INSPIRATION / ART & SELF-EXPRESSION
Niki Lopez
You can begin
before you
have the words.
A mask. A color. A question. An artist makes room for the conversation someone has not yet known how to start.
By Rob Urban
The phrase “elephant in the room” usually arrives after everybody has spent an impressive amount of energy avoiding something.
Niki Lopez built an arts organization around asking people to notice it.
Her project, What’s Your Elephant?, uses exhibitions, workshops and conversation to approach experiences people may find difficult to name. The work is rooted in South Florida, with Fort Lauderdale’s 1310 Gallery among its recurring gathering places. Lopez is an artist, curator and organizer, and the movement she founded became a nonprofit in 2023.
The invitation allows someone to choose where to begin. A person can make something, look at somebody else’s work, recognize a feeling, or begin with a question. Art offers several ways into a conversation that ordinary social habits might keep firmly closed.
Lopez has made that invitation part of her own artistic practice and part of the way she brings other people together. Those two activities keep feeding one another.
A mask can reveal something.
We tend to associate masks with concealment. In Lopez’s work, a mask can also become a way to examine what someone chooses to show, protect or express.
Her mask-making practice and workshops explore identity, personal experience and cultural symbolism. She connects the workshops to her own mixed-media art, including the use of cowrie shells and their significance within Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions. Participants create individual pieces while considering the stories and meanings they want to bring to them.
The object becomes a place to try an answer. What face do you present? What belongs on its surface? What might a material communicate that you would struggle to explain in a sentence?
Making those choices can be absorbing even when the result is not intended for a gallery. A person who would never volunteer to give a speech about identity may be willing to choose a color, attach an object or explain one part of a design.
I like the modesty of that possible beginning. Public conversation often rewards the person who already knows exactly what to say. Art can give somebody time to find out.
Honesty
can have
boundaries.
In an Art Loft interview published by PBS, Lopez explained that speaking through her own work had prompted other people to share experiences with her. She also described keeping some details private and being clear with participants that she is an artist, not a therapist.
I admire the judgment in that combination. Being open takes courage. Knowing what belongs to you, and what you are equipped to offer another person, takes care. Her example leaves room for a person to speak honestly and still have boundaries. Someone’s story can matter before it is complete, before it is public, and before they know how they want to tell it.
The artist remains
in the picture.
Lopez describes herself as an Afro-Latina, queer interdisciplinary artist. Identity, spirituality and transformation recur in her work, alongside her interest in how people gather and communicate. Her practice includes making visual art, producing exhibitions and collaborating with cultural and community organizations.
These are substantial jobs in their own right. The curator must decide which works belong in conversation. The organizer must make the room, supplies, collaborators and schedule come together. The artist must keep developing the work itself.
Calling someone a community builder can make all of that sound pleasantly effortless. It is more useful to look at what they actually arrange. Lopez’s projects provide the physical and social conditions for an encounter: objects to look at, questions to consider and opportunities to respond.
She is also a co-founder of Artists for Black Lives Matter and a founding member of the 1310 Bandits filmmaking collective. Her artistic life crosses media and includes people whose perspectives have often been pushed to the edges of public cultural life. Those commitments shape the people she brings together and the conversations she makes possible.
Freedom has
more than one voice.
For Echoes of Liberation, Lopez brought mixed-media work to the City of North Miami Beach’s Juneteenth Breakfast Experience in June 2026. The project description connects the pieces to ancestry, freedom, memory and self-definition. Visitors were invited to contribute their own reflections alongside the displayed work.
That changes the role of the audience. A visitor may still spend time quietly looking, but there is also a way to leave a response. The exhibition becomes a meeting between the artist’s choices and the experiences other people bring into the space.
The distinction matters especially with a subject such as liberation. It has a public history, and it also has meanings shaped by family, identity and circumstance. Inviting reflection allows those meanings to coexist without pretending that one short explanation can contain all of them.
Lopez’s project page also connects this body of work to her participation in NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s Artist’s Roundtable series for Juneteenth 2024. There is continuity across settings: a museum conversation, a civic gathering, the artist’s own developing body of work.
An exhibition need not solve the questions it raises to be worthwhile. Sometimes its most useful achievement is making a question harder to dismiss.
Several ways
to enter
the same room.
In late 2025 and early 2026, Lopez curated and produced SOIL: Where the Light Enters at 1310 Gallery in Fort Lauderdale. The exhibition brought together visual work, performance and opportunities for people to make art and talk. Its announced program included collage, mask-making and a session for parents, caregivers and children to create alongside one another.
The variety offered several ways to participate. Someone might come for an exhibition, someone else for a workshop, another person because a family activity felt approachable. A cultural space can become more accessible when there is more than one legitimate reason to enter it.
The programming also depended on collaborators: artists, performers, community groups and supporters. Lopez arranged a program in which other artists’ work could be encountered on its own terms.
That is a curatorial responsibility as much as an organizational one. A group exhibition should preserve differences among artists. If every contribution is forced to deliver exactly the same message, the audience loses much of the reason for bringing the work together.
An artist gets
to have a perspective.
Lopez made room for that independence in What We Carry, presented at 1310 Gallery from August 21 through September 10, 2026. The exhibition considered memory, identity, grief, belonging and the things that sustain people. It combined work by multiple artists with reflection and community activities, including collage and a drum workshop.
Its published statement distinguishes an individual artist’s viewpoint from the position of the curator or presenting organization. That is a thoughtful provision for a project built around conversation. Making room for a work involves allowing the artist to have a perspective, including one that does not settle comfortably into a shared slogan.
Listening has a format, too.
Lopez’s The Circle began in 2018 as a live interview series with artists, activists and social entrepreneurs, with conversations later made available as audio. The format extends her interest in gathering people beyond an exhibition’s opening hours.
An interview gives somebody time to explain the choices behind their work. That can be particularly valuable for creative people whose public presence is often reduced to a finished image, a performance or a short biography. The process becomes audible: what they are trying to do, what they have learned and what remains unresolved.
There is a connection here to Hope McMath’s work in Jacksonville, where exhibitions and community relationships likewise share a physical setting. Both artists take seriously what happens around the work as well as what appears on a wall. Their projects have distinct subjects and voices, but each asks a cultural space to participate in the life around it.
Lopez’s own invitation remains open-ended. A mask does not have to explain everything. A collage can contain a contradiction. A visitor can recognize something before knowing what to call it.
That room for an unfinished thought is valuable. The next meaningful conversation may begin with a person who has never considered themselves an artist, deciding that this color, this shape or this small object says something they have wanted to say for a long time.
About Niki Lopez and What’s Your Elephant
What is What’s Your Elephant?
What’s Your Elephant is an arts and education organization founded by Niki Lopez. It uses exhibitions, workshops and conversation to approach experiences that often go unspoken, and became a nonprofit in 2023.
What media does Niki Lopez work in?
Lopez is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose practice includes mixed-media work and masks, alongside curating exhibitions, organizing community art experiences and interviewing creative people.
Where does Niki Lopez work?
Niki Lopez is based in South Florida. Her projects include exhibitions and community programs at 1310 Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, as well as collaborations with other cultural and civic organizations.
Sources: Niki Lopez’s artist statement and project pages; What’s Your Elephant’s organizational history; and the published transcript of her Art Loft interview on PBS. Exhibition descriptions refer to their stated 2025 and 2026 dates. Reflections on expression, listening and care are Rob Urban’s.
For more of Rob’s writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.