A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 27
Clotilde Jiménez’s Olympia is a radical departure from
Édouard Manet’s 19th-century painting of the same title
and a reclamation of the Black body in space—particularly
the queer, Black, male body. Firelei Báez’s portrait honors
two under-celebrated women leaders from Caribbean
history: Marie-Louise Coidavid, a Black queen in
independent Haiti from 1811-1820, and Anacaona,
Queen of the Taíno, a powerful chief who sought to build
diplomatic relations with the Spanish in order to protect
her people (1464-1504). Báez’s painting connects these
women and countless other Black, Indigenous, women of
color who, as the artist states, “fought for and created
space for enacting black joy, resistance, and healing in
spite of oppressive systems.”
For those who have been oppressed, marginalized, and
exploited, manifestations of joy are an act of resistance.
Leonardo Benzant’s colorful Black Joy Takes Courage is
made up of beads and leather, fabric and string, suggesting
accumulated and varied inherited experiences that people
of African descent adopted as methods for survival. The
large, nude, brown female figures dancing in Monica Kim
Garza’s Reggaeton, dale—representations of herself in
moments of happiness—visibly celebrate brown bodies.
As critic Mala Muñoz writes, “In a capitalist society built
on the backs of unpaid and underpaid women and girls of
color, Garza’s paintings of brown skinned women at rest
serve as powerful and poignant counter-narratives to the
abuse that women of color have historically endured in
the midst of colonization, global systemic racism, and
patriarchy.” In her painting Yellow Dog, Lilian Martinez
recasts the familiar canine—a trope in art history that
signifies loyalty and wealth—at the feet of a large, strong,
and beautiful woman. For Martinez, placing women of
color into scenes of luxury and visually occupying spaces
associated with power from which they are often denied,
is a powerful act of representation.
The desire to transcend from present-day pain and anxiety
to a space of interconnection, compassion, and empathy is
evident in the works of Gisela Colón, Jose Alvarez
(D.O.P.A.), Cecilia Vicuña, Candida Alvarez, and Raúl de
Nieves. Candida Alvarez and Raúl de Nieves both consider
the beauty of the transition between worlds: de Nieves’s
sculpture, Psychopomp, is a spiritual guide that leads souls
into the afterlife while Alvarez’s abstract painting, A Wing,
A Halo, was inspired by a friend whose niece asked if she
could see the “wings or halo” when her dog died. Similarly,
Cecilia Vicuña’s works investigate the interconnectedness
of the human experience across time, meditations on the
liminal spaces between life and death, the past and
present, the natural and the manmade. Gisela Colón’s
towering, iridescent monolith transforms the phallic
symbol into an object that addresses the universal
relationship between humans and the earth, which as she
says, transmutes the negative energy into positive energy.
The power to transform the dark to light is the basis for
Jose Alvarez’s The Promised Land. Created after the artist
returned to his home in Florida after spending two difficult
months in the Miami-Dade Krome Detention Center, the
work offers a powerful visual antidote and hopeful
counternarrative. “I really just want to inspire
commonality, get closer to a state of consciousness,”
Alvarez says. “Work that talks about this is important,
especially now when people feel a darkness has
descended and need space to feel glorious, feel connected
rather than isolated.”
Leonardo Benzant, Black Joy Takes Courage, 2019,
upholstery fabric, string, monofilament, leather,
gel-medium, acrylic, pony beads
27
