The Banner Project: Joiri Minaya

Drawing on a wide range of visual sources, Joiri Minaya (b. 1990) explores how the identity of Black and Brown women from tropical regions has been imagined, constructed, and commodified. For her "Banner Project" she challenges persistent tropes through intervention, layering fragmented images from art history, science, the internet, and popular culture. Minaya connects present-day tourism, which promotes a vision of local women and nature as available for travelers' enjoyment, to the colonial impulses that drew Christopher Columbus to the supposed New World and Paul Gauguin—whose _Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?_ (1897–98) is a highlight of the MFA's collection—to Tahiti. This entwining of exoticism and eroticism, and the conflation of women with their tropical surroundings, often says more about the imaginers than their subjects. The artist uses postcards, Hawaiian shirts, and other imagery coded as "tropical" to underscore how a similar shorthand stereotypes the people who inhabit the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Rather than perpetuating these stereotypes, she experiments with ideas of transparency and opacity, through Photoshop masking or mesh fabrics, to propose a form of resistance to flattening perceptions.