August 16 - September 16, 2023

Yohanna M. Roa is a visual artist and art historian 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, Documents and Portraits is an ongoing project; and was developed with the Wave Pool community over the course of the Artist’s 5-week Residency. She creates textile cartography with portraits and stories shared with her. During her stay in Cincinnati, the Artist used the gallery as a space for “activist fabric” to create a textile-cartography installation as well as a performance.

This installation is a daily space, "the homeroom of the Textile Woman." The decoration consists of portraits of women (embroideries) that the artist has known throughout her life, and who have irrevocably changed the Artist’s path.

It is an ongoing project and the portraits accumulated over the course of this 5-week installation. Roa covers 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.

The Vance Waddell Residency is generously sponsored by Sara and Michelle Vance Waddell.

Programming