Artist Spotlight: Amalia Galdona Broche

Displayed in the Lippitt House Museum’s Reception Room as part of the exhibition On Being American | Contemporary Artworks, Echoes of the Past, textile artist Amalia Goldona Broche’s three textile works center the experiences and memories of the laborers that sustained life at Lippitt House. The installation On whose labor this house stands features three textile works, each addressing the interconnected spheres of labor: domestic labor, textile production, and the construction of the house itself.

Placed provocatively in the room MaryAnn Lippitt received her guests in the 19^th century, these works reframe the space as one shaped not only by the design and taste of the lady of the house, but by the largely unseen and uncelebrated labor of servants, mill workers, and artisans. This hidden labor is placed front and center in Galdona Broche’s work, the tapestries illuminating the social and economic foundations underlying the Lippitt family’s legacy.

A digital collage created by Goldona Broche as part of "On whose labor this house stands: mill workers."

With a subtle nod to the shape and construction of a butler’s screen in the Lippitt Dining Room (a three-panel piece meant to hide the work of domestic household staff), Goldona Broche plays with ideas of visibility and invisibility. The three-panel work shifts with the viewer’s position, evoking the layered and subjective nature of labor and memory. As the work shifts with the viewer’s position, so too does our understanding of whose labor and memories have shaped the house and whose stories history has too often left unseen.

About the Artist: Through textiles, sculpture and installation, Amalia Galdona Broche’s work materializes a psychological landscape of displacement. She examines history, cultures, and belief systems to investigate the process of transculturation and to weave alternative histories and mythologies. Drawing on the ancient language of textiles, Goldona Broche transforms fibers and mixed media into drawings, tapestries, sculptures, and installations that translate memory and displacement into worlds that feel both familiar and unsettlingly dreamlike. Shaped by her experience of leaving Cuba, her work treats cloth as a “second skin” and protective archive, engaging histories of diaspora, feminism, and lost tradition while seeking forms of connection that move beyond language, time, and geography.

Originally from Santa Clara, Cuba, she has lived in the US since her adolescence. Galdona Broche earned a BFA and a BA in Sculpture and Art History from Jacksonville University, and an MFA in Art Studio from the University of Kentucky. She has participated in residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, The Banff Centre, the Hambidge Center, The New York Academy of Art, etc., and has shown her work at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, California; The Parachute Factory, Lexington, KY; 48h Neukölln, Berlin, and more. Amalia Galdona Broche currently lives in Providence, RI where she teaches in the Textiles Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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On whose labor this house stands will be on display in the Reception Room of the Lippitt House Museum as part of On Being American | Contemporary Artworks, Echoes of the Past, an exhibition reimagining the historic house through the work of five contemporary artists. The exhibit will be open to the public on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays between May 13 and June 20, 2026.