Gisela McDaniel Paints Dazzling Portraits of Indigenous Resilience

Stories of resistance and resilience are made dazzlingly visible in Gisela McDaniel’s body of work. Her portraits of Black, Indigenous, women of color, and nonbinary people embody mutual trust and understanding. Lounging seated or otherwise comfortably, everyone in McDaniel’s paintings is portrayed full of intricacies. Harnessing her own experiences as an Indigenous CHamoru artist, McDaniel introduces new sensibilities to her sitters with a calm yet strong flair, manifesting through vivid strokes, shimmering details, and the presence of those close to her.

In McDaniel’s current solo show “Manhaga Fu’una”––on view at Pilar Corrias in London until February 26th––the Detroit-based artist elevates stories that have long been discounted, overlooked, and ignored. Her portraits, each of them accompanied by a recorded interview, are robust in poignant details of CHamoru Famaloa’an women and nonbinary people from U.S. territories in the Pacific, including Guam and American Samoa. Everything is to be experienced in McDaniel’s paintings as it is: the landscape, the people, the objects, and the spaces surrounding them. Through overflowing flowers and protruding, vibrant traces of colored stones, shells, and jewels, McDaniel’s artworks demand to be felt.

After receiving her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2019, McDaniel moved to Detroit to be closer to her family after surviving intimate partner violence. “Detroit was where I was able to process so much of the trauma I had experienced with found family and community—folks who truly helped me to heal and, in the end, transformed me,” McDaniel said in a recent interview with Artsy. “My artistic process was birthed because it was what I desperately needed at the time. Being able to set down heavy experiences and reclaim my autonomy through art was so crucial to my own healing that I wanted to share it with others.”

Many of McDaniel’s portraits demonstrate her mixed-media approach and include donated or found material, such as clothing, and recycled or broken jewelry. The artist actively collects, treasures, and incorporates stories and personal objects from her sitters—people in the community with similar stories as her. She strives to create safe environments for everyone who shares their stories with her, especially as her work is received by wider audiences.

“Ultimately, this practice that is for us and by us is so very intimate. There is only so much I can control as an artist,” McDaniel said. “I try to protect the subjects as much as I can, and enable them to exercise their own sense of control and agency as well. For me, that looks like not always having to explain everything, and keeping some things just for ourselves.” At Pilar Corrias, “Manhaga Fu’una” is, indeed, a rare exhibition that shares artistic authority and agency.

With artworks titled in CHamoru—the indigenous language native to the Mariana Islands—the complexities expressed in McDaniel’s body of work can only partially be understood using English as a bridging lingua franca. Even though McDaniel’s mother, grandparents, and extended family were all raised with CHamoru, the artist didn’t learn the words for how she moves and lives in the world until two years ago.

“The fact that we were systematically denied our own words—i fino’ haya’—is itself an important part of my work as an artist,” McDaniel explained. “My mother often says that she refuses to apologize for our broken CHamoru, because we weren’t the ones who broke it.” McDaniel’s paintings underline the significance of seeing, sharing, and circulating CHamoru with those who continue to speak the language.

Her work operates simultaneously as evidence that documents the present, and as interpretations of records she has collected from others. For instance, at the request of her subject-collaborator, Manhagahulo’ l famaguon (2021) includes two Guam kingfishers—a species that is now extinct in the wild due to the brown tree snake, which was brought to the island by the U.S. military. Working with subtle details, McDaniel engages with multiple perspectives and viewpoints in layers.

There’s space to heal, belong, and connect with one another in McDaniel’s body of work, which highlights the people and stories that have been silenced. “And by ‘silenced,’” McDaniel explained, “I mean not only in, though especially through, fine art, but throughout all dominant narratives, such as ‘official’ histories, formal systems of education, popular culture, and media that have circulated for centuries about Indigenous, formerly enslaved Black folx, people of color, and gender diverse folx.”