%2007.jpg)
When we meet over Zoom in late September, the artist Manuela Solano greets me in her club outfit: white leather jacket with fringe, white crop top, white hot pants, and a custom white leather harness used to secure her white cane to her body when she isn’t using it. It’s an incredible look. But she isn’t actually going out to a club tonight. The outfit is meant as more of a demonstration—evidence of her ebullient life in Berlin, something she had to carve out for herself as a blind trans woman new to the city.
That joie de vivre becomes something of a theme throughout our conversation. Solano, 38, who was born in Mexico but has lived in the German capital since 2019, is about to open her largest solo museum show to date at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Called “Alien Queen / Paraíso Extraño,” the exhibition (October 9–January 4) contains over 30 massive acrylic paintings of queer and pop icons, both real and fictional, from the 1990s and 2000s. Figures like Cher, Sinead O’Connor, and Marge Simpson are rendered from memory in vivid detail, as are scenes from films like Alien and The NeverEnding Story. Solano chose each subject for what they represent to her personally and in the broader culture. In this way, these portraits become almost conceptual.
Solano lost her sight more than a decade ago, stemming from an HIV-related infection. But she never stopped painting, and with her studio assistants she has refined a technique that involves nailing pipe cleaners and string to canvas to form a tactile outline. In the years since then, Solano’s work has taken different turns. At times she paints words or phrases on her canvases, like “Is this your first time here, sweetie?” from the 2024 series Blind, Transgender and Wild. Other paintings are tender renderings of dinosaurs or her family. A gallery show earlier this year in Madrid comprised five large self-portraits in which Solano explored different aspects of her identity, acknowledging that none of us is just one thing.
She has shown an astonishing amount the past few years; she was included in the 2018 New Museum Triennial and had large solo shows at ICA Miami and Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, ICA Miami, and Pérez Museum Miami.
But this show at Museo Tamayo is special. Most of the work has never been displayed publicly. “It feels unreal. This is exactly what I was aiming for seven years ago when I first started making that painting Alien Queen without any destination for it, with other projects that we had to borrow time from, fantasizing that I wanted to show this in the Tamayo museum and kind of telling myself, That’s not going to happen,” Solano tells me. “And here we are. I’m shocked, I would say, in a good way.”
Ahead of the opening, we discussed Karen O fan art, truths gleaned from creating as a blind person, and why discovering clubbing felt like “a baptism.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Vogue: What was the impetus behind the title of the show, “Alien Queen / Paraíso Extraño”?
Manuela Solano: The Alien films have been almost sacred to me since I was a little kid, so I decided to make a portrait of the Alien Queen. I was kind of stuck on those two words, and also “paraíso extraño,” which appears in a song by the Spanish pop singer Mónica Naranjo. “Alien Queen” conveys something that is other than us, but it’s also majestic and powerful, and “paraíso extraño” [“strange paradise” in English] is a place or an experience, perhaps a state of being that is also strange, but nonetheless paradisiac. But now that it’s finished and about to open, I would say this show is mostly about my exuberance and my joy, and also my drive and my brio and my lust for life and my libido—the life in me. But the show is about many other things. These [paintings] are all characters from pop culture, and as such, they speak to those traits in all of us, not just me.
Are these pop culture figures that you grew up with or had special connections to?
Half and half. A lot of them were very special to me as a little kid, like Karen O. The last painting we finished for this show was Karen O’s Hands or Maps. As a teenager, I was very into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I saw them live in Mexico City in 2005, and back then I kept making little drawings of her in my notebooks. And then there was an open call for fans to design a flag, and I sent one in, and it was included in the booklet for their second album. Then a few months after that, it was my first semester in college, and for an assignment for a digital-illustration class I designed a box for a cereal named Karen O’s. I took a photo and sent it to this email address I found on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ website. I wasn’t thinking it would actually come to anything, but a couple weeks later, I got an email from the band’s PR person saying that Karen O loved it, and she wanted my permission to put it up on her blog. And obviously as an 18-year-old studying art and a fan, it felt like such a big moment for me, knowing that my art could bridge gaps. Now, 20 years later, that painting crystalizes a lot of that impulse.
That’s amazing.
There are also characters in this show like Christina Aguilera or Pink or even Jan Crouch, the televangelist. I never would have thought they would mean something to me. Then I have this idea in my head of a painting of them, and it just gnaws at my brain, like, Wouldn’t it be so funny to show a painting of Christina Aguilera in the video for “Dirrty” in the museum? And then I can’t shake the idea, it just tickles me for whatever reason. Usually when something is funny, it makes for a good work of art, so I make the painting and then later I figure out why it was tickling me. With Christina Aguilera, it was only a few weeks ago in talking about it with a friend of mine, I realized nowadays how much I have in common with that character. I too, every Saturday night, I’m out dancing in a jockstrap, all grimy and sweaty.
Is there a particular mood you’d ascribe to these paintings? Are they maybe nostalgic, or irreverent?
These paintings, all of them have a very serious side to them. Maybe on some initial level it could be said to be irreverent. But then usually as time goes by, as I figure out my connection with these characters, I develop a reverence for them. I don’t think they are nostalgic either. As I said, the things that I find in these characters are celebratory, victorious. But also, these are not just portraits of these characters. It could be said they are all self-portraits as well, but I would also like to think they are portraits of all of us. These characters reflect us. We see our ambitions and our desires and our humor and our fears in these characters. So in these paintings, I’m not really presenting a past or anything that’s been lost. On the contrary, I think they’re very much alive.
Did you always want to be an artist?
Yes, though the thing I wanted to grow up to be changed a lot as a little kid. An artist was one of them. I was told since a very young age, You’re such an artist, you’re going to be an artist. At one point, I wanted to be a marine biologist, as did every other kid. [Laughs.] But still, the thing I do now is the same thing I was doing back then. I was putting myself out there through painting and drawing.
Could you share a little bit about your current painting process?
I knew that I had to figure out a way to use my sense of touch instead of my sense of sight. And so I started experimenting all those years ago with things that I could put on the canvas that I could touch. But I also knew that I didn’t want these to become sculptures; I wanted them to remain paintings, so I had to put something on the canvas that I could also remove. At first, the canvas was stretched on regular stretchers, but the nails [used to attach string or pipe cleaners as outlines] kept wobbling and falling off. They weren’t nailed through anything other than the fabric. And that’s when I decided to start stretching my canvases directly on the wall, because there needs to be something firm behind for the nails to hold. And that’s also why I paint with my fingertips instead of brushes. I can feel how much paint I’m placing on the canvas, and I have more control over the shape.
Is there anything about making art as a blind person that you wish people knew?
The first thing that comes to mind is that art is inside us. Art is not the painting that you’re looking at. Art is what that painting does to you and what was going on in me that made me put that painting out there. People forget that. They just see what they’re seeing and stay with that. But the true art piece is what’s behind it and what’s inside you. Being blind has pointed that out for me. I could talk at length about things like accessibility within the art world and accessibility in general, and also misconceptions about disability. You could fill books about that. There’s always a need for more access to [information], and I’ve always tried to change misconceptions. I wish more people and institutions paid more attention to their audience with disabilities.
And Berlin, where you’ve lived for six years—what’s your life like there?
Well, here’s another misconception about blind people. That’s why I’m wearing this. [Solano stands up to better show her all-white clubbing outfit.] This look is for the club. I started going out a couple of years ago. Before that I was very frustrated because I desperately wanted to be a part of the Berlin you hear about: the parties, the crazy adventures. And I kept finding myself sitting here alone, even though I have a lot of friends. But there was one time when my brother Danny was visiting and we were both really hungover and bored and depressed, and it was the dead of winter, and I said, “Fuck it. We’re going out, get ready. We’re going to Berghain.” And he was like, “How are we going to get in?” I said, “I’m going to get us in. Don’t worry about that.” And we go to Berghain, and there we are, having a drink. And I realized for the first time how much I could tell about a space by hearing. I finished my drink and I said to Danny, “Okay, I’m going to go dancing.” He offered to help take me to the dance floor, but I wanted to try by myself. So I stood up, I whipped out my white cane, and I started walking in the direction of the crowd. And eventually I was surrounded by bodies, and I could feel they were moving, but not walking—they were dancing. So I folded my white cane and I clipped it on my waist, and everybody around me was like, Whoa, are you really blind? Whoa. Something changed after that. I started taking myself out almost every weekend. It was a baptism. I discovered a side of myself that I didn’t know was there: a very outgoing, very lively, fiery, feisty, fun-loving person. I fell in love with Berlin that way.
That’s wonderful. It sounds like people were surprised.
All the time people are surprised, like, “Oh, you go out? Who takes care of you?” I take care of me. The club takes care of me. I’ve learned that there’s always somebody who’s happy to offer assistance if I need it. Berlin can be a city that favors individuality. In many ways it’s a bad thing because it makes you a loner. But in many ways it’s a good thing. And especially in my case, with my disability, it helped me. It’s a place where even though I’m blind, and even though I’m transgender, I’m not that out of place anywhere. I can just take myself out and spend eight hours in the club and do whatever I want there. And I’m very grateful for that. I try to show that in my daily life, but also in my work.
“Manuela Solano: Alien Queen / Paraíso Extraño” is open at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City from October 9, 2025, through January 4, 2026.