JOIRI MINAYA
OVER THE PAST DECADE, Joiri Minaya has developed a robustly layered body of work that speaks to the intricacies of Caribbean history and its subjects. Drawing on her upbringing and Carribbean heritage, the New York–born, Dominican Republic–raised artist creates photographs, installations, videos, and public art interventions that deal with themes of tourism, landscape, and the history of colonialism. Her current exhibition, “Joiri Minaya: Geographic Bodies” at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, helpfully surveys her own geographically influenced body of work. Organized by George Bolster and Anjuli Nanda Diamond, the exhibition showcases Minaya’s collage-like repurposing of stereotypical imagery of the tropics, such as hypersexualized female bodies or pristine crystal-clear waters. Bringing her local perspective to bear on these tropes, Minaya deploys the body as a site to explore Caribbean strategies of resisting colonization’s oppressive legacy and reflecting on “natural” beauty.
Among Minaya’s best-known bodies of work is “Containers,” 2015–20, a series of photographs and videos in which a female figure—clad head to toe in a colorful spandex bodysuit—poses amid lush tropical settings. Although the backdrops typically appear untouched and “natural,” they are, in fact, tourist sites, including the carefully groomed gardens of a resort. Likewise, the figure’s poses may appear spontaneous, yet they, too, are carefully staged. To produce the series, Minaya googled images of Dominican women, finding, to her dismay, predominantly sexualized imagery of Latin women, many in odalisque-like poses that Minaya, in turn, carefully re-creates in her practice. But if Minaya’s works evoke the male gaze, they do so only to repel it: Minaya subverts the sexualized representation of the female body by rendering the figures anonymous, cloaking their faces and figures in fabric and exposing only their eyes. With opacity and camouflage as key strategies, the tropical landscape and the body coalesce, making identity elusive. Here, Minaya’s approach recalls the writing of Édouard Glissant, who describes unintelligibility and opacity as tools whereby marginalized people might carve out a space for autonomy.
The “Containers” series also includes performances: Minaya and her models walk around in public fully clad in her spandex bodysuits—notably created from the same fabric used to make tiny, sexy swimsuits—catching the attention of onlookers. Though spandex is pliable and soft, Minaya has commented on how uncomfortable these garments are and how difficult it is to move in them—the experience of the wearer recalling that of female-presenting bodies across cultures. Indeed, the title of the series emphasizes how her approach invokes a broader, global discourse about the female body as a container of the concepts of the domestic, the sexualized, and the docile.
With opacity and camouflage as key strategies, the tropical landscape and the body coalesce, making identity elusive.
In other works, Minaya addresses US military interventions in the Dominican Republic. I can wear tropical print now #1 (INVADERS), 2018, for instance, is a kind of assisted readymade: Minaya found a touristy white shirt printed with black palm trees and added the words INVADERS 1965 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, setting the shirt inside a wooden frame lined with a similar black-and-white frond pattern. The work refers to a relatively recent imperialist intervention by the US in the Caribbean: President Lyndon Johnson’s military action in the Dominican Republic in 1965 during the country’s civil war. If mass-produced tropical motifs typically highlight the romantic idea of a beautiful landscape, Minaya’s linguistic interventions invite viewers to look beyond the beauty, to the historical and political. Importantly, tropical shirts also connote tourism, a driving force for economic development in the region. Many locals, however, are critical of the industry, because it creates an economy of pleasure for outsiders (via the privatization of beaches, for example) that insiders cannot access. In this work, Minaya creates an analogy between American military intervention and the exploitative neocolonial tourist economy.
I first encountered Minaya’s work in December 2019, when Fringe Projects in Miami commissioned two public interventions from the artist. For the resulting works, both part of her “Cloaking” series, 2019–, Minaya covered two bronze statues at the city’s Bayfront Park, one of the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León (who “discovered” Florida) and the other of Christopher Columbus. Minaya shrouded the monuments in a custom fabric patterned with motifs and vegetation from Indigenous, Afro-Caribbean, and Black traditions, such as rompe saraguey, a plant used by Indigenous and African populations for revitalization and protection. As in other works in the series—such as Encubrimiento (de la estatua de Cristóbal Colón en el Parque Colón de la Ciudad Colonial en Santo Domingo, República Dominicana) (Cloaking [of the statue of Christopher Columbus in Parque Colón of Ciudad Colonial in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic]), 2021, which Minaya realized in a public plaza in Santa Domingo—the artist brings attention to a site that pays homage to colonizers. Through the simple, economical gesture of cloaking the statues with patterned fabric, Minaya gives visibility to people who were affected by the colonizers and points to the violence of the past. She transforms the monument to the colonizer into a memorial to the colonized.
Six months after her Miami project was deinstalled, protesters vandalized the Columbus monument during the 2020 demonstrations against George Floyd’s murder. Analyzing the connections among aesthetics, public space, and social distress in an article for the ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America, Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd describes how the respective gestures by Minaya and the protesters raise important questions about monuments—their “ever-shifting role, meanings, validity and reception” and “how they have come to be seen as obscuring or glossing over the ‘messy’ or challenging details” of the histories they mark. In “Geographic Bodies,” Minaya shows how our bodies are tied to the chronicles of a locality and connected to others. The exhibition allows viewers to admire the Caribbean’s beauty, and to learn from and engage with the social and political realities of the Caribbean experience. One can see the best of its landscape and feel its people’s struggles.
“Joiri Minaya: Geographic Bodies” is on view through June 14 at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York.
María Elena Ortiz is a writer and a curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
