A statue of Christopher Columbus in Santo Domingo’s colonial district is not an empty surface awaiting decoration. Joiri Minaya’s 2021 Encubrimiento, part of The Cloaking Series, covers it with fabric printed with plants. The Walters Art Museum, which exhibits the work, explains that its first part is a photograph of the wrapped monument. The second is wallpaper carrying the same carefully drawn botanical pattern. The image and the wall do different things: one alters a public figure; the other surrounds the viewer with the visual language used to alter it.
The plants are not generic tropical leaves. The Walters identifies ceiba flowers, yucca roots, guayacán and tobacco among species connected to Indigenous, African and Afro-Caribbean resistance or protection. It also cites colonial records concerning manchineel and ají used against colonizers. Minaya makes the material that a souvenir might reduce to scenery carry a history of tactics and care. A visitor can first read the pattern as ornament, then discover that the pattern has names and purposes that a colonial statue does not advertise.
The museum places Minaya’s work in conversation with a Taíno zemí, a sculpture associated with an ancestral spirit. That curatorial pairing is not proof that either object speaks for all Indigenous life on the island. It changes the neighboring questions. Rather than asking only whether Columbus should stand, the installation asks what knowledge and presences the monumental figure displaced in the surrounding public story. The wrapped fabric does not make the statue vanish. It makes the way it occupies space contestable.
Minaya grew up in the Dominican Republic; Providence College Galleries describes her earlier Containers series as a response to tropical images that sexualized Dominican women. There she used floral bodysuits in manufactured landscapes, turning an apparent paradise image into a question about who is being packaged for whom. In Encubrimiento, botanical print moves from the artist’s body to a colonial monument. The shift makes the public object, rather than a Caribbean woman, carry the burden of being covered and interpreted.
Minaya’s intervention cannot settle the politics of every statue or speak for every descendant of colonization. Its achievement is more exact. By selecting plants with documented uses and placing their image over Columbus, she refuses the separation of beautiful nature from the people who knew how to live and resist with it. The wallpaper continues that refusal after the photograph ends: the viewer remains inside the pattern, and the monument no longer owns the only visible story.