The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures is pleased to announce our Virtual Artist in Residence. This virtual opportunity gives up and coming artists the opportunity to share their work outside their usual environments, providing them added exposure. MLL will spotlight artist’s artwork on our website and in the marketing for MLL’s Lecture Series. This residency is funded by the Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin Amercian Studies
Virtual Artist in Residence
2021-2022 | Joiri Minaya
Photo Credit: Joiri Minaya in the studio. Photo by Joeal Gaal, courtesy of the Red Bull House of Art.
Biography
Joiri Minaya (1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work navigates binaries in search of in-betweenness, investigating the female body within constructions of identity, multi-cultural social spaces and hierarchies. Recent works focus on questioning historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical identity from a decolonial stance.
Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. She graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic (2009), the Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013).
She has participated in residencies like Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, BronxArtSpace, Bronx Museum AIM Program, the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Transmedia Lab at MA Scène Nationale, Red Bull House of Art Detroit, Lower East Side Printshop, Art Omi, ISCP and Vermont Studio Center.
Minaya has exhibited internationally across the Caribbean and the U.S. She is a grantee from Jerome Hill, BRIC’s Colene Art Brown’s Award, NY Artadia, the Nancy Graves Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (Emerging Artist Grant), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (Emerging Artist and Painters and Sculptors Grants), Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship, the Great prize and the Audience Award XXV Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes, the Exhibition Prize Centro de la Imagen (D.R.), and the Great Prize of the XXVII Biennial at the Museo de Arte Moderno (D.R).
Statement of artist about the three pieces of art we chose:
The paintings La tía y la Santa & Papito belong to a series of paintings and patterns I made in 2011 called El Papaupa de la Matica. It was through these works that I first started to think critically about the role of women and their relation to domesticity, class and religion, and contextualized in a patriarchal society that has a history of colonization and regime. In the domestic environment I grew up in, gender roles were a binary, very defined and differentiated from one another. The female role was more often related to restrictions and to ideas of dependence and resignation. The family portraits and the patterns in the series double as an exploration of archetypes, exploring behaviors repeated throughout society.
Based on toile and baroque wallpaper designs, associated with class privilege due to their European lineage, and widely found in colonized territories throughout the Americas, the patterns I was designing at the time acted as elements inside these paintings, or were applied to the background walls. The phrase “papaupa de la matica” comes from popular Dominican culture and it describes a patriarchal man who thinks of himself as an all-deserving leader or authority. The phrase also brings up associations with the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, who used the palm tree as the symbol of his party.
The piece Las locas (2009) is an installation of paintings exploring the Dominican Carnival as one of the few events that provides a relative safety for expressing and presenting visible queerness in public space in the Dominican Republic, and celebrating exuberant, gender-bending and non-normative codes, from the subjects being depicted to the formal qualities of the work (for example in this detail it is the back of the canvas that is painted as opposed to the front). Looking at this piece more than a decade later, it's worth mentioning that the public presentation of the LGBTQI+ community and its perception in the national imaginary has expanded from being "tolerated" under the ambiguity provided by disguises and the spirit of mockery and exaggeration of carnival, to being "out and proud" through the work of activists and events like Pride Parades, Draguéalo, and most recently Marsha Queer, a series of protests against the discriminatory changes made in the Penal Code in 2021, where sexual orientation and gender identity were excluded from being protected from discrimination.
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