A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 32
GISELA COLÓN
My journey as a Latinx artist in America has been one of growth
and metamorphosis. Traveling a road of conscious evolution and
subversive transformation, I have engaged in a deliberate
process of simultaneously challenging, deconstructing, and
expanding upon the most white, straight, male-dominated
art-historical movement in the contemporary western canon:
minimalism. The arena of minimalism in general—both East
Coast minimalism and its West Coast counterpart, the light and
space movement—counted very few women members and
evinced a complete dearth of Latin American/Latinx
practitioners. The few female practitioners of minimalism were
always relegated to a secondary position in history and forced to
“blend in” with the males by abdicating any notions of female
identity. Their work had to be completely stripped of content
and gender in order to garner respect. I learned how in the
1960s Judy Chicago had to suppress her feminist sensibility to
create credible art for that time. I saw how Mary Corse and
Helen Pashgian both affirmatively rejected notions of feminism
in their work. I grasped how Ann Truitt, as the sole East Coast
minimalist, was segregated from her male counterparts through
intellectual rhetoric. Minimalist sculpture had been the exclusive
purview of macho men who created strong, large-scale, heavy,
industrialized works. There were no Latin women in sight. This
void became my calling.
I thrived at the challenge of breaking open this hermetic
minimalist canon in new and unexpected ways. I tackled these
ideas of the staid, inert, hyper-masculinized, reductive, minimal
object, devoid of content, and engaged in an intentional process
of transmutation, forging a new language resonating with energy
and life. This process of purposeful creation has been one of the
most exigent and fruitful endeavors of my life—not only as a
woman, but more significantly as a Latinx artist.
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My oeuvre embodies the real power of my island of Puerto Rico.
Drawing upon the raw energy of change, growth, and
transformation I experienced growing up on “la isla de
Borinquen,” I have imbued my work with the pulsating energy of
the tropical El Yunque rainforest, the forceful bravura of el
Océano Atlántico y el Mar Caribe, and the soulful vibrancy,
vivacity, and resilience of la cultura puertorriqueña. As my father
always said: “Mija dale pa’ lante, tirate al agua con to’ y erizos,
no le cojas miedo a nada.” Always forge ahead, dive into the
ocean even with sea urchins beneath your feet; do not allow fear
to take hold. This is the essence of the Puerto Rican spirit,
omnipresent in the soul of my work.
Gisela Colón in her studio, 2020
