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Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Artist Joiri Minaya in Conversation with Patricia Eunji Kim, Monument Lab

Mar 9, 2021
4:30pm

Haverford, PA, USA
Monument Lab and Cantor Fitgerzald Gallery, Online

Artist Joiri Minaya in conversation with Monument Lab's Patricia Eunji Kim, as part of Notes for Tomorrow at Cantor Fitgerzald Gallery. 

Minaya's work The Cloakings was selected by Curatorial Intensive Alumna Marina Reyes Franco. Franco writes:

"Tropical prints and patterned fabrics have long been part of Joiri Minaya’s critical toolbox, having incorporated these materials in her work via photographs, performances, and installations. For some of those pieces, she would cover herself or others with a full bodysuit that simultaneously would make the wearer extremely noticeable and conceal them in a critique of exotification and otherness in relation to nature.

The Cloakings is a series of digital and real coverings for public monuments that represent colonial legacies. The specific interventions realized so far include a digital rendering of a Christopher Columbus statue located in Nassau, Bahamas; and the actual wrapping of another Columbus monument as well a statue of Juan Ponce de León in Miami, Florida. In the case of the latter two, these tropical print coverings were specifically designed as metaphors of resistance, incorporating plants used in Native American, Black and Afro-Caribbean rituals that reference poison healing, purging, cleansing, casting evil spirits away or protection, as well as the very plant that poisoned Ponce de León.

Through this process, Minaya resignifies her own work in order to create a statement on public space and national identity in relation, but not limited to, touristic and commemorative sites. The massive worldwide movement in defense of Black lives that took center stage during the Summer of 2020 demands a more just, decolonized future, and has consistently critiqued the reasons for keeping such monuments. By intervening on the statues, Minaya makes them hyper-visible and calls into question their place in our cities, and their ideological repercussions in our societies and our minds."
 

Notes for Tomorrow is on view from February 15-April 11, 2021. To learn more about the exhibition and programs at Cantor Fitgerzald Gallery click here.

Presenters
Joiri Minaya

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist whose work investigates the female body within constructions of identity, multicultural social spaces, and hierarchies.