Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum

Emily and Joe Lowe Galleries
January 21-May 10, 2025

The “tropics” are both place and perception.

The term “tropic” invokes the parallel latitudes known as the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn and the geographical regions located between them, a strip around the equator that includes continental and insular parts of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Australia. In addition, it describes the biodiversity and climate within these areas, such as tropical rainforests and tropical storms.

The idea of the “tropics” dates to the 15th century, when Spanish and Anglo-European explorers, writers, and photographers in the 19th century represented these regions as virgin paradises or dangerous territories, inhabited by peoples perceived as “primitive.” Consequently, the tropics have been reduced to a narrow set of images shaped by colonial legacies and commercial interests with exoticized environmental and cultural portrayals in media and popular culture today. This visual and cultural distortion extends beyond actual tropical geographies. Through a process of “tropicalization,” non-tropical places have been manipulated to conform to the visual tropes of “tropicality,” suggesting that any space can be molded to fit the fantasy.

Joiri Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum brings together artwork by the acclaimed New York City-born and based Dominican artist with objects from the Syracuse University Art Museum collection. It encourages reconsideration of the layers of historical and contemporary misrepresentation that shape our perception of tropical regions. Through these comparisons, the exhibition invites an “unseeing” of the tropics by revealing how nature, landscape, culture, gender, and race have been historically constructed and deployed as tropes in visual culture.

This exhibition is curated by Cristina E. Pardo Porto, assistant professor of Latinx literatures and cultures in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Centro de Estudio Hispánicos; Latino-Latin American Studies; and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Program on Latin America and The Caribbean (PLACA) in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

About the artist
Joiri Minaya (born 1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity.