Experience Joiri Minaya: Venus Flytrap, a four-day performance series and summer-long installation at Bartram’s Garden. Presented by BlackStar and curated by writer and editor Dessane Lopez Cassell, the series reflects on the intertwined legacies of freedom, extraction, and ecology in North America’s oldest surviving botanical garden.
Much like a Venus flytrap, the plant this project is named for, Joiri Minaya’s practice often employs beauty before its bite, utilizing sensuality, lush florals and hues to invite deeper reflection on thornier aspects of history and the impacts of colonialism.
Established in 1728, Bartram’s Garden encapsulates the complexities of Philadelphia’s history and our relationships with land. From its earliest uses as a hub for Indigenous trade to the role of founder John Bartram in popularizing Eurocentric notions of “modern botany,” Bartram’s Garden can be understood as a microcosm for the ongoing colonial experiment.
With Venus Flytrap, Minaya extends her longrunning interest in foregrounding the histories and possibilities of local and Indigenous plant life. Together, Minaya and Cassell seek to reveal hidden histories of labor and anti-colonial resistance buried in the grounds of Bartram’s Garden and historic Kingsessing, and their echoes across the Americas.
Learn more via BlackStar Projects.
Joiri Minaya is an interdisciplinary artist who works in photography, digital media, film, performance, sculpture, textiles and painting. Born in New York and raised in the Dominican Republic, Minaya describes her multiculturally-informed work as ‘a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing, and exorcizing imposed histories.’ Minaya has been part of exhibitions and screenings at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as international exhibitions like the Prospect 6 New Orleans Triennial, the Cooper Hewitt Triennial and the Sharjah Biennial 15. She is a recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship, NYSCA / NYFA Artist Fellowship, Jerome Hill Fellowship, Artadia award and has been an artist in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Light Work, Socrates Sculpture Park and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
