Curated by William Hernandez Luege

The City of Berkeley Cube Space is a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at 2010 Addison Street. Unlike traditional galleries, its curated exhibits are always visible to the public through three glass walls in a 200 sq. ft. space. The space features a rotating series of three-month exhibitions by emerging and mid-career Bay Area artists.

Decorative wooden thresholds, like the one seen here, are found all across the American Southwest and feature prominently on the balconies of California’s Spanish-style homes. This ornamental screen, called a mashrabiy’ya, was used in traditional North African and Middle Eastern architecture to create a boundary between inside and outside spaces. It offers privacy while still allowing air and light through, enabling both visibility and concealment, control and openness. Traditionally, they were used in the practice of protecting or covering things considered sacred.

In The Architectural Veil, Bay Area-based artist Joanna Keane-Lopez reinterprets this form through ponderosa pine and bolsters the design with earthen adobe, quartzite stone, and woven textiles—substances that trace a history of architectural movement from Western Asia and North Africa to Spain and the Americas. These components are shaped by colonial expansion, Indigenous traditions, and the layered connections between craft and construction that emphasize the sanctity of natural resources. The built environment of the “American West” is a legacy that spans continents, and these aspects of the installation each evoke a component of this story.

By transforming structural features into sculpture, The Architectural Veil asks how materials contain cultural memory and how the spaces we inhabit shape our understanding of belonging and separation. This exhibit opens a space for reflection, urging us to consider how the built world, both industrial and handcrafted, is never a given but always the result of long processes of migration, adaptation, and transformation.