Mending My Garden: Borinquen Gallo at Alessandro Berni Gallery
- Art Dealer Street
- Jun 2
- 6 min read
Borinquen Gallo’s latest solo exhibition “Mending My Garden” (May 22 – June 29, 2025) unfurls like a visionary botanical dream in Chelsea. Through towering woven tapestries and floor installations, Gallo transforms trash into treasure and invites us into a reimagined urban garden. The show “reframes our relationship to waste, beauty, and resilience” – a fitting leap for an artist who has long made art from the discarded.
Born in Rome to Italian–Puerto Rican parents, Gallo is a Bronx-based artist known for weaving together threads of social and environmental commentary. A Cooper Union and Hunter College alumna (BFA in Painting and Sculpture, MFA in Painting), she is also an educator, serving as Adjunct Associate Professor at Pratt Institute. In her practice, she delves into themes of beauty, community, socio-cultural systems and structures through sculpture and installations made using a range of repurposed materials.
From early in her career, Gallo has collected trash bags, caution tape, debris netting and plastic ribbon — everyday detritus of city life — and painstakingly twisted and braided them into complex woven forms. As she explains, “the inherent qualities of materials that we consume and dispose resonate for me on a personal and social scale… Through manipulating and reconfiguring ordinary, disposable materials into new combinations, I extrapolate a beauty in unexpected places.” Her work is deeply process-driven: “Twisting, braiding, weaving these materials becomes a way to domesticate, redeem, and humanize my surroundings.” In Gallo’s hands, something as prosaic as an orange caution ribbon or a black trash net becomes an agent of wonder and healing.
A Garden of Resilience and Community
In Mending My Garden, Gallo brings this vision to full bloom. The title suggests both a personal sanctuary and a call to repair something wounded. Indeed, the exhibition feels like strolling through a wild, enchanted garden grown from the ruins of city life. Bright, tangled vines of plastic drape walls and crawl on the floor; live plants poke out of mirrored pools of soil; and soft ruffles of color burst where least expected. Gallo invites us into a reimagined garden where discarded remnants become symbols of healing and interconnectedness. The gallery space becomes both tactile and conceptual: organic references (flowers, trees, bell shapes) emerge from hard-edged industrial materials, blurring the line between the synthetic and the natural. It’s a space that is both personal and political, echoing Gallo’s belief that art and dialogue go hand in hand. She has said of her community-based work that “we cannot [build] the future we want… through dialogue and collaboration, dealing with our differences and finding common ground.” In Mending My Garden, the loom of community is woven literally into art: the mythic garden in each piece suggests that human-made environments can, with care and imagination, foster new life and unity.
Visually, the show’s centerpiece motifs are unmistakable: tiger stripes and tiger lilies in vivid orange. For example, Tiger Lillies (2024) explodes in a cascade of burnt-orange petals, entirely hand-made from debris netting, plastic bags and caution tape. From afar it reads like a wall of living flowers; up close, one sees the meticulous knots and fringe where each petal has been cut and twisted. The piece’s color recalls spring blossoms in a landfill, suggesting that beauty can erupt even from danger-colored tape. Nearby hangs its sister-work, Tiger against Tiger (2025), a similarly large-scale tapestry woven from the same striking orange “CAUTION” ribbon and black cords. It resembles two tigers facing off — or two halves of a single tiger’s pelt — with its banded stripes in the lower portion of the form. Both works sweep toward the floor like leonine shrouds: the material pools in loose tendrils, as if the felines have slinked off the wall and let their coats unravel behind them. The effect is powerful and slightly unsettling, like nature confronting us in the midst of industrial chaos.
In another corner, Gallo’s “Fertile Grounds” series grounds the exhibition with literal foliage. Fertile Grounds 1 (2025) and Fertile Grounds 3 (2025) are two tall vertical weavings that incorporate live plants into their structure. Here the caution tape and netting form the “soil” that cradles small potted flowers and grasses. Punctuating the orange and black weave, green leaves and blooms push through the synthetic web, as though a wild greenhouse were framed on the wall. The plants are not mere decoration: they grow slowly over the course of the show, changing the piece day by day. The title “Fertile Grounds” feels literal — Gallo has made an art piece into something you could almost plant. The juxtaposition is beautiful and hopeful: these woven tapestries literally bear life, suggesting that even our thrown-away materials might nourish future growth.
Smaller works add intimacy and narrative. Wounded Love (2024) is a narrow hanging of netting and repurposed plastic. In it, frayed edges and shifts of color give the sense of patched-up heartbreak or a scarred heart in healing. Its title and the ragged hole in its center suggest a love hurt but not destroyed — knotted closed, held together by care. Likewise, Hear Them Ringing? (2025) is a delicate banner of netting and tape. The title evokes bells and alarms, and the tapestry’s shape — long and narrow — suggests a ringing bell or a warped guitar. Its orange and white forms could be read as sound waves or exclamation marks. In this quiet piece, Gallo seems to be asking us to pay attention to the world around us, to listen. The materials themselves — bright tape and loosely knotted fibers — make it feel urgent yet fragile.
Perhaps the most poetic work is Mirror Mirror… on the Floor (2025). Laid out beneath a front window, it consists of three upended car rims encasing actual flowering plants, set into a shallow bed of soil atop a mirror tile. In other words, the plants literally grow from the ground, framed by scrap metal, and reflected infinitely back to the viewer. Peering into it feels like stepping into a secret garden: cars and trees from the street mingle with your own reflection in the mirrored tiles. It’s a gentle inversion — we look down to see ourselves surrounded by new green life, in a patch of “earth” that Gallo has created from dirt and debris. The rims suggest growth rings of trees or rings of safety, and the title Mirror Mirror (a nod to Snow White) reminds us that self-reflection and nature-reflection are entwined. This installation underscores the exhibition’s magic: even the coldest urban artifacts (metal, mirror, discarded wheels) are rendered soft and soulful when woven with care and life.
All these works together underscore Gallo’s core message: that hope and beauty can emerge from what we dismiss as worthless. In Gallo’s hands, the synthetic becomes soulful, the broken made whole, and the ignored brought back into focus. Her laborious weaving process literally stitches back together the fabric of a world frayed by consumption. A discarded plastic sheet becomes an orange blossom; a pile of soil and mirrors becomes a blooming pond. The feeling is quietly triumphant and emotional. In a time when so much of our environment and community feels unraveled, Mending My Garden delivers a restorative vision: Gallo’s garden shows us that healing is possible, one knot at a time.
For collectors and art lovers, this exhibition is not just aesthetically striking — it’s emotionally transformative. It asks us to reconsider the meaning of “trash,” urging empathy for the world we often ignore. Walking through, many viewers find themselves unexpectedly moved: touched by the fragility of the small flowers, humbled by the scale of the tapestries, and ultimately uplifted by the triumph of creativity over waste. It is rare to see an exhibition that so seamlessly blends craft, concept, and heart. One leaves Mending My Garden thinking, “Wow — this is what art can do.” Gallo has taken the flotsam of modern life and woven from it a manifesto of hope. Her garden blooms despite us, reminding everyone who sees it that from what we discard can grow renewal, beauty, and — perhaps most importantly — a sense of togetherness.
Exhibition Details 👨🏼🎨 Borinquen Gallo: Mending My Garden 📆 Dates: May 22 – June 29, 2025 📍 Location: Alessandro Berni Gallery, 532 W 28th Street, New York, NY 10001 👉 Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday | 12 PM – 6 PM 🔗 Contact: art@alessandrobernigallery.com | www.alessandrobernigallery.com
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