Joiri Minaya's Textiles Dismantle Colonial Tropics at Henry

Joiri Minaya, a multidisciplinary artist born in 1990 in New York City and raised in the Dominican Republic, explores the concept of the Tropics as a colonial idea. Her current exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle focuses on textiles, including Aloha shirts and floral spandex designed to cover colonial monuments, to critique the constructed notion of the 'exotic' from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Minaya seeks to reclaim Afro-Indigenous stories of resistance, ancestral wisdom, and sustainable plant traditions. She positions herself as both a performer and a disruptor, confronting the stereotypes that diminish tropical landscapes and their people to mere fantasies.