LATINA is highlighting the work of Latinx creatives and visual artists through our column, Curated by KCV. Each month, Art Curator and Processa founder, Kiara Cristina Ventura, will speak on exhibitions and inspirational artists within the Latino community.

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When I walked into the Domesticanx exhibition at New York City’s El Museo Del Barrio, I immediately felt like I was in my abuela’s house. I could smell the fresh cafe bustelo brewing in the greca, the pungent Agua Florida emerging from the altar, and the fresh coat of fabuloso permeating the air.

El Museo Del Barrio’s curator Susanna Temkin tells LATINA, “The show is inspired by the concept of ‘domesticana,’ first theorized by artist, scholar, and critic Amalia Mesa-Bains in the 1990s.” Domesticana is related to the term Rasquachismo, coined by scholar Tomas Ybarra- Frausto, used to describe aesthetics present in the working class Chicano art and Mexican art movements that “make the most from the least.” Bains describes the term as “aesthetic expression [that] comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials…. The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.” Domesticana derives from rasquachismo but uses a feminist lens, drawing from feminine elements that are tied to cultural memory.

Domesticana reminds me of the many Latinx artists making work inspired by the ways the women in their life navigate their identities and their households. How have our mami’s and abuela’s inspired us? And which domestic everyday practices or crafts have they passed down? These connective moments now live in our collective cultural memory.

Curator Susanna Temkin centers the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains as a foundational point of reference throughout El Museo Del Barrio’s exhibition to highlight the relationship between femininity and domestic space. Yet she expands these themes beyond Chicana culture and relates them to queerness and other intersectional identities within the Latinx diaspora. “Bringing up ideas of spirituality and centering queerness in discussions of Latinx art…these are really critical conversations that I am glad to be able to center,” notes Temkin.

Domesticanx powerfully shows a younger, emerging generation of artists alongside veteran Latina artists, which include Amalia Mesa-Bains, Nitza Tufiño and Maria Brito. Temkin calls Mesa-Bains the madrina (godmother) of the exhibition, in fact, she even received the blessing to pursue this show from Mesa-Bains herself.

Mesa-Bains is known for her art historical essays and artworks by creating “altar installations,” a form of multimedia work she pioneered in the 1970s. Her works based on home altars and ofrendas (offerings) speak to sacred spaces, memory, life and death, the mystical and mythological. Her piece Museum of Fatima (1995/2022) connects the gallery spaces of Domesticanx and blesses the show with its maternal energy. At its center, an intricately beaded sculpture sits adorned with a seashell and white flowers. Inside of the sculpture stands a figurine of a nun with a rosary in her hands and a soft facial expression.

The exhibition also features an installation of textile works made in 1979-80 by Mexican Puerto Rican artist, Nitza Tufiño, hanging on a clothesline, directly portraying domesticity and home labor. Each textile draws us in with a vintage black and white family photograph, framed with colorful wax pencil designs.

In contradiction with the warmness of many of the works in the show, Cuban-American artist Maria Brito conveys coldness with her sculptures. Come Play With Us: Childhood Memories (1985) represents notions of surveillance and escape, as it incorporates a nursery, detached baby hands, and mirrors, hinting to the ominous side of labor, and traditional yet restricted gender roles in domestic spaces.

In addition to the above mentioned veteran artists, this exhibition features a younger generation. The exhibition opens with Boricua artist Amarise Carreras’ photo based works. I was immediately drawn in by Her winds and tides bring future homes (2022), a photo of an altar made up of seashells, leaves, flower petals, Agua Florida, satin and marbles; A hand squeezes an orange as if the juices are blessing the altar with sweetness. The physical work is framed by a reclaimed door frame and shiny oyster shells, creating a beautiful balance between organic material and the photo print. I couldn’t help but think of legacy, hence the name of the piece, and how maternal figures pray and set intentions for the future generations to come.

Nuyorican artist Misla’s collage and mixed media work Cuarto (2019) depicts a bedroom space. My favorite moments in this piece are the pink Chinese chanclas and the Precious Moments figurines that take center stage on the bureau. In the painting we see a room that encapsulates the abuelita aesthetic and functions as a figure-less portrait of a maternal figure. The work led me to think about how one’s room also serves as a physical representation of a person and how each of their possessions carries their energy. The familiar elements of the piece made me feel as if I had been in this room before.

In her paintings, Cielo Félix-Hernandez draws on memory and aesthetics derived from cultural legacy to reflect her lived experience as a trans-femme Boricua. Here she presents paintings of scenes of a nude feminine figure in a tropical space. We see a story unfold between the figure and the free range chickens frolicking in her finca (farm). Throughout the paintings are motifs symbolizing love and freedom, such as hearts, butterflies, and forms of water. She paints a space that feels like an in between of a sort of utopia and reality. The femme figure seems comfortably nude in the paintings, sending a radical message about femininity in relation to safety, rest, and relaxation.

Nicaraguan artist Joel Gaitan’s terracotta vessels fill the exhibition with so much life as each piece is personified with a face and shows a spectrum of emotive facial expressions along with their own individual essence. Inspired by Gaitan’s Nicaraguan heritage and referencing early Mesoamerican objects, the vessels’ voluptuous forms are adorned with braids, animal motifs, piercings, and shiny gold teeth. In conversation with spirituality as the artist makes each piece as offering to their ancestor. Gaitan also speaks to sexuality and queerness as some of the pieces have aroused genitals and both masculine and feminine features. Thus, loudly challenging the taboos on gender, pleasure, sexuality with the decolonial act of honoring queerness that has always been embedded in indigenous ways of being.

The art presented in Domesticanx breaks the shackles of traditional gender roles in the home, and reclaims inherited practices related to femininity as acts of self-care with power and agency. On what Temkin hopes people take away from this exhibition, she shares, “I hope people recognize the domesticana aspects in their own life. I really want to center the artist’s voice. The work represents an anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial stance. I want the visitors to walk away knowing that.”

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Domesticanx is on view at El Museo del Barrio through March 26, 2023. More info here.

Latina is highlighting the work of Latinx creatives and visual artists through NYC art guides and thematic stories in our new column, Curated by KCV. Each month, Art Curator and Processa founder, Kiara Cristina Ventura, will speak on exhibitions and inspirational artists that everyone should keep on their radar from an informed lens. 

Historically, the art world has been a hotbed for gender disparities: women artists are often overlooked, and few receive the support they need to advance their careers. Meanwhile, male artists – especially cis-white-male artists – have co-opted women and the female figure for decades and been applauded for it. Often, their photographs, sculptures, and paintings of women unnecessarily idealize, sexualize, and objectify their so-called muses. Three prominent examples that present women in a subservient manner include Francisco Goya’s La maja desnuda (c. 1797–1800),  Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

The artists’ gaze powerfully influences an audience’s experience of their work. When men are the predominant mouthpiece for femininity in art, society’s view of women could become distorted. Alternatively, when women portray other women, they reflect a more multidimensional narrative of themselves to the world.

Today, countless women are pioneering a movement to take agency over their artistic stories. They are capturing the complexities behind the female figure and revolutionizing concepts of modern femininity. These five young, powerful, Latina artists are paving the way for this initiative.

Joiri Minaya

Joiri Minaya is a Dominican artist, born in New York and raised in Santo Domingo. Minaya challenges the exoticized and fetishized portrayals of Caribbean women that followed 15th-century colonization. Her work represents Caribbean women as more than tropical accessories to be admired on vacation. Minaya also questions the white-male gaze and the commercialization that has objectified Caribbean women since the 20th century. Her performances, installations, collages, and sculptures speak to the relationship between women and nature. In her work, Minaya uses images of the abstracted female form in conversation with tropical flora and environments to reunite women with nature. She works to distance Caribbean women from the ideals western tourism has imposed on their culture. By abstracting the female form as well as the flora, Minaya releases the images of women from the male gaze. After all, the deconstructed female form becomes nearly unidentifiable, therefore free from the patriarchal and colonial systems that society has forced onto it.

Laura Ciriaco

Laura Ciriaco is a Dominican artist and New York native who takes agency over “the feminine” in her image-making process. Working with photography and mixed media, Ciriaco portrays women in different states of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing during moments of divinity and grace. Her series Red (2017-ongoing) explores the various realms of femininity using tones of red as a metaphoric and visual tool of empowerment. Here we see photographed portraits of women and femme non-binary people dressed in red – symbolizing intense energetic revelations and internal reflections. In her book, Respira (2020), she shares “a photographic meditation” honing in on her healing journey and that of others. In her meditation, she includes what she calls “reconstructed letters,” which range from poems, love letters, family archives, personal reflections, and photographs from her career. “Threaded together with the color red, a vital source of my innate power, the spreads were curated to depict my uprooted transitional trip from the Dominican Republic to New York City, to the exploration of femininity through portraiture and personal documentation,” she shares. 

Cielo Félix Hernández

Cielo Félix Hernández is a Brooklyn-based painter and interdisciplinary artist from Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. As a trans-femme Boricua, Hernández draws on memory and Caribbean culture for her art. She uses her experiences growing up between Puerto Rico and the mainland United States to combat the narrative of Latina women as only caretakers. At the forefront of her work lies the question, “what does it look and feel like to pour care and love into oneself first?” All the women she portrays in her paintings are full of agency and pay homage to their families and cultures. Her recent work includes bubblegum pink paintings of women in imagined settings participating in acts of care and labor for themselves. The figures naturally engage in everyday activities such as cleaning their home, mopping, cooking, running errands, bathing, doing their hair, and smoking weed while nude. These femme figures are obviously in control of their bodies, sense of self, and environment. We see these figures pouring into themselves with graceful everyday acts of love. Hernández also frames her elaborate paintings with fringed borders that she dyes using “agua de jamaica,” hibiscus tea.

Heloisa Hariadne

Heloisa Hariadne is a native of São Paulo, Brazil. By floating feminine figures in abstract, colorful, and natural spaces, she processes the complexities behind identities through painting. Hariadne derives peace from placing female figures in environments where they feel a sense of belonging and safety – both in their external settings and within their bodies. Hariadne loves portraying nature as home and connecting themes related to the body, memory, ancestry, and the organic world. Apart from featuring women, her work centers around animals such as tigers and hummingbirds while they are experiencing peace. By capturing moments of vibrant harmony between women, animals, and nature, Hariadne invites her audience to reimagine the meaning of freedom. Her paintings reflect the liberation that accompanies alignment, joy, and abundance. 

Angélica Maria Millán Lozano 

Angélica Maria Millán Lozano is an artist from Bogotá, Colombia currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Using distressed fabrics, she creates abstract and figurative compositions that question the social injustices affecting migrant families. She focuses specifically on Latinas at home. In response to her home country’s political unrest, Millán Lozano uses her experiences to explore themes of familiarity, absurdity, foreignness, and fear. Millán Lozano chooses the fabrics for her work very carefully – opting for textiles that tell stories of resilience. The pre-worn fabrics reveal evidence of distress, wear and tear, deconstruction, and reconstruction. The artist emphasizes that these mediums can carry narratives of pain – which is fitting given that they often represent the bodies of suffering Latin American Women. Millán Lozano also selected fabric as her medium to return agency and meaning to a material often reduced to “women’s work” in Latinx households.