Gisela McDaniel

The gallery is pleased to present (Ti)p of the Spear, Gisela McDaniel's first solo exhibition with the gallery, bringing together thirteen new paintings made for her New York debut. McDaniel began much of the work on Guam, where she was the 2026 Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Isla Center for the Arts at the University of Guam. The series draws on oral history recordings, gifted artifacts and photographs of Indigenous CHamorus of Guåhan, nearly all of them engaged in climate work.

McDaniel calls the people she paints subject collaborators. They set the pace and the content of the encounter, choose how they pose, select the photograph she works from, and are consulted as the painting proceeds; her stated aim is that they see themselves in it. Audio excerpts of the conversations, which her Kanaka Maōli relatives call “talk story,” are embedded in the finished portraits, so that each sitter is heard in her own voice rather than described in someone else's. Sitters also contribute objects, jewelry, photographs, even a lost tooth, fixed into the surface as talismans for the stories the paintings carry into the world.

McDaniel’s work draws on her own experiences of trauma, alongside her perspective as an Indigenous Pasefika woman born and raised in the Midwestern CHamoru diaspora. Neither fact is background to the work; both are structural to its method. The authority she hands each sitter over how she is seen answers the experience of having had none. And because her connection to Guåhan runs through her mother's line rather than through residence, the work proceeds by relation rather than observation: she does not document people, she sits with them.

Guåhan's climate crisis cannot be separated from the military presence that has shaped the island since 1898. One-third of the island is occupied by the United States Armed Forces, and the reef, the aquifer and the limestone forest are not abstractions there. McDaniel's panoramic formats borrow from nineteenth-century American landscape painting, which once announced territorial expansion across a continent and then across the Pacific. In her hands the convention turns around: the land is doing the looking.

Gisela McDaniel was born in 1995 in Bellevue, Nebraska, and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2019. Her first solo museum exhibition in the United States opened at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in 2025. She has also held solo exhibitions at Pilar Corrias in London and Arario Gallery in Seoul. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. It is also included in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. McDaniel was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2024.