Left: Demetri Espinosa, "Catharsis," 2020. Right: Anina Major, "Red Tip Loci," 2018. (Courtesy LaiSun Keane)
Anina Major has spent a lifetime balancing the push and pull of place and identity. Growing up in the Bahamas, then later moving to the United States, she’s thought a lot about what it’s like to live on an island where inhabitants adapt their sense of self to fit the touristic stereotypes. Major calls it a kind of “cultural erasure” that she now contemplates from afar, as a transplant to New York.
Demetri Espinosa, on the other hand, has spent his life negotiating the “cultural dissonance” of being raised by a Greek mother and Mexican father. Attending the Hellenic American Academy in Lowell as a child, he spoke Greek in school during the day but heard Spanish in the evenings at his father’s Mexican restaurant.