Image: Lucia Hierro (Dominican American, b. 1987), Nuestra Silla, 2026, painted steel. Courtesy of the artist
The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, in Florida will open "Nuestra Silla" on 17 October 2026, an outdoor sculpture by the New York-based conceptual artist Lucia Hierro that the museum is showing on long-term loan. The work is Hierro's first public sculpture, and its Spanish title means "Our Chair".
"Nuestra Silla" takes the Monobloc chair – the one-piece white plastic lawn chair mass-produced since 1970 – and enlarges it to a monumental scale in painted steel. Hierro has painted it a vivid red, a colour the museum associates with festivity and celebration, turning an everyday object into a sculpture about connection and shared experience.
For the artist, the chair recalls the social life of the bodegas she knew growing up in New York, where a simple seat can stand for rest, gathering, hospitality and community. The museum places the work within a Pop art lineage that includes Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, artists who engaged critically with popular culture and mass production.
Hierro, who is Dominican American, was born in 1987 and raised in Washington Heights and Inwood, the Manhattan neighbourhoods known as New York's Little Dominican Republic, and now lives in the South Bronx. Working across sculpture, digital media and installation, she often focuses on archiving bodega culture and on critiquing capitalism. She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2013), has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and is represented in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The long-term loan is sponsored by the museum's Collectors Circle, with additional support from the State of Florida's Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.
