Vance Waddell Resident: Yohanna M. Roa
The New Historiographic Atlas, Documents and Portraits is an ongoing project that was developed with the Wave Pool community over the course of Yohanna M Roa’s 5-week Residency. She creates textile cartography with portraits and stories shared with her. During her stay in Cincinnati, the Artist will use the gallery as a space for “activist fabric” to create a textile-cartography installation as well as performances.
This installation was a daily space, "the homeroom of the Textile Woman,” which consisted of embroidered portraits of women that Roa has known throughout her life, and who have irrevocably changed her path.
It is an ongoing project and the portraits will accumulate over the course of this 5-week installation. Roa has covered everything with decorative fabrics full of repeated motifs, in order to point out the metaphorical pattern of invisibility and obscuration of knowledge, activities, and life processes, (including resistance,) produced by women throughout history.
Likewise, in a performance that honors her own mother and grandmother, Roa covers her body and head with pattern fabrics, inviting visitors to sit and share a story about a relevant woman in their own lives. She also shares a story about one of the women already portrayed in her archive, and the space becomes filled with enormous emotions, stories, and memories that acquire additional significance when people share them as a group.
After stories and memories are shared, visitors are invited to write their chosen honoree’s name on the Artist’s skirt, in order to add their own stories to the archive.
About the Artist:
Yohanna M Roa is a visual artist and art historian currently living in the United States, with a feminist approach and archival practices. Her work aims to rescue or point out the memories, the knowledge, and even the bodies hidden or obscured in the processes of writing history.
The New Historiographic Atlas was on view at Wave Pool from August 16th through September 16th, 2023
The Vance Waddell Residency is generously supported by Sara and Michelle Vance Waddell.
Wave Pool’s exhibitions are supported by the generosity of tens of thousands of contributors to the annual ArtsWave Campaign, the region’s primary source for arts funding.
All photos by Scott Beseler.