Gisela McDaniel

Whenever Gisela McDaniel looked at portraits of women on art museum walls or in art history textbooks, she would wonder about the people behind the canvases. “You read the text and it’s about the painter,” she says. “It wasn’t ever about the woman in the work. Who was that person to the painter?” At the University of Michigan, where McDaniel studied painting, she began creating portraits of women. Over the years, she has developed a process in which she layers interviews with her sitters—about their lives, their experiences with sexual assault or domestic violence, and other histories of trauma into complex portraits, even incorporating audio into the gallery installation. “I wanted to make sure people stayed with their voices and their stories and were able to speak for themselves,” she explains. In total, she estimates she has interviewed and painted over 140 women. Many of those works, which feature her subjects in various jungle settings, are part of her ongoing solo exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine.

After an initial interview with her sitter, McDaniel begins to plan the composition. As she layers each draft of the painting onto the canvas, she views herself as creating protective boundaries between the subject and the eventual viewer. As an Indigenous Chamorro woman whose family hails from Guam, McDaniel strives to incorporate symbolism from her culture into each piece as well. The palettes skew neon, an allusion to the nuclear testing that the U.S. military did in Guam, she explains. The figures are seated in domestic settings or jungles with painted tribal markings on their faces, and totemic objects adorn the background or on their figures. “You’re supposed to ask permission to go into the jungle, and I like this idea of asking somebody to respect this piece of artwork, putting somebody in a protected environment and keeping them safe,” she says.