Fertile Ground

David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University • Providence, RI • brown.edu/campus-life/arts/bell-gallery • Through November 3, 2019

Maía Berrío’s El Cielo Tiene Jardines (2013) depicts a heavy tiger lying along the supine woman, his alert eyes and thick muzzle contrasting her distant gaze and slender neck. Berrío’s work is full of such juxtapositions, just like the rest of the exhibition, Fertile Ground, at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery. This concise yet dense show explores, inhabits and picks apart the “natural feminine.” Though the show contains just three works by each artist, (Berrío’s lacquered paper-paintings, Zoë Charlton’s expansive collages and Joiri Minaya’s photographs and video installation), collectively they reconfigure the feminine body in ways that challenge long-held cultural constructions.

Zoë Charlton, to them like water (Strand), 2019, graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and collage on paper, 112 x 68″. Courtesy of the artist.

While Berrío’s complex narrative scenes evoke the wild woman both in control of and subject to nature, Charlton fragments the feminine body to articulate the interrelated exploitation of Black women and the landscape. A bird for the sportsman’s gun (2019) sprawls across the white wall towards the ceiling, a collage of mountains, water and a flurry of ducks erupting out of the solid hips and thighs of a Black woman. Charlton’s works all take their title from Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “The Meaning of July 4th to the Negro,” and also reference her grandmother, Everlena Bates, one of the few women of color to have purchased and owned land in early 20th-century America, pointing to the complicated relationship between Black women and the American landscape.

Minaya’s artworks depict tropical landscapes and patterns to illustrate the long history of the commodified “paradise” continued in the neocolonialism of the tourist industry. While her photographs cleverly highlight and obscure the bodies of sexualized Black and Brown women of the Caribbean by posing them in the landscape completely covered by silk-screened tropical prints, her video installation Labadee invites viewers to repose in beach loungers, while watching footage of a Royal Caribbean cruise ship docking off the coast of Haiti juxtaposed with text from Columbus’s diary.

Fertile Ground looks to the familiar yet dense tropes of the “natural” feminine and asks us to unpack the myriad histories of exploitation in search of a complex and shifting assertion of a feminine selfhood.