Threads of Love: Intimacy, Domesticity and Tender Resilience by Michelle Silver
September 26, 2025
Threads of Love is a two-person exhibition curated by Beth Kantrowitz/bk projects featuring work by Delvin Lugo, a narrative figure painter working directly on vintage textiles, and Amber Mustafic, an embroiderer who hand-stitches personal mythologies that draw from memory, symbolism, and mysticism. Through their varied practices, Lugo and Mustafic explore domestic environments, familial lineage, intimate relationships, and human connection. The exhibition is on view at Distortion Society, a combined contemporary art gallery and tattoo studio in Beacon, New York, U.S. through October 12, 2025.
Amber Mustafic, Friday, 2025. Hand embroidery on linen, 4 x 4 inches. Photo by the artist.
Lugo’s vibrant oil paintings depict queer love and chosen kinship within the LGBTQIA+ community. Drawing from his personal and family photo archives, Lugo paints figures in familiar environments, capturing the layered tension between comfort and alienation that shapes domestic queer life. Growing up with tailor parents, Lugo considers textiles to be his first artistic tool. He paints directly onto vintage tablecloths, pillowcases and other home linens, honoring their natural form by hanging the work without stretcher bars and incorporating the embroidered details and lace within the painted compositions. These tender, materially rooted works honor the persistent beauty of domestic queer life and in making these personal spaces visible, Lugo’s work is an act of resistance in a polarized cultural reality.
Delvin Lugo, Brothers and Cousins, 2025. Oil on found embroidered vintage linen, 22 x 37 x 3 inches. Photo by the artist.
Mustafic’s delicate embroideries explore the sublimity and mysticism of intimate moments that bridge human connection, solitude and our relationship to the natural world. A first-generation Albanian American, Mustafic connects to her heritage through her maternal embroidery tradition and recurring references to Albanian mythology. Sacred icons from Albanian folklore—the sun, ocean, specific flora and fauna—appear throughout her work, carrying symbolism of ephemerality, infinite cycles, and overwhelming power. Trained as a painter, Mustafic uses cotton and silk threads as her pigments. By intertwining ancestral narratives with her personal experiences, her work investigates beauty and mysticism in the face of environmental and political uncertainty.
Amber Mustafic, Secrets, 2024. Hand embroidery on found textile, 17 x 12 inches. Photo by the artist.
Interview with the Curator & Artists
Excerpts from a filmed interview with the curator Beth Kantrowitz, and artists Amber Mustafic and Delvin Lugo. Interviewed by Michelle Silver on August 12, 2025.
Between Michelle Silver and curator Beth Kantrowitz
MS: Why did you pair Amber and Delvin for this show?
BK: I had met Delvin a couple years ago, and Amber after I met Delvin, and showed both of their works at different times. When [you and I] talked about doing a show, I kept thinking who would be the right pairing for an exhibition, who would make sense and connect with each other. I started reading a bit more about their work on their websites and their Instagram. There was a connection between the importance of culture, family history and materials. And so, it seemed almost like a natural fit that they would be together.
Amber’s family is from Albania; Delvin’s family is from the Dominican Republic. Amber’s grandmother did a lot of sewing and embroidery, and Devin’s parents were both tailors. So, it started becoming more evident how necessary thread, material, cloth, hands, handy work and hard work were – making things that weren’t easy and coming from lives that weren’t easy, you know, coming from other countries to this country just seemed very important to their work. And it seemed important to me to work with artists that had those backgrounds.
Between Michelle Silver and artist Amber Mustafic
MS: What inspires you? And who do you use as subjects in your work?
AM: I’m inspired by a million things, but I feel like if I had to boil my practice down a common thread that runs through a lot of my work is my fascination with the concept of the sublime, as well as the big umbrella term of mystical experience. And specifically, I’m really, really fascinated by the concept of creativity and art making itself as its own form of spiritual experience. Artist for a very long time, from Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint 100 years ago to very influential creative minds like Rick Rubin and David Lynch talk about the importance of meditation and their practices. I’m really interested in that practice of being a channel as an artist, of channeling from something other than yourself, other than your ego, and reaching to a more divine source. And as for subjects in my work, everything is fully autobiographical. So, whether it’s a depiction of myself or somebody close to me, or a specific plant or object, everything is based on my conscious experience, my felt experience, and how it has impacted me.
Amber Mustafic, Skye, 2025. Hand embroidery on linen, 4 x 4 inches. Photo by the artist.
MS: I love that. Thank you. Can you speak a little bit about your process?
AM: Sure. My connection to the fabric that I work on, I would say is first and foremost. Every piece has its own different journey. So, whether it’s working on top of a vintage textile or just a beautiful hand-dyed linen I found in the store, I start there first, and then I either draw directly on to the textile, or I use a carbon transfer paper that I use to transfer a drawing on top. And then I essentially paint with all my cotton and silk threads. I was a painter my whole life until I started embroidering. So, I approach embroidery the exact same way that I approach a painting with the way I blend colors and such.
Amber Mustafic, Solitude, 2025. Hand embroidery on found textile, 17 x 12 inches. Photo by the artist.
Between Michelle Silver and artist Delvin Lugo
MS: When and how did you decide to start painting directly on linens and textiles?
DL: I was visiting my parents, and at home, my mom always has on the dining room table a tablecloth with some sort of embroidery on it, some that she’s made, some that she’s also found. And while I was home, I had a dream that I was looking at paintings with stitching on them. And when I came downstairs to the living room and saw that tablecloth, like it just clicked. Something said, why not, you know, experiment with painting on this material because it will add more depth to the work and to the theme.
Delvin Lugo, Like a Prayer, 2024. Oil on found embroidered vintage linen, 14 x 13 x 2 inches. Photo by the artist.
It has a lot of personal meaning too, because my parents are tailors, and I always consider textiles to be my first artistic medium. I sewed a lot of Barbie’s clothes. I was actually doing a lot of stitching and embroidery as a kid, and my mom taught a class at this afterschool program that the nuns ran in our small town in Dominican Republic. I wanted to take the embroidery class, and they wouldn’t let me because I was a boy. So I still, I guess, try to validate those feelings from that time. But now I feel really comfortable using textiles and linens, and I love that they’ve had another life that I get to renew again.
Delvin Lugo, Poses, 2024. Oil on found embroidered vintage linen, 18 x 16 x 3 inches. Photo by the artist.
View the filmed interviews on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/distortion_society.
–Michelle Silver (she/her) is a painter, graphic designer and the Gallery Director of combined art gallery and tattoo studio Distortion Society in Beacon, NY. Merging contemporary art exhibitions with eclectic styles of tattooing, DS aims to break stigmas associated with each space and elevate the gallery and tattoo experiences through their intersection.
distortionsociety.com | @distortion_society
michellesilverart.com | @michellesilverstudio
