Gisela Charfauros McDaniel (born 1995) is an American visual artist of Indigenous Chamorro (or CHamoru) descent, working primarily with oil painting. McDaniel was born in Bellevue, Nebraska. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Background and career 
Gisela McDaniel, who was born in 1995 in a military base in Bellevue, Nebraska, United States. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended an all-women’s high school on the Eastside of Cleveland. McDaniel's holds a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Michigan (2019). Her mother, Antoinette CHarfauros McDaniel is a Chamorro scholar native from Guam, a United States military territory.   

After graduating from college in 2019, the artist moved to Detroit, where she established a studio, to live closer to her relatives to find emotional support after surviving sexual violence from a former partner. The tragic event  become 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, Micronesian, Indigenous to Turtle Island, Asian, Latinx, and/or mixed-race and had experienced trauma.

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 create paintings that "talk back" to viewers.  

In 2022, the artist presented the solo show “Manhaga Fu’una” at Pilar Corrias in London, in which she displayed paintings that incorporated found objects or donated materials ranging from clothing to recycled or broken jewelry.

Relation to Western Art History 
Gisela McDaniel's artistic practice refers to the history of painting while highlighting marginalized voices within the art historical canon. In past interviews, McDaniel mentioned her intent to recover Gaugin's color palette as a way to reclaim her Pacific Islander and Samoan 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, is sometimes used by the artist as a motivating source to continue to paint her subjects. In Got Your Back (2020), McDaniel refers to Gaugin as well as Delacroix's Women of Algiers (1834), and The Moroccans by Matisse.

Exhibitions 

 2023 Tender Loving Care, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (group show)
 2023 Permanent Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami (group show)
 2022 Manhaga Fu'una, Pilar Corrias, London (solo show)
 2022 A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (group show)
 2022 The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (group show)
 2021 _How Do We Know the World? _, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (group show)
 2021 Dual Vision, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan (group show)
 2020 Making WAY/FARING Well, Pilar Corrias, London (solo show)

Artworks in notable collections 
 Speaking Seeds, 2020. Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida
 Tiningo’ si Sirena, 2021. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Inagofli’e, 2021. Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Florida
What She Saw/Where She Went, 2020. Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland

References

External links 
 Gisela McDaniel's website
 Pilar Corrias, London

1995 births
Living people
American contemporary painters
American contemporary artists
American women artists
Chamorro people
University of Michigan alumni
Artists from Cleveland
Artists from Detroit