Gisela McDaniel

Gisela McDaniel is a diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist who explores the effects of trauma, displacement and colonisation through portraiture and oral histories. Interweaving audio interviews, assemblage and oil painting, she intentionally incorporates the portrait sitters' voices in order to subvert the traditional power relations of artist and sitter. Working primarily with women and non-binary people who identify as Black, Micronesian, Indigenous to Turtle Island, Asian, Latinx, and/or mixed-race, her work disrupts and responds to the systemic silencing of subjects in fine art, politics and popular culture.

McDaniel received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2019. Recent solo and group shows include: Some Dogs Go to Dallas, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, US (2024); (Re)Work It! Women Artists on Women’s Labor, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, US (2024); The inescapable interweaving of all lives, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2023); Tender Loving Care, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston (2023); Thinking of You, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023); Manhaga Fu’una, Pilar Corrias, London (2022); A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, ICA Boston (2022); The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2022); Sakkan Eku LA, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2021); How Do We Know the World?, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore (2021); The Regional, CAC Contemporary Art Centre Cincinnati (2021); Dual Vision, MOCAD (2021); Making WAY/FARING Well, Pilar Corrias, London (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2020); On the Road II, Oolite Arts, Miami (2019); Save Art Space, Playground Detroit, Detroit (2019); Lush P(r)ose, Playground Detroit, Detroit (2019); Virago, Detroit Art Babes Collective, Detroit (2019) and Theotokos: New Visions of the Mother God, The Schvitz, Detroit (2018).