Portrait of a Woman

“Portrait of a Woman. The Female Perspective in Dominican Painting.” This project highlights the contribution of women artists to the history of national art, bringing together twenty artists, ten pioneering masters, and ten contemporary artists, to trace a map of continuity, legacy, and transformation.

Each pairing of a master and a contemporary artist has been conceived as an exhibition of works that connect styles, themes, and specific moments in their respective trajectories. Within each dialogue, time, bodies, and emotions intersect: introspection and rebellion, spirituality and memory, the intimate gesture and social critique.

That surely reveals the importance of this project: knowing something is the first step towards valuing it. American illustrator Alex Warnick produced 30 lifelike artistic representations of an equal number of local winged beauties, featuring historical information and their respective conservation status compiled by a team of biologists and environmental activists. As a whole, this book provides one of the most beautiful, complete and detailed collection of images about the natural world of Hispaniola —which can contribute to the ongoing protection of our species, as valuing something is the first step towards change.

CHAPTER 1

The Grammar of the Sensible and the Political 

Adriana Billini & Inés Tolentino

This chapter draws a line from the 19th century to the present, where the ornamental, the intimate, and the symbolic intertwine within the female body as a visual language. Billini’s painting, marked by the solemnity of her portraits, finds an echo in the work of Inés Tolentino, who deconstructs and reconfigures the body through a critical and seductive gaze.

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CHAPTER 2

The Body as Territory and Memory

Celeste Woss y Gil & Lucía Méndez Rivas

This chapter proposes a dialogue between the pioneering figure of Celeste Woss y Gil and the introspective, spiritual work of Lucía Méndez Rivas. Both placed the female body at the center of their artistic practice, treating it as a space of aesthetic and political expression. From the frontal depiction of the nude to the contemporary symbolic portrait, corporeality becomes an archive of identity and resistance.

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CHAPTER 3

The Suspended Language of the Intimate

Delia Weber & Marcia Guerrero

Between these two artists emerges an ethics of care and memory. Weber, poet and feminist, transforms the intimate into a political manifesto. Guerrero inherits that impulse through an affective abstraction, where the flower, the letter, or the portrait become gestures of repair. The chapter weaves an affective genealogy shaped by both subtlety and intensity.

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CHAPTER 4

Enigmas of Dream and Childhood

Clara Ledesma & Iris Pérez

From the colorful magic of Clara Ledesma to the symbolic density of Iris Pérez, this chapter explores mestizaje, the mystical, and the feminine as central visual axes. Both artists inhabit a world where bodies transform into myths, and the pictorial becomes a bridge between magical and surreal realms.

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CHAPTER 5

Experimental Rigor and Utopian Imagination

Soucy de Pellerano y Scherezade García

This chapter explores the intersections of the body, migration, and visuality. Soucy de Pellerano, with her language full of organic symbolism, anticipates a sensibility that Scherezade García reclaims through Caribbean hybridity. Both artists treat the body as a metaphor for displacement, floating identities, and territorial memories.

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CHAPTER 6

Creative Freedom and Vital Affirmation

Ada Balcácer & Lizett Mejía

This chapter presents an alliance between the graphic, the symbolic, and the structural. Balcácer constructs a deeply metaphorical visual universe, while Lizette expands graphic expression from painting into the realm of objects. Together, they articulate a vision of the Caribbean as a symbolic composition of layered experiences, grounded in their earliest memories.

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CHAPTER 7

The City as a Distant Stage

Marianela Jiménez & Rosalba Hernández

From gestural painting to the exploration of materials and textures, this chapter highlights a pictorial sensibility shaped through materiality. Marianela and Rosalba share an interest in form as an emotional landscape and in painting as an extension of the body.

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CHAPTER 8

Traces of Resistance and Migration

Rosa Tavárez & Yuly Monción

Rosa Tavárez, a pioneer of printmaking in the Dominican Republic, and Yuly Monción, a contemporary artist who expands the graphic into material and political terrain, converge in a shared commitment to leaving a mark. This chapter traces the continuity of a practice that inscribes bodies, territories, and memories onto the surface. Both artists have contributed distinctive textures and techniques to Dominican painting.

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CHAPTER 9

Subjectivities and Symbolic Representation

Elsa Núñez & Tania Marmolejo

Núñez and Marmolejos propose two visions of the feminine face and soul, one grounded in political and spiritual expressionism, the other in emotional and introspective portraiture. Despite their stylistic differences, both reveal the ethics of the gaze and a poetics of the feminine as a site of symbolic power.

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CHAPTER 10

Poetics of the Invisible and the Transcendent

Rosa Idalia García & Mónica Ferreras

Abstraction becomes a medium for an embodied and spiritual interiority. Both Rosa Idalia García and Mónica Ferreras explore the feminine through a gestural language that touches the mystical, the ancestral, and the ritual. Painting becomes an act of connection with the intangible and a space for an ethics of contemplation.