Throwing a goddess in the garbage.

In the beginning there was a void; In that darkness, Atabey, the mother of all, created herself and the universe.

"She could be a portal to something bad."

I looked down at the painting of Atabey. A month before, in Puebla, Mexico, a museum conservation artist taught me how to coat a slab of wood with clay, thinly, one layer at a time. I etched her image on its surface. Then, he helped me mix egg tempera to surround her form with a vivid cobalt blue, and carefully explained how to apply gold leaf. I left his office in the back of the museum, hurried to my studio hidden in a small courtyard, and began gilding her sky with golden stars.

“Syncretism,” he later said to me amongst the museum's religious paintings, "it's why we have The Virgin of Guadalupe. We had to hide our truth to survive." A lesson about colonialism and hidden deities followed, pointing me towards my own roots. As a half-Black, half-Puerto Rican woman, I grew up knowing Atabey, the Taino nature spirit, by name and image but never by story.

“She could be a portal to something bad.” My pastor's words echoed as I held the painting over a yellow trash can lined with a black garbage bag. She was out of hiding, and he instilled fear in me. I hesitated before throwing the goddess of creation into the black abyss.

After I discarded Atabey, her lesson of death and rebirth began.

Within a decade, I transformed. I closed my photography studio, dropped out of an MFA program, left the church, and began to study the stories hidden behind the saints.

Writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of, "the right to opacity", argues that people outside of Western culture should not demystify themselves to be understood by a dominant power.

This abstract work is helping me decolonize my mind as an artist and claim my right to opacity. A formal education and early career as an artist, in the Western context, drained my creative energy. I felt the burden of trying to make sense to a world that categorizes me as “other”. 

This body of work is my freedom. I never know what the painting will reveal. I create with nothingness, and an entire universe forms. My work is about releasing all the energy myself and my ancestors had to hide, justify, or fit into a confined box.

What is art outside of a Western context? What is its function? And who am I serving as an artist?..these are all the thoughts going through my head.