lexa toledo villanueva (she/her) is a queer Filipina American mixed-media artist, tarot practitioner, and mother based in Gig Harbor, WA. Her work investigates the magic found in caregiving, ritual, dreams, and cycles, and is often driven by contemporary social issues. lexa is the Frye Store’s 2026 summer Alcove Artist, and her original work From Cavite With Love exemplifies the interwovenness of her multifaceted identity and art practice. Read on to learn all about what inspired this incredible work and the special person who helped lexa create it.
by Caitlyn Edson, photos provided by the artist unless otherwise noted
Artist lexa toledo villanueva is no stranger to the Frye Store. Her beloved Future Ancestor tarot decks and celestial ceramic mugs have delighted visitors, and this summer, she has created something completely original for the Store’s central alcove. Drawing from recent travels to her family’s homeland in the Philippines, lexa’s new composition From Cavite With Love delivers a lush splash of color to the heart of the Store, just in time for the summer exhibition season.
From Cavite With Love is a mixed-media collage that weaves together multiple techniques imbued thematically with elements of belonging, cultural specificity, and home. “The first large-scale paper weaves I ever made were during the postpartum period following my daughter’s birth, and this piece expands on those foundations,” explains lexa.
“When I began dreaming about this piece, I was still steeping in the nostalgia of a family trip to the Philippines earlier this year,” she recalls. “It was the first time I was accompanied by both my mother and my daughter, who was experiencing the Philippines for the very first time.” She describes walking through the bustling, colorful streets of Cavite, holding her mother’s hand on one side and her daughter Isadora’s on the other. “It felt surreal to share this special place with my little one, seeing it freshly through her eyes, while listening to my parent’s beautiful stories of being raised there.”
lexa’s composition is proud and joyful; its vibrancy and layered complexity evoke the unique essence of her memories of Cavite. In creating it, she not only wove paper to illuminate this treasured place, but she also wove intention into each carefully placed element of the collage. “I wove in my gratitude,” she explains, “for the lineage I get to carry forward, and the strength, resilience, and love of my ancestors.”
From Cavite With Love was also inspired by the Frye’s fantastic summer exhibitions. “As I researched the work of Tom Lloyd and Lotus L. Kang while preparing my piece, it felt like a beautiful dialogue across time and medium,” says lexa, who was moved by Lloyd’s fierce advocacy for community involvement in the arts, and Kang’s emphasis on the human body.
For lexa, sitting with these works was an especially physical experience. She says that Lloyd’s light sculptures make her “chest buzz with excitement” and that her senses were soothed while diving deeper into Kang’s recent installations. These sensations informed her final composition, in which vivid shades of turquoise, coral, and jade are balanced by a weaving technique that speaks to corporality, identity, and metamorphosis. “Creating large paper weaves is a somatic experience,” lexa explains, “telling the story of the ways that caregivers and guardians often feel our identities reassemble, weaving new pieces into the whole.”
Embodying the roles of caregiver and guardian to her daughter has been an expansive experience for lexa, who says that “becoming a parent has been one of my greatest sources of inspiration.” In motherhood, lexa’s artistic practice has waxed, shape-shifted, and returned to earlier studies that embrace natural elements from the outdoors. She says that her favorite way to spend time with Isadora is in the garden, where stewardship of the land inspires a sense of belonging and magic. Her artwork has also evolved to speak more directly to social justice issues, she says, “because becoming a parent solidified a deep inner knowing I’ve always had, that we are all connected on this earth and must rely on each other.”
Alongside her ongoing studio practice, lexa is currently studying to become a mental health and art therapist, which she describes as a continuation of her intentions as an artist and tarot reader. lexa also teaches art at her daughter’s preschool and continues gravitating towards values-aligned commissions for communities she cares about such as Families for Ceasefire and Perinatal Support Washington. “I feel incredibly lucky,” she says, “because much like my artwork, everything I do is interwoven and feeds into the other. My work as an art teacher expands my experience as an art therapist-in-training, while my parenting is influenced by the liberatory, anti-oppressive psychological theories I’ve been studying in graduate school.”
lexa has also been intentional about weaving her daughter into her artistic practice, welcoming Isadora into the studio to create alongside and with one another. “Since my daughter was born, I decided to include her in my creative process whenever I can, wanting the world she grows up in to be filled with the joy of making,” she says. “Now that she is four years old, it is normal for her to see me as her art teacher at school and as a co-creator at home, where art is just a way of playing.”
Not only did Isadora inspire elements of lexa’s alcove commission, but she also helped create it. “She was a huge part of the process of making From Cavite With Love,” explains lexa, recalling their process of hand-mixing a unique acrylic color palette, guided by their shared memories from the Philippines. They used these colors to paint large pieces of archival watercolor paper together, which lexa later cut and carefully weaved into what would become a stunning snapshot of Cavite.
Weaving—with paper, through intention setting—is intrinsic to lexa’s identity and how she moves through the world as an artist, mother, organizer, and healer. The weaving practice she explored in From Cavite With Love inspires a closer look at the multitudes contained within each of us, and within each place we inhabit or long to return to. This work transcends borderlines and spans lineages. It connects a sense of belonging between the past and the future. And for lexa, “it contemplates what it means to be a mother who feels a sense of home and family in multiple places, whose identity is woven with others and deeply connected across distances and generations.”
From Cavite With Love is on view in the Frye Store alcove through September 2026. Join us this season to behold this stunning original work and be sure to follow lexa toledo villanueva on social media to trace the creative path of this incredible local artist.