Driving up the conifer-lined I-95 to Maine, the rain created a claustrophobic tunnel—the kind of weather that makes you question if this is a kind of divine intervention designed to keep New Yorkers out. Yet as I turned onto Route 1, the aggressive majesty of nature softened. Banks of clouds smattered the skyline, touching the Gulf of Maine with intermittent rainbows and offering a striking backdrop for the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Inside the crisp white galleries, sunlight coming through the east-facing windows illuminated “Gisela McDaniel: ININA.” The gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows overlook an inlet that leads to the sea connecting the NYC-based CHamoru painter’s first solo museum show to her diasporic island homeland.
McDaniel’s oil paintings, embedded with personal and oceanic memorabilia, feature highly present, semi-nude female figures, permeated by tropical shades of pink, yellow, and green. These bright, almost celebratory tones function as a Trojan horse—drawing viewers into more serious reckonings with sexual and colonial trauma. Holding the active gaze of the sitters, I realized that my inclement journey, ending in a kaleidoscopic horizon, parallels the bond between the artist and her sitters. McDaniel’s work explores sexual and colonial trauma and transforms its wretchedness into a collective bond, an atmosphere of autonomy and presence that instantly registers as upending the asymmetrical painter-sitter relationship.
While often compared to Gauguin for her Post-Impressionist style depicting Pacific Islander women, McDaniel, who is of Guåhan descent (anglicized as Guam), positions herself as a counterpoint to the polarizing figure. Rather than admiring Gauguin, she makes an ad hominem critique: not of his technical merit, but his sexual exploitation of underage Micronesian women. Where Gauguin fostered relationships with sitters under the guise of reciprocity and exchange, McDaniel reframes these dynamics by welcoming her subjects with tea, conversation, and a gift of her initial sketch. In doing so, she rejects extractive painter-subject norms while simultaneously resisting the art world’s tendency to separate artistic merit from personal conduct. Consent—its presence or absence—remains an extant guiding question in her work. Some of her earlier portraits on view at the Ogunquit integrate sensor-activated recordings of her sitters directly into the portraits, literally giving voice to those once silenced by her predecessor. This technological intervention alters the traditional museum experience, requiring viewers to approach in order to activate the recordings, thereby transforming them into active participants rather than passive observers.
While technology operates subtly throughout the exhibition, so does the ethos of the island nation. “The magic of watching light bounce on water parallels light in the jungle—this stippling effect of light glimmering between forest leaves,” said McDaniel in a phone interview in September. For her, this coruscating light becomes a metaphor for hope. It also defines the show’s title: “ININA” is CHamoru, the artist’s Indigenous language, for “light” or “glimmer.” Highlighting the sitter, she offers them control over their own depiction by allowing them to choose what is shown or hidden. Many of her subject-collaborators’ faces are painted with stripes emulating traditional face tattoos. In Put it down for her (2023), a woman with tooth-embellished stripes descending her visage sits in a Filipino rattan peacock chair (think the black-and-white portrait of Huey P. Newton), a commentary on the consumption of island culture. She regards the viewer directly; her tawny, rosy, bare-chested form turns slightly askew, right hand gripping what McDaniel shared was her grandmother’s machete across her legs, as a woven rattan pattern subtly obscures her lower abdomen. Sovereignty is woven into her body.
McDaniel employs realism selectively, rendering faces, hands, and foliage with verisimilitude while keeping other elements abstract. The technique draws attention to her sitters’ expressions of emotional states. When she gives the landscape similarly detailed treatment, she suggests the sentience of the land itself.
Gift-giving, a powerful practice in many Mariana archipelago cultures, performs at the core and fore of McDaniel’s work. This reciprocal practice, called chenchule’, is ritualistic and obligatory, functioning to an extent as an austerity measure among CHamoru families. Extending the tradition, McDaniel requests appurtenances to embellish her work with: Her sitter in Lola 2 (2019) gifted the painter a diamond pendant, which McDaniel embedded into the textured strokes of the work, while kin often confer wisdom teeth—sometimes stained black or reddish-brown and worn decoratively—as markers of social status. This practice, fundamental to CHamoru culture, contrasts the extractive essence of historical Western painter-sitter dynamics.
Her painter-sitter relationship is intentionally formulated as a balm, creating lasting community and collective voice for survivors of sexual violence. Her requited approach is carried out past artmaking into spiritual practice. McDaniel works closely with CHamoru Yo’åmte healers, learning traditional knowledge that colonization attempted to erase. Her mother’s refusal to “apologize for our broken CHamoru, because we weren’t the ones who broke it,” McDaniel shared with me, underscores the impact of systematic language suppression: Speaking CHamoru was illegal under various colonial administrations. Through her portraits, McDaniel perpetuates these healing protocols in contemporary contexts—practices as simple yet as profound as listening—offering an alternative to Western medical models that often pathologize trauma rather than treat it through community and relationship. Across many Indigenous communities and specifically in my Lakota/Dakota culture, waŋčántognaka—meaning generosity—extends beyond materiality to encompass offerings of empathy, comfort, and nourishment. McDaniel’s vulnerability establishes kinship bonds, mutual esteem, and responsibility, contrasting sharply with my experience of Western transactional relationships.
In Created for Such a Time as This (2020), two Native women convey kinship and autonomy. The painting foregrounds an urgent concern for McDaniel: the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn—often described as “the Black Lives Matter of Native America”—and the persistent lack of justice when crimes by non-Native perpetrators fall outside tribal jurisdiction. The two seated Native American women—one wearing jeans, combat boots, and dentalium earrings; the other wearing a ribbon skirt and woven lavallière—both hold large apotropaic feathers and bear face coverings (McDaniel’s signature gesture to privacy) alongside traditional tattoos. Rendered jungle fauna, conch shells, and real pine tree branch tips surround the women-collapsing distinctions of space and borders, replacing them with a global sense of the inevitability of Indigeneity and its inseparability from the land.
Witnessing this percussive exhibition in southern Maine, I wondered whether this small, predominantly white community would be surprised by this decolonizing museum space. The town derives its name from the Abenaki “people of the dawn,” yet shows little acknowledgment of its Native origins—no placards commemorating original peoples, no Native people visible in the streets or working in the sundry tourist shops. Before tourists, the village attracted artists who established two opposing schools in the early twentieth century: the Ogunquit Summer School of Drawing and Painting, founded by Charles Woodbury, and the Ogunquit Summer School of Graphic Arts, the product of Woodbury’s student Hamilton Easter Field—both non-Native. Today, diverse audiences attend the New York–based artist’s show, but it appears the sun has, in fact, set on the first peoples of Ogunquit.
The only museum in Maine dedicated to American art, the Ogunquit has been curated for over three years by Devon Zimmerman, who is redressing the locale’s monolithic art culture of the past century. Similarly, McDaniel examines her own preconceptions by embracing a once-problematic color in her work: pink. The color, she told me, previously felt oppressive and symbolic of immutable gender expectations. But in her work, the rosy hue becomes less rigid, representing not a codified femininity, but instead gender fluidity, as seen in works like Prima, Nieta, Nåna: Pasifika Bailadora (2021), which depicts a woman—the cousin, granddaughter, and mother of the title—in a pink-and-green leaf-covered dress. Similarly, in Living more (2023), she interpolates pink into a male figure’s brown skin and the surrounding flowers, his side-reclined form with buttocks and face positioned toward the viewer.
In the sea-facing galleries of the Ogunquit Museum, McDaniel tells her CHamoru friends that they remain connected to the ocean, that the relationships persist between coastal peoples and the land, between past and present, and between survivors. Like the Ogunquit itself, the exhibition draws viewers in with its beauty: a heuristic that opens space for deeper reckonings. Perhaps someday the town will highlight its Abenaki origins as clearly as McDaniel illuminates the relationships between herself and her feminine subjects.
“Gisela McDaniel: ININA” is on view at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art through November 16, 2025.
