Argentine artists Leo Chiachio and Daniel Giannone who together form the duo Chiachio & Giannone were painters at one point in their careers. Their combined artistic identity has since been forged working in textile, with such labor-intensive techniques as embroidery. The two have created an extensive body of lushly stitched, vibrantly colored hand-made textile works, the focus of which is frequently portraiture—specifically of the artists, who are a couple, and their dachshunds.

“Celebrating Diversity,” their exhibition and residency at the Museum of Latin American Art, is part of an ongoing two-fold project of textile mosaics and pride flags first shown in 2018 at the Kirchner Cultural Centre (CCK) in Buenos Aires, in “Democracy Under Construction,” a group exhibition that examined the future in the context of Argentina’s 35 years of uninterrupted democracy. Their project in that context reflected on the values that underlie democracy: community and diversity, which are at the heart of an open society. In this country, where recent history has shown how quickly those values can be threatened, their work takes on renewed urgency.

Working in craft media traditionally associated with femininity and domesticity, they complicate gender roles and assumptions of “serious work.” In a playful investigation of identity, the duo lightheartedly explores their creative partnership in which the discrete boundaries of the individual blur and shift—like binary stars, the two revolve, in each other’s orbit. Their series of textile mosaics, “Family in 6 Colors,” evoke ancient Roman tile mosaics and redefine and extend the boundaries of family—from the nuclear family unit to the social bonds that are the family of one’s choosing. These ultimately compass their artistic family as the duo devises lineages of LGBTQ positive artists that carry their artistic DNA.

Chiachio & Giannone, Family in six colors #6 / Familia a seis colores #6 (2018) courtesy of the artists and MOLAA.

Those bonds extend to museum visitors in their “Pride Flags,” created in collaboration with artist Cecilia Koppmann and visitors who contribute fabric or decorate swatches with messages of pride, acceptance, love and advocacy to be quilted in. Recycled cloth in both their mosaics and pride flags carries the histories of those who donate to their artistic enterprise, reminiscent of Joel Otterson’s quilts, reclaimed from his grandmother’s and sewn into new works.

The exhibit includes mosaics from the “Family in 6 Colors” series, made in 2018. The pièce de résistance, California Family in 6 Colors (2019), created in residence at MOLAA, derives from David Hockney’s double portrait, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968). In the role of Barchardy, Chiachio returns the viewer’s gaze, wearing a diadem fashioned after Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s ornate sculptural work. Next to Giannone’s Isherwood, is a “69” à la Lari Pittman. The imagery includes references to punk front man Tomata du Plenty, Patssi Valdez, Carlos Almaraz and others.

Primary in this lineage are Hockney and Sonia Delaunay, whom the duo describe as their artistic grandparents. Delaunay’s unfettered, lyrical use of color, in discrete geometric shapes, is evident in their gamesome sense of pattern, color and design, and Hockney’s influence is seen too, in their lush color, figuration and unabashed depiction of their lives together.