There are as many female bodies as there are plants in “A Natural Turn,” the DePaul Art Museum’s current show, and it can be hard to tell them apart. Life-size cutout arms, legs and other disembodied parts hang from the ceiling, their fronts printed off the internet, their backs covered in tropical fabrics. A girl lies in her bed, surrounded by blooming sunflowers. A besuited lady sits primly in a wooden house overrun with lush foliage that grows through the floorboards and decorates her skin. A pair of sturdy women sprout roots from their legs, branches from their temples and leaves from their hands.
The creators of this fantastical female imagery are, respectively, Joiri Minaya, born in 1990 and raised in the Dominican Republic; María Berrío, born in 1982 and raised in Colombia; Kelly Sinnapah Mary, born in 1981 and raised in Guadeloupe; and Rosana Paulino, born in 1967 and raised in Brazil. Their four-person exhibition is no kind of survey, not even a representative sampling, of feminist positions as expressed by figurative artists of the Americas — not that it would be unwelcome. It is instead that deeply pleasurable kind of mid-size museum show, full of exciting and thoughtfully installed works, by artists never before seen in Chicago, and with lots to say to one another and to us: about the relationship between women, nature and mythology; and about what it might mean to make images true to one’s own experience and ideas, especially when such imagery has long gone unseen.
The most audacious work is by Minaya, who since 2015 has been creating a series of daring photographs titled “Containers.” In these, the artist or another performer wears skintight garments sewn from mass-market tropical-patterned fabrics, then strikes a sexy pose in a related environment: recumbent in showy flowers against hydrangea bushes, on her knees in leafy greens against palms trees. If that sounds hot, let me just say, it’s really not. There is the creep factor of the suits encasing the women from head to toe, with only their eyes showing. Then there are their positions, revealed in an adjacent video to be immovable: the bodysuits are literally stitched into shapes derived from Google search results for the term “Dominican women.” The resulting images pulse like ticking time bombs, their subjects encased under layers of tropical sexism and very near ready to explode.
When they do, it might look something like what happens in “Siboney,” a 2014 video playing opposite. Here Minaya films herself in a Santiago museum, meticulously copying a found tropical fabric motif onto a gallery wall. After a whole lot of laborious work and some downtime during which she mimics the women in historical paintings (take your pick; DPAM suggests Ingres’ “Odalisque”), the artist pours water on her hair and her white uniform then drags her wet self all over the mural, smearing its polite presumptions, literally leaving her mark on the museum. Not incidentally, the ruined mural rivets in a way the original could have never.
Not to be outdone in the fierceness department are the mythological figures of Paulino. Her power comes not from overturning the female tropes of pop culture or art history but from embracing those of Candomblé, an African diasporic religion that developed in Brazil during the 19th century. Paulino’s pantheon of goddesses — on display are two large and 14 small luminous watercolors — appear half animal or plant, half Black Brazilian woman, their hair short and kinky, their bodies many shades of brown, their lips and noses wide. Do not mess with these women, not the mischievous ones with the buffalo horns and tongues sticking out, nor the benevolent ones rooted and blooming as solid as trees. Definitely stay far away from the vengeful types, brandishing tapered leaves like knives and crowned by spiky foliage decorated with blood-red buds.
The plant-weapon in question is real foliage: Dracaena trifasciata, also called snake plant or mother-in-law’s tongue, for the Candomblé goddess of wind — one culture’s misogyny being another’s female empowerment. Native to West Africa and naturalized across many warm regions of the Americas, it is considered invasive in Guadeloupe, home to Sinnapah Mary, whose paintings and sculptures have also been overrun by the species. An enormous triptych portrays the artist as a bride dressed in white, set against a dense, undulating background of Dracaena, as if her world consisted only of its striped, yellow-edged leaves. On her dark skin, tattoos of green tigers, a cottage, people and vegetation illustrate stories from Hindu mythology, European fairy tales and local folklore. It’s a breadth of references that encompasses the artist’s own origins as someone whose parents came from mixed Hindu-Catholic families, converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and originally descended from South Indians brought to Guadeloupe in the late 19th century to replace enslaved Africans.
What’s accomplished through impressive elegance in Sinnapah Mary’s paintings is achieved with deliberate crudeness in her tabletop papier-mâché sculptures — expectations of artistic modes be damned. The rough figures of a schoolgirl, all pigtailed and uniformed, perform a bait-and-switch, appearing from afar as cute wee things and from up close like something wild and formidable, with three eyes, a pet tiger, a head that can be lit on fire, the ability to crush chickens with a stone, and a body that, when sliced, reveals an interior made of fleshy layer cake. Things are not always what they seem or even what they are remembered to have been.
So instead, perhaps, there is the dream offered by Berrío’s unapologetically lovely canvases: girls at one with the natural environment. Her subjects are pale, beautiful creatures, the landscapes they call home idyllic and untouched. Everything except the girls’ painted faces is collaged from handmade Japanese paper, printed with a kaleidoscopic array of colors and patterns, and the pictures are large and capacious. Enviably ethereal yet tough, the girls carry a pair of baby goats by the front hoofs, sport bloody hands, brave the strong waters that surround them, tame the tiger they embrace, lounge carelessly under mountain goats.
Good wishes to them all.
“A Natural Turn: María Berrío, Joiri Minaya, Rosana Paulino, and Kelly Sinnapah Mary” runs through Feb. 19, 2023, at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton Ave.; more information at 773-325-7506 and resources.depaul.edu/art-museum
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Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.