Gisela Charfauros McDaniel (born 1995) is an American visual artist of IndigenousChamorro (or CHamoru) descent, working primarily with oil painting. McDaniel was born in Bellevue, Nebraska. She has lived in Detroit.[1][2]
Gisela McDaniel was born in 1995 at a military hospital in Bellevue, Nebraska, United States. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended an all-women’s high school on the Eastside of Cleveland.[3] McDaniel's holds a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Michigan (2019). Her mother, Antoinette CHarfauros McDaniel is a Chamorro scholar native to Guam, a U.S. Territory.[4][5][6] McDaniel was named to Forbes 2024 "30 Under 30" list for Art & Style.[7]
After graduating from college in 2019, the artist moved to Detroit, where she established a studio to live closer to her relatives and to find emotional support after surviving sexual violence from a former partner and while studying abroad in Florence, Italy. The tragic event became central in her artistic practice as both a coping mechanism and a way to create a platform for other survivors of gender-based violence to feel honored. McDaniel's paintings are mainly portraits of female and non-binary subjects who identify as Black, Chamorro, Pacific Islander, Indigenous to Turtle Island, Asian, Latinx, and/or mixed-race and had experienced trauma.[2][3]
McDaniel's work combines motion-activated audio components featuring excerpts of interviews and conversations between the painter and her sitters about experienced traumas. She refers to them as her “subject-collaborators.” In the words of critics, she creates paintings that "talk back" to viewers.[8][9][10][11]
In 2022, the artist presented the solo show “Manhaga Fu’una” at Pilar CorriasinLondon, in which she displayed paintings that incorporated found objects or donated materials ranging from clothing to recycled or broken jewelry.[11]
Gisela McDaniel's artistic practice refers to the history of painting while highlighting marginalized voices within the art historical canon.[8] In past interviews, McDaniel mentioned her intent to recover Gaugin's color palette as a way to reclaim her Chamorro/Pacific Islander ancestry. The subject in her painting Inagofli'e (2021), is posed very similarly to Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892). Gaugin's book Writings on the Savage, a source of misleading views and colonial violence[opinion], is sometimes used by the artist as a motivating source to continue to paint her subjects.[12][13]InGot Your Back (2020), McDaniel refers to Gaugin as well as Delacroix's Women of Algiers (1834), and The MoroccansbyMatisse.[12][14]
