Artist Yohanna M. Roa dismantles art history books and carefully pieces them back together, restructuring the art world’s discriminatory past one page at a time.
La Bodega Gallery
The Past: Instructions For Its Use, Roa’s solo exhibit currently on view at La Bodega Gallery, features dozens of pages torn from art history tomes reinterpreted using needlework, yarn, and thread. Identities are concealed with gauzy veils, scenes are embellished with colorful foliage, trim, and borders, and book leaves are stitched together and transformed into everyday items historically associated with women.
"Art history has systematically denied the participation of women in the production of knowledge through art," Roa explained. For centuries, women were omitted from practicing "traditional forms and techniques” of art and were restricted to crafts such as sewing, knitting, and embroidery "because the art [establishment] considered that these did not produce knowledge [since] they were activities carried out by women," she continued.
"I puncture the paper with the needle. I cut the books, delete information, or put glazes on the identity of the works and their subjects," she said of her painstaking work. "These actions subtly and…explicitly refer to the systematic violence exerted by an art history." Roa contends that art history intends to be "universal" but "reflects the blindness of others embodied in colonial, patriarchal, and racist power relations."
Yohanna M. Roa, Family Portraits I
(L-R) Yohanna M. Roa, New Patterns 2. a/v; New Patterns 1. a/v
Originally from Bogota, Columbia, Roa received an undergraduate degree in visual arts from Bellas Artes in Colombia and a master’s degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her work is inspired by history, feminism, her experiences as an immigrant, and her grandmother Helena. Roa believes observing her grandmother work as a seamstress taught her how to sew, embroider, knit, and crochet. "I saw her practice all my life," she recalled. "She was a designer but she never thought about herself as a designer." After completing her studies, Roa said she realized that her grandmother's craft was not considered an art form. "I asked myself why that kind of practice wasn’t included in art history," she said, which led her to examine her relationships with others as a woman.
Yohanna M. Roa, The Past Instructions For Its Use
Yohanna M. Roa, The Past Instructions For Its Use
For her installation The Past Instructions For Its Use, the artist cut out portraits from a book of French miniatures and obscured each subject’s face with oil paint. Roa also crossed out the text in the book with a marker. With these revisions Roa hopes viewers will be able to relate to the work on a personal level and create their own narratives or histories. "You might think that it looks like a family member, a neighbor, or an image you saw at your grandmother's house," she explained. "My goal is to establish a relationship between memory, materiality, and bodies. And point out that the writing of history has holes…which we can fill with our own experience."
Yohanna M. Roa, Tablecloth
In Tablecloth, Roa took pages from an art history book and sewed them together to form a table cover, complete with embroidered details including a duck, house, teacup, shoe, and cactus. "Traditionally history has been written in a chronological linear fashion, pointing out the events and characters that committed important acts, for example, the coronation of Napoleon," she explained. "I take a book that is written in a linear way, I disassemble it to make a fabric. I am interested in altering that order and making certain temporalities touch in non-linear ways."
As for the charming items adorning the tablecloth, Roa notes that they are decorations women commonly embroider onto household textiles. "Why is the image of Napoleon…or of a naked woman, more valid than a duck, a cactus, or a shoe?" she questioned. "I take that fabric, I cut it, to make a dress or a tablecloth, with the aim of saying that there are other ways of doing historiographies."
Yohanna M. Roa, Huipil Mazahua (dress)
Similarly, Roa sewed together pages to create Huipil Mazahua (dress), a faithful reinterpretation of a traditional Mexican dress. After spying a woman proudly wearing an unconventional version of the garment in Mexico City, Roa was inspired to create her own. "It surprised me because it’s a traditional dress and she made it with a weird fabric," the artist recalled of the woman's lace interpretation. "The woman made a mix between the traditional model and the new fabric. It was amazing to me. I said, 'I’m going to do the same thing but with a history of art book.'"
Using pages from a book printed in 1955, Roa stitched together a structured blouse and a pleated skirt and apron. The work warns of cultures losing information about themselves and women. "A lot of information is lost because the original paintings in the museum are big paintings with a lot of texture and color, and in the printed version, it’s in sepia...." she noted of the reproduced images culled from the book. "I intervened again [with linoleum and lace engravings] to say there’s one more layer of information. Art is a contextual experience."
Roa relocated from Mexico City to NYC nearly two years ago to study at CUNY Graduate Center's Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She recently completed a residency at NARS Foundation in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where she created a project based on archiving memories "to claim the memories of women."
Yohanna M. Roa at her 2019 exhibition at NARS Foundation (photo courtesy of the artist)
The work was inspired by a wooden sewing box Roa found at a thrift shop. Along with needles, thread, and beads, the box contained "documents"—instructions on how to make a beaded belt. "Maybe the owner of the [box and the] documents was a woman," Roa mused. "I thought it’s amazing. It works as an archive." The artist emailed her friends requesting that they send her a photo and history of a woman who is important to them. "I printed those portraits over some maps and I embroidered them using the supplies I found in that box," she said. "It’s about their memories, their stories. Everyone has a story and I’m trying to recover it.... We need to return the value of the things that women have been doing through history, like cooking, embroidery. Women live their own lives and that’s important."
Currently working on a project about her grandmother, Roa insists that the past and history can be revised and transformed. "The present is a port which allows us to use our memories to rebuild the past," she said. "History is a technique."
The Past: Instructions For Its Use | A Solo Exhibition By Yohanna M. Roa
La Bodega Gallery, 695 5th Avenue, Park Slope
Exhibition on view February 7 through March 2
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