Independent Art Fair: Helina Metaferia & Joiri Minaya

May 14 – May 17, 2026
  • Independent Art Fair

    Independent Art Fair

    Praise Shadows Art Gallery presents a duo-booth featuring Helina Metaferia and Joiri Minaya. Metaferia, an Ethiopian American interdisciplinary social practice artist based in New York City, will exhibit sculptures and collages that reference and pull from archives. Included will be a throne, staff, crown, paintings, and collages that create a setting for the interior lives of activists. These works provide a preview of her upcoming solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch in 2027. Minaya, a Brooklyn-based artist raised in the Dominican Republic, uses motifs of opacity and camouflage to interrogate the dichotomy between history, perception, and lived experiences in tropical countries. Represented in the booth will be gouache paintings, original works that were later incorporated into Minaya’s monumental public art commissions at Prospect New Orleans and a cloaking of a Christopher Columbus statute in the city center of Santo Domingo. These paintings also provide invaluable context to her upcoming exhibitions at MoMA, the MFA Boston, and more. To request a preview, please email gallery@praiseshadows.com.
    • Joiri Minaya Aji, 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Aji, 2020
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    • Joiri Minaya Bija, 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Bija, 2020
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    • Joiri Minaya Bija #2, 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Bija #2, 2020
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    • Joiri Minaya Guayacán (Rama Flor), 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Guayacán (Rama Flor), 2020
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    • Joiri Minaya Tobacco #1, 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Tobacco #1, 2020
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    • Joiri Minaya Tobacco #3, 2020
      Joiri Minaya
      Tobacco #3, 2020
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    • Helina Metaferia Crown (Nigist), 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      Crown (Nigist), 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia Staff (Mesariya), 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      Staff (Mesariya), 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia Throne (Zufani), 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      Throne (Zufani), 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia There Is Still Life 4, 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      There Is Still Life 4, 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia There Is Still Life 3, 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      There Is Still Life 3, 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia Artifacts 1, 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      Artifacts 1, 2025
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    • Helina Metaferia Artifacts 2, 2025
      Helina Metaferia
      Artifacts 2, 2025
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  • Helina Metaferia

    Helina Metaferia

    Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, sculpture, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work incorporates archival research, embodied practices, and dialogical studies, supporting overlooked narratives of intersectional identities.

     

    Metaferia’s solo exhibitions include Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2024-2025); RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI (2022-2023); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021-2022). Her work was included in the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates. Group exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2025); Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2025); Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023); The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI (2019); and Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Art Center, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2019). Her work is in institutional collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY.

  • Joiri Minaya
    Photo by Auri Minaya

    Joiri Minaya

    Joiri Minaya (b. 1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop, ISCP, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from NYSCA / NYFA, Jerome Hill, Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Santo Domingo Museo de Arte Moderno, the Centro León Jiménes, the Kemper Museum, El Museo del Barrio and several private collections.
     
    "My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service." — Joiri Minaya