Afrodiasporic Spirituality as Female Empowerment in Yelaine Rodríguez’s Fashion Art

• In Event: Spiritualities and bodily practice

Description for Program

Infused with Yemaya and Oshun myths, the works by contemporary Caribbean women artists honor Afro-Caribbean religious heritage and call for women’s empowerment. With notions of Black sovereignty, feminist spiritualities and sexual assemblage theorized by Ana-Maurine Lara, Joshua Deckman and Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, I will show how Yemaya and Oshun representations become an allegory of a decolonial project that prioritizes gender and racial fluidities and creates genealogies alternative to patrilineage in the works of Yelaine Rodríguez (1990), an Afro-Dominican fashion artist. First, I will show how in her 2020 photographs “Oshun Orisha of Fertility: Help Us Birth Generations of Revolutionary Womxn,” she crafts a wearable art piece to create visual narratives depicting African-derived deities from Santeria and Vodou in order to challenge a dominant narrative of mestizaje, whitening and eurocentrism in the Dominican Republic. Further, I will explore how the photographs evolve into a multimedia project that incorporates fashion, handwoven panels, video, and photography. Commissioned by El Museo del barrio for Estamos Bien Triennial-2021, Rodriguez brings these photographs to life with an immersive experience with a procession of dancers, musicians and a singer. As the title clearly indicates, the project responds to the concept of birthing a revolution and revolutionary women.

Author

• Elena Valdez