There’s a certain current of mischief that runs through Joiri Minaya’s work. Whether employing collage, installation, or performance, the artist often tackles several weighty isms simultaneously—racism, colonialism, exoticism, extractive capitalism—but with a delivery that evinces a sly humor.
Take, for example, The Cloaking (2019), a public art project commissioned by Fringe Projects Miami, for which Minaya covered statues of Ponce de Leon and Christopher Columbus in brightly patterned fabric of her own design. There’s something deeply funny about the sight of these two notorious conquistadors—each genocidal in their own right—sheathed completely in lush florals. Each grandiose statue and violent legacy reduced to sort of a blob on a Miami street, accented by awkward bulges. The irony turns prophetic when you consider the timing of Minaya’s project: mounted in December 2019, her artistic intervention was in some ways a bellwether of the monument toppling and defacement that would continue amid the uprisings of 2020.
In projects such as this one, Minaya wields the veneer of “tropical” beauty skillfully, with a full awareness of its ability to attract and disarm. Her art traffics in bright hues, verdant foliage, and coquettish fantasy, luring the viewer like a Venus fly trap. Yet rather than snap the jaws shut, Minaya’s objects and images invite you to squirm a little in your own complicity, instilling an awareness of the raced and gendered dynamics of consumption that underpin much of contemporary image production.
