Gisela McDaniel: (Ti)p of the Spear
The gallery is pleased to present (Ti)p of the Spear, Gisela McDaniel's first solo exhibition with the gallery, bringing together thirteen new paintings made for her New York debut. McDaniel began much of the work on Guam, where she was the 2026 Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Isla Center for the Arts at the University of Guam. The series draws on oral history recordings, gifted artifacts and photographs of Indigenous CHamorus of Guåhan, nearly all of them engaged in climate work.
McDaniel calls the people she paints subject collaborators. They set the pace and the content of the encounter, choose how they pose, select the photograph she works from, and are consulted as the painting proceeds; her stated aim is that they see themselves in it. Audio excerpts of the conversations, which her Kanaka Maōli relatives call “talk story,” are embedded in the finished portraits, so that each sitter is heard in her own voice rather than described in someone else's. Sitters also contribute objects, jewelry, photographs, even a lost tooth, fixed into the surface as talismans for the stories the paintings carry into the world.
McDaniel’s work draws on her own experiences of trauma, alongside her perspective as an Indigenous Pasefika woman born and raised in the Midwestern CHamoru diaspora. Neither fact is background to the work; both are structural to its method. The authority she hands each sitter over how she is seen answers the experience of having had none. And because her connection to Guåhan runs through her mother's line rather than through residence, the work proceeds by relation rather than observation: she does not document people, she sits with them.
Guåhan's climate crisis cannot be separated from the military presence that has shaped the island since 1898. One-third of the island is occupied by the United States Armed Forces, and the reef, the aquifer and the limestone forest are not abstractions there. McDaniel's panoramic formats borrow from nineteenth-century American landscape painting, which once announced territorial expansion across a continent and then across the Pacific. In her hands the convention turns around: the land is doing the looking.
History enters the surfaces directly. Several works incorporate newsprint reporting the aftermath of nuclear tests, dated to January of this year. Others are painted in part with soil taken from the ground, which McDaniel asked her ancestors' permission to use; the protocol is part of the work rather than a story told about it. A recurring motif is the talåya, the fisherman's throw net, rendered as negative space so that the garment opens into the ground behind it. In the CHamoru account of how the island was saved, young women cut their hair and wove it into a net to catch the fish that was dividing Guåhan in two. Depending on the viewer, tools in these paintings can be read as weapons, and McDaniel leaves the ambiguity intact.
Halos appear, drawn as much from pre-Christian fresco painting as from the Church, and used here to describe energy fields rather than sanctity. In one work McDaniel revisits Gauguin's spirit figure, a composition she has reworked before to reclaim a palette built on Pacific bodies. Her subject is not the spirit but the aura around a person: what is present and not visible.
These paintings register absences too, including sound. Guåhan's forests were emptied of their native birds after brown tree snakes arrived in military cargo following the Second World War, and a few are beginning to return; feathers, light and the vocabulary of angels move through the work as something being recovered rather than simply lost. The CHamoru language, banned in schools and its dictionaries destroyed under the Naval government in 1922, is another such recovery. The people in these paintings speak in their language.
Gisela McDaniel was born in 1995 in Bellevue, Nebraska, and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2019. Her first solo museum exhibition in the United States opened at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in 2025. She has also held solo exhibitions at Pilar Corrias in London and Arario Gallery in Seoul. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It is also included in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. McDaniel was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2024.
