Coming Soon...
Our Bodies Are Memories of Our Bodies:
Siapo ma Solo
Public Opening: May 3- September 28, 2025
Coming Soon
siapo—indigenous Samoan barkcloth abstraction—and solo—poetry in the Samoan genre and worldview, here composed in English—by Fa’afafine, non-binary Samoan artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin. Printed on cloth with ink painting, these works embody the fa’asamoa understanding that the body itself is an archive, carrying ancestral and personal memory through the mana of social and environmental relationships. Taulapapa's siapo abstractions draw from sea geometries and mountain rhythms as indigenous heritage and moreover as an ever-shifting continuum, while the solo poems retain the cadence, imagery, and interwoven logic of gagana Sāmoa, each line a patterned surface of sound and sense. Complicating the Western partition between past and present, body and history, this exhibition invites entry into Pacific poetics where memory moves in cycles, returning like the tide to all the shores it has known and will know. Carried on cloth are imprints of ancestral siaopos, cared by Pasifika diaspora.
The exhibit is generously supported in part by The Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative, Center for Cultural Power.
Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa'e (American Samoa). Their artist book The Healer's Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia (2022, 2nd edition 2024) was published by Pu'uhonua Society and Tropic Editions of Honolulu at HT22 the Hawai'i Triennial. Their book of poems Coconut Milk (2013) was on the American Library Association Rainbow List Top Ten Books of the Year. The Bat and other early works received a 1997 Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft. They co-edited Samoan Queer Lives (2018) published by Little Island Press of Aotearoa. Their work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Metropolitan Museum, De Young Museum, Musée du quai Branly, Auckland Art Gallery, Bishop Museum, and Honolulu Museum of Art. Their film Sinalela (2001) won the 2002 Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival Best Short Film Award. Their film 100 Tikis was the opening night film selection of the 2016 Présence Autochtone in Montreal and was an Official Selection in the Fifo Tahiti Film Festival. Taulapapa's art studio and writing practice is based in Muhheaconneock lands / Hudson, NY, where they live with their husband.