STONELEAF RETREAT

JOIRI MINAYA: 2024 BAXTER ST FELLOW AT STONELEAF RETREAT

We are so excited to announce Joiri Minaya as the awardee of the second annual Baxter St Fellowship at STONELEAF RETREAT, with generous support of the 7G Foundation. Minaya will receive an unrestricted grant and participate in a three week group residency with two other artists, which includes Open Studios during UPSTATE ART WEEKEND, which attracts thousands of visitors to the Hudson Valley. 

ABOUT JOIRI MINAYA

My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.
It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S. / global North; using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity.
I’ve learned there is a Gaze thrust upon me which others me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency. Inter-disciplinarily, I explore the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a NY-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose work destabilizes historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. She was born in Harlem, New York, growing up in the Dominican Republic. She studied art at the ENAV (DR), the Chavón School of Design (DR), and Parsons (NY). Minaya has exhibited across the Caribbean, the U.S. and internationally. She recently received a Latinx Artist Fellowship, a NYSCA / NYFA Artist Fellowship, a Jerome Hill Fellowship and a NY Artadia award, and has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Smack Mellon, LES Printshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Art Omi, ISCP, Vermont Studio Center, New Wave, Silver Art Projects and Fountainhead, among others.

Minaya’s work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ), MIT List Visual Art Center’s permanent collection (Cambridge, MA), El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), and the Kemper Museum (Kansas City, Missouri) in the US, as well as the Centro León Jimenes, Santiago and the Museo de Arte Moderno (Santo Domingo) in the Dominican Republic, and the Fundación Ama Amoedo Collection in Uruguay.

ABOUT BAXTER ST: Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York supports emerging lens-based artists at critical moments of their careers. Founded in 1884, Baxter St is one of New York’s oldest artist-run nonprofit spaces, and has long been a catalyst for innovative creation within the artistic mediums of photography and video practices. Through exhibitions, workspace residency programs, and conversations series, Baxter St is a hub for a vibrant community deeply engaged in the art of lens-based contemporary practices.

ABOUT 7|G: 7|G Foundation champions organizations and individuals that challenge inequality in human rights, education, art and culture. By partnering with organizations, artists and community facilitators we seek to build strong community bonds that elevate local culture, while supporting cultural change founded upon our core values of social impact and sustainability.