MONTCLAIR, NJ.- The Montclair State University Galleries presents Maria Yolanda Liebana: A Place to Be Held, the first solo museum exhibition by New York City-based artist Maria Yolanda Liebana.
Bringing together painting, sculpture and immersive installation, the exhibition premieres three ambitious site-specific commissions created for the George Segal Gallery, transforming the museum into a series of imagined environments that explore motherhood, spirituality, identity and belonging. The exhibition will be on view from September 15 through December 11, 2026.
A first-generation Latinx artist who grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, Liebana creates richly layered works inspired by personal experience, ancient mythology, Catholic imagery, Tarot, art history and contemporary popular culture. Using materials including pearls, glitter, sequins, mirrored surfaces, beads, wallpaper, and rhinestones, she blurs the boundaries between the sacred and the everyday, the playful and the profound. Throughout her work, familiar symbols become tools for imagining new possibilities of care, transformation, and self-invention.
As guest curator Kristen E. Evangelista notes, "Embracing her self-proclaimed identity as a ‘pop culture vulture,' Liebana transforms nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s into a world of new possibilities, dissolving the boundaries between beauty and the grotesque."
Inspired by the birth of her daughter, the artist’s work explores motherhood as both a physical and spiritual landscape shaped by labor, wonder, and change. Alongside selections from Liebana's acclaimed Venus Crusades and Tarot Card series, the exhibition debuts a new body of work that marks the artist's most ambitious immersive project to date.
“My work invites curiosity and encourages viewers to look closely, question what they see and make unexpected connections. Through maximalism, glamour, and kitsch, I create immersive environments that invite participation, where every object, symbol and material becomes an invitation to curiosity and personal interpretation,” says Liebana.
At the center of the exhibition is A Place to Be Held, a lush installation inspired by the hidden private gardens of Jackson Heights, Queens. Decorative wrought-iron fencing encloses an Eden-like landscape that feels both welcoming and inaccessible, inviting visitors to consider how spaces of protection can also create exclusion. The work reflects how motherhood has transformed her sense of freedom, care, and community.
A second installation, Still Life for the Devout, transforms the gallery into a cosmic arcade centered on a claw machine filled with symbolic objects. Drawing connections between Catholic traditions, Tarot imagery, Dutch still-life painting and popular culture, the work turns a familiar game of chance into a reflection on fate, fulfillment and the unexpected choices that shape our lives.
Responding directly to the gallery's architecture, Liebana also introduces Portal for the Seen, three stained-glass windows that bathe the space in color and light. Filled with magical, floral and kitsch imagery, these luminous works create a sanctuary where multiple identities, histories and possibilities coexist.
Together, these immersive environments invite visitors to experience Liebana's personal mythology—one where beauty, excess, spirituality and everyday life intertwine to imagine more expansive ways of belonging.
