Dominican artists
LIZANIA CRUZ: INFLUENTIAL SITES
Lizania Cruz fills the gallery with “evidence” of the whitewashing efforts of the Dominican state, which has long employed anti-Black and anti-Haitian rhetoric to erase centuries of multi-racial and working-class resistance to its pattern of authoritarianism and US-intervention.
HULDA GUZMÁN: MY FLORA, MY FAUNA
The works in «Hulda Guzmán: my flora, my fauna» reveal an artist in exuberant introspection and exploration of reality and perspective through her distinct iconography —informed by her imagination and the flora and fauna in her surroundings within the Dominican Republic. Guzmán renders a world in which children, adults, animals, plants, and invented creatures alike come together to dance, lounge, congregate, share secrets, and play —all colored and enriched by embracing nature and celebrated through the act of painting.
BONY RAMIREZ: MUSA X PARADISIACA
Behind Ramirez’s muses lie saturated, playful colors, or landscapes of quintessential Caribbean beaches, jungles, and paradisiacal symbols. Accompanying many of his subjects are still lifes with tropical fruits, shells, and plants like the “flamboyant tree” and plantains (scientifically, Musa x Paradisiaca). He uses the traditional elements of Renaissance portraiture, but adapts them with Caribbean iconography, rendering his works’ subject matter away from white gentry to those affected by European colonialism.
JOIRI MINAYA: I’M HERE TO ENTERTAIN YOU, BUT ONLY DURING MY SHIFT
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York (CCNY) presents a solo exhibition by Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic/United States,1990), a multi-disciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity through an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.