Audience
Aesthetics of Relation and Afro-Dominican Womanhood in Ojos Nebulosos’ “Kiskeya Salón”
by Dr. Gisabel Leornardo
11/14 4:30pm AA Blackistone Room
This presentation explores the aesthetic and political work by Afro-DominiRican visual artist, Ojos Nebulosos. Of partial Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage, Ojos Nebulosos' work grapples with the lived realities of racism and xenophobia she and her family face while living in Puerto Rico-- bringing forward and centering the experiences of Black migrant women from and within the Caribbean. Her 2020 visual installation 'Kiskeya Salón,' inspired by her aunts' Dominican hair salon in Puerto Rico, reproduces the transnational institution that is the Dominican hair salon. This work reads Nebulosos' visual installation against the history of the Dominican hair salon, allowing for a reading of Afro-Dominican womanhood through migration, entrepreneurship, and the quotidian aesthetic expressions of Dominican Blackness. This work asks, how do Afro-Dominican women imagine the Dominican hair salon as a space for Black feminist sociality? How does the Dominican hair salon work with and against anti-Black and misogynistic beauty standards hemispherically? And lastly, how does the Dominican hair salon and Nebulosos’ work offer a reading of Afro-Dominican political resistance through the aesthetic?