Gladwell Projects

Operating as a shape-shifting ecosystem that prioritizes dialogue, experimentation, long-term relationships, and moves at the tempo of artistic inquiry, Gladwell Projects is designed to nurture artists across various stages of their careers, particularly those whose work challenges categorization. Gladwell Projects seeks to uplift practices that traverse formal, conceptual, and institutional boundaries through radical storytelling as a reclamation space where culture is made and seen through dynamic exhibitions and community-centered programming. It is a space where legacy meets the future: in motion, in dialogue, and always with intention.
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Lisu Vega Artis Bio: 

Lisu Vega (b. 1980, Miami, Florida; raised in Maracaibo, Venezuela; lives and works in Miami) is a Venezuelan American multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores ancestry, migration, and material memory through fiber and textile-based processes. Working across weaving, engraving, photography, sculpture, and immersive installation, Vega approaches textile as both a material language and a method of historical inquiry. Engaging the long lineage of textile traditions across Latin America, including Indigenous weaving practices of the Caribbean and northern South America, her work positions fiber as both cultural record and site of knowledge transmission, while the body and landscape emerge as sites through which personal and collective histories are inscribed. Vega will present a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Mint Museum, Charlotte (January 2027), followed by a second institutional solo exhibition at the Coral Springs Museum of Art, Florida (June 2027).

Central to Vega’s practice is an engagement with ancestral lineages that include Indigenous Wayuu weaving traditions alongside Spanish and Portuguese cultural inheritances. Through labor-intensive, hand-driven processes, she activates textile as a site of both cultural continuity and transformation. Recycled rope and fiber serve as primary materials in her work, chosen for their capacity to oxidize, transform, and register the passage of time. Vega frequently integrates sublimated photography within woven structures, allowing image and fiber to merge into tactile surfaces that function simultaneously as object, archive, and spatial environment. As the artist describes, weaving becomes “a gesture of thought and evocation,” where each knot and stitch carries the potential to transmit memory. 

Vega will present a solo exhibition organized by Gladwell Projects at the historic A&P Building in Jersey City (May 12th, 2026, through May 31st, 2026). Additional institutional programming includes a presentation at MAD Arts, Dania Beach, Florida (July 2026) and participation in the South Florida Cultural Consortium exhibition, curated by Kimari Jackson and Laura Socarraz-Novoa, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami (April through October 2026).

Recent solo exhibitions include Weaving Landscapes of Memory, curated by Rina Gitlin, Miami Dade College, Kendall Campus, Miami (2026); That Which Inhabits Me, curated by Sophie Bonet, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, Pembroke Pines (2025); Memoria Perdida, Tunnel Projects, Miami (2025); and Calle Chile, Callejón San Benito, Spellerberg Projects, Lockhart, Texas (2025), curated by Dainy Tapia. In 2025, Vega also presented a special solo project as a guest artist in the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art, curated by Coralie Claeysen-Gleyzon. 

Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as Tactics for Remembering, curated by Fabiola R. Delgado, Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington, Virginia (2025); Proyecto Creadoras, curated by Loren A. Gonzalez, National Art Gallery of Venezuela (2025); and exhibitions at the Natura Cica Museum, South Korea (2025). Vega’s work is also featured in Le Fil / Thread in Contemporary Art, written by Charlotte Vannier (Pyramid Publishing, France, 2025). 

Across her installations, fiber operates as both medium and witness, generating immersive environments where gesture, language, and material converge. Through works that may incorporate sound, Braille, sign language, video, and textile structures, Vega constructs spaces intended not simply to be viewed but physically encountered, inviting viewers into a sensory engagement with the layered histories embedded within the material body.

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Purvai Rai Artist Bio: 

Purvai Rai (b. 1994, New Delhi, India; lives and works between New York and New Delhi) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the entanglements between land, lineage, labor, and ecological precarity. Working across sculpture, textiles, drawing, and bookmaking, Rai situates her work within the agricultural and architectural histories of her ancestral village of Nawanpind in Punjab, a landscape shaped by monsoon cycles, colonial land interventions, forced crop shifts, and ongoing political protest.

 Rai will present a forthcoming solo exhibition organized by Gladwell Projects at the historic A&P Building in Jersey City (May 12th, 2026, through May 31st, 2026).

Her practice engages oral histories, devotional traditions, and archival research, drawing from sources that include family narratives, local agricultural knowledge, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, and Bhakti Sufi poetic traditions. As the artist describes, her work seeks “to navigate visible and invisible voices… those of my family, local communities, archives, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Bhakti-Sufi hymns, and machines.” Within her installations, sculpture, and textile works, materials function as both medium and witness, generating what she describes as an “architecture of remembrance,” a structure through which layered histories of land use, social hierarchy, climate change, migration, and spiritual practice across the subcontinent become materially legible.

Rai received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2025 and her BFA from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology in 2017. She was an Artist in Residence at the Henry Moore Foundation, United Kingdom, in 2024.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at Perrotin, New York; Nunu Fine Art, New York; THK Gallery, Cape Town; and Gallery Espace, New Delhi, and is included in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), India.

Across her practice, Rai treats materials such as fiber, paper, earth-based pigments, and sculptural assemblage as sites of historical transmission, constructing works that trace the relationship between agricultural labor, spiritual knowledge, and ecological change. Through these material investigations, her work proposes new ways of understanding land not only as territory, but as an evolving archive shaped by generations of human and environmental interaction.

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