that resisted speed, extraction, and isolation. Through sculpture, painting, and installation, Lopez presented art as a form of listening—to the natural world and to inherited memory.
Lopez, an artist and therapist based in Nashville, approaches biomimicry not as scientific imitation but as ethical relationship. “Biomimicry, for me, is about slowing down,” she explained during her artist talk. “Becoming a witness to nature, a responder, and a steward.” In a cultural moment marked by environmental precarity and emotional exhaustion, this philosophy felt both urgent and quietly radical.
Throughout the exhibition, plant-like forms appeared suspended, layered, and punctured by negative space. These abstractions echoed tropical leaves, root systems, and cellular structures without settling into literal representation. Lopez describes them as “propagated portraits of the artist with herself in transformation.” They functioned as emotional and spiritual self-portraits, mapping growth, rupture, and resilience through material language.
A recurring visual reference was the monstera leaf, whose natural perforations inspired Lopez’s understanding of absence. “The monstera leaf starts whole, and as it grows, holes appear,” she noted. “Those gaps aren’t wrong. They make space for others.” In her work, loss and fragmentation were not signs of damage but conditions for connection. “Loss doesn’t make us less,” she added. “It makes us more capable of holding life.”
Lopez’s process reinforced this philosophy. Many works were shaped through slow, repetitive hand labor using piping bags and salvaged materials. This technique referenced domestic and traditionally feminine practices while situating them within current abstract traditions/practices. “Using piping bags connects women’s work to contemporary abstraction,” she said. “It’s a reclaiming.” Sustainability, in this context, became an extension of care rather than a stylistic choice. “Saving materials from the landfill is an act of reverence,” she emphasized, “not just reuse.”
This ethic of reverence extended to Lopez’s understanding of ancestry and healing. After discovering her Mayan heritage, she began to recognize how her intuitive practices aligned with curanderismo and Indigenous knowledge systems. “I was already healing before I knew it was my heritage,” she reflected. Her work became a process of remembering what migration and assimilation had interrupted. The studio, for Lopez, functioned less as a site of production than as a space of ritual. “My work is carefully made by hand, like a ritual. That care is part of the healing.”
Nowhere was this fusion of art, lineage, and care more visible than in The Birth of a Curandera, a major work created while Lopez was pregnant and caring for her dying mother. “I was giving life and helping life transition at the same time,” she shared. “The painting had to hold both.” The piece operated as a threshold between beginnings and endings, positioning art as a vessel for emotional and spiritual passage.
A striking dimension of Biomimicry was its commitment to collective participation. Rather than positioning viewers as passive observers, Lopez invited them into a shared healing process. This was most evident in Seeds of Wisdom, an interactive installation painted by her three-year-old daughter, Siena Lopez Zulfer.
The installation asked visitors to take a seed and plant it alongside a written message, voice, or offering from their wisest self, beloved, or ancestors. Participants were encouraged to consider what beliefs, intentions, and forms of compassion they wished to cultivate in the coming years. The prompt concluded: “Repeat as many times as needed.” Involving her daughter in this process expanded the exhibition’s temporal reach. Seeds of Wisdom bridged generations, positioning creativity as both inheritance and gift. It suggested that healing is not confined to individual biography but unfolds across familial and communal timelines. The presence of Siena’s hand in the installation underscored Lopez’s belief that creativity is learned through witnessing and participation rather than instruction.
During her talk, Lopez framed this participatory element as central to her practice. “Art is ancestral healing,” she said. “What message would your ancestors leave you?” In this context, viewer contributions became acts of remembrance and projection, linking past, present, and future through shared intention.
Lopez also emphasized abstraction as a means of accessing interior states that resist language. “These works are self-portraits,” she explained. “Not of my face, but of how I’ve changed.” By refusing figurative representation, she opened space for emotional, spiritual, and ancestral realities to surface without narrative constraint. “I want people to ask, ‘Is that paint?’” she added. “That curiosity opens the door to reflection.”
What distinguished Biomimicry was not only its visual coherence but its ethical consistency. Every material choice, process, and spatial gesture reinforced Lopez’s commitment to care, reciprocity, and attention. The exhibition argued that healing is not an event but a practice. It unfolds through repetition, listening, and relational presence.
In a society that often treats sustainability, wellness, and spirituality as marketable trends, Lopez offered an alternative rooted in lived experience. Her work insisted that repair begins with slowing down—with noticing how leaves tear, how grief and birth coexist, how children learn through touch, and how discarded materials can become vessels of meaning.
As an exhibition space, The Electric Shed often functions as a place of reverence rather than spectacle, making this installation particularly resonant. “The piece became a sanctuary,” Lopez said of The Birth of a Curandera. “A river of life carrying beginnings and endings at once.” That description could apply to the exhibition as a whole. It held space for vulnerability, memory, and collective imagination.
By merging artistic practice with therapy, ritual, and ecological awareness, Keisha Lopez positioned creativity as a form of stewardship. Her work reminded viewers that healing is not something to be purchased or perfected. It is something cultivated slowly—like seeds planted with intention, tended through attention, and carried forward through relationships.
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Andrés Bustamante is a Sculptor and Public Artist born in Cali, Colombia, working in South Florida. Bustamante studied at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN followed by an experimental practice in sculpture. Selected solo exhibitions include “Reflexion” at Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN in 2022. He has been awarded the Artist-To-Artist award at ArtPrize 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As well as having works in the permanent collection of MOCAN (Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville).His immigrant experience at a young age led him to existential questions about reality, and the abstract mystery of life. Embracing the abstraction in the human experience and ephemeral emotion. An attempt to say in shape, color, and material that for which the spoken language has no words for. Bustamante lives by the conviction that creativity is healing for humanity. He is passionate about community empowerment, mental health, and accessibility in the visual arts. To learn more about his mission and collect art visit andresbustm.com@andresbustm
