Joiri Minaya: Geographic Bodies
March 13 – June 14, 2025
Opening March 13, 6-8pm (RSVP)
Joiri Minaya, Container #4, 2020. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the artist.
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present Geographic Bodies, a solo exhibition by New York City–based multidisciplinary artist Joiri Minaya at The 8th Floor. Opening on March 13, 2025 and on view through June 14, the show will examine the complexities within Minaya’s obsessively researched and elaborately produced works by presenting multiple series made by the artist over the past ten years. Central to Geographic Bodies are Minaya’s experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic, and the exhibition features her perspectives on politics related to the body and ideas of the body-as-site, metaphorically referencing her Caribbean heritage.
“Camouflage is a survival technique in the natural world.” — Joiri Minaya
Colonial projections onto women’s bodies and their effects on culture in Minaya’s homeland are deconstructed in Geographic Bodies, which seeks to expose the oppressive legacies those projections have left behind. There is a conflation in Minaya’s work of the exoticism of the body/island and the fetishism of tropical aesthetics, tropes that are heavily employed by corporate tourism. This merging often results in the exploitation of women and natural resources and exacerbates the local population’s lack of access to the geographical beauty of the Dominican Republic. This spiritual connection between nature and leisure, and the respite they provide, is sold to tourists instead of enjoyed by locals, which Minaya explores in her films Labadee (2017) and Promise of Progress (2023).
The artist expresses a quest for safety through visual camouflage. This intends to allow the viewer to engage in supposition, addressing the Western projections onto her nation state and reflecting on the exoticism at the heart of colonial projects. This is especially apparent in the performative and photographic works from the series Containers (2015–20), in which she removes women’s bodies from the male gaze, shapeshifting their form. Minaya satirically subverts depictions of both landscape and women to expose the colonial and patriarchal interchangeability that subjugates them both.
In her Cloaking series (2019–), monuments to a variety of conquering colonial figures are covered in fabrics of her own design, visually treated in the language of concealment. Minaya’s sometimes covert acts of covering these monuments take place in public squares where the statues were meant to psychologically dominate the public, as is seen in Encubrimiento Cristóbal Colón (2021) in Columbus Park, Santo Domingo, DR.
The exhibition foregrounds the myriad processes Minaya utilizes to create works in performance, painting, digital collage, and installation. Her complex patterns, relating to human patterns of behavior, begin with traditional paintings and end with her digital manipulations of a variety of print techniques, including fabric and photography. In addition to featuring finished works, Geographic Bodies will explore the often unshown visual research and sketches behind her pieces.
Joiri Minaya, born in New York in 1990 and raised in the Dominican Republic, attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales, Santo Domingo in 2009, Altos de Chavón School of Design in 2011, and received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2013. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Guttenberg Arts; Smack Mellon; the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program; the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists; ISCP; Art Omi; Vermont Studio Center; New Wave; Silver Art Projects; Light Work; and Fountainhead. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from the US LatinX Art Forum; NYSCA / NYF; Jerome Hill; Artadia; the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize; Socrates Sculpture Park; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and the Nancy Graves Foundation, among others. Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; as well as the Centro León, Santiago, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and the Fundación Ama Amoedo Collection in Uruguay.
Image description: A photograph of a woman lying on her side in the grass in front of hydrangeas, foliage, and trees. She is wearing a red, yellow, and white floral jumpsuit that covers her head and feet. Only her eyes are exposed.