Final Weeks to see Gisela McDaniel’s First Solo Museum Exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art – On View through November 16, 2025

OGUNQUIT, ME — Don’t miss the final weeks of the exhibition Gisela McDaniel: Inina, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, on view at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art through November 16, 2025.

Named one of Art Mag’s 30 Most Influential Artists Under 30 in 2025, Gisela McDaniel is a diasporic, Indigenous CHamoru artist who takes an affirmational approach to portraiture. Focusing on the individuality of her “subject-collaborators” (a term she uses for the individuals in her paintings, often women and non-binary people of color), McDaniel works to transform experiences and histories of trauma by creating space for healing and self-care through conversation and relationship building. McDaniel’s sitters range from friends and family to people and activists she meets through community, social media, and word-of-mouth. Her subject-collaborators are empowered to choose how they are depicted and invited to share personal belongings that are incorporated into their vibrant, three-dimensional portraits. The artist also gives agency to each sitter’s voice, incorporating into the portraits recordings of conversations had during the painting process. A CHamoru word, Inina translates to “glimmer of light.” McDaniel’s canvases glow with her collaborators’ dreams, traumas, healing, and joy.

At the heart of the exhibition is McDaniel’s work with the CHamoru community and diaspora of Guåhan (Guam), her maternal homeland. Through portraits of relatives, activists, healers, and friends, she foregrounds Indigenous stories, identities, and values that have long been silenced in Western representations of Pasifika peoples. Her work directly confronts the legacy of that erasure, making visible and audible their full being.

McDaniel, with her collaborators, also explores the complicated relationship between Guam and the United States. The island became a U.S. territory following the invasion in 1898 (just weeks before the first art school opened in Ogunquit). Guam has since been made a space of intense militarization because of its location in the North Pacific.

Framing this body of work, is a survey of McDaniel’s portraits of subject-collaborators from Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York––all spaces that she has lived and worked. From early projects giving voice to survivors in the Detroit area to more recent exploration of people’s histories of migration in New York, these paintings spanning roughly the last half-decade, reflect the self-made community McDaniel has built through her practice.

About Gisela McDaniel
Born 1995 in Bellevue, Nebraska, Gisela McDaniel lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2019. Recent solo and group shows include: Some Dogs Go to Dallas, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, Texas (2024); (Re)Work It! Women Artists on Women’s Labor, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT (2024); The inescapable interweaving of all lives, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2023); Tender Loving Care, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston (2023); Thinking of You, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2023); Manhaga Fu’una, Pilar Corrias, London (2022); A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, ICA Boston (2022); The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2022).

---

ABOUT OGUNQUIT MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART (OMAA)
Opened in 1953, OMAA was founded by the artist Henry Strater. The museum shares close historic and geographic ties to one of the earliest modern arts communities in the United States. OMAA houses a permanent collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs from the late 1800s to the present. The museum showcases American art by mounting modern and contemporary exhibitions and accompanying educational programming and events. OMAA sits on approximately three acres of gardens right on the water with stunning panoramic views of Maine’s iconic coves and outcroppings. The museum is open for the 2025 season through November 16. For more information, visit ogunquitmuseum.org.

OGUNQUIT MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
543 Shore Road
Ogunquit, ME 03907
207.646.4909
ogunquitmuseum.org