Catherine Tafur

Catherine Tafur relocated to the United States with her family in 1984 to flee such rapturous violence at the age of eight. The Peruvian-born painter has subsequently spent a lifetime untangling the terror she witnessed in early childhood from the harassment she endured as a queer, multiracial immigrant in the overwhelmingly white American suburbs of Delaware during her adolescence. Her drawings and paintings therefore manifest a politics of survival alongside the attendant psychology of someone wrestling with a history of injustices. If painting is a method of mourning, then it is also an act of retribution for Tafur. After all, some of the best chapters from her oeuvre include chaotic scenes of klepto-capitalism run amuck; queer rebuttals to the status quo served by a triumvirate of androgynous angels; and imploded scenes from our current cycle of globalized military malaise.

And if political resistance often feels like a Sisyphean task in the twenty-first century, then painting is an arena for emotional release. More specifically, Tafur has turned the genre of history painting into a feminist project. Her work reflects on the artistic avant-garde’s intertwined legacy with disillusionment and violent revolution.

Although very young when she lived in Peru’s capital city of Lima, Tafur could still comprehend the cost of living through the reign of terror dispensed by the Sendero Luminoso - Shining Path. Aligned with Maoist Communism, Shining Path’s optimistically Orwellian name betrayed an ulterior motive through the 1980s: to replace the country’s recently-established democracy with a “New Democracy,” doublespeak for dictatorship. Violence took many forms for soldiers of the Shining Path: the indoctrination of rural peasants, the extensive bombing campaigns, the assassination of more than 250 public officials, and an estimated total killing of over thirty thousand people between 1980 and 2000.

Arguably the group’s favorite target, though, was Peru’s electrical infrastructure. Power outages in Lima were a common occurrence. During these outages, the Shining Path would burn enormous hammer and sickle insignias in the hills high above Lima, reminding its residents of their apocalyptic fate.

Witnessing such spectacular atrocities unfold around her compelled Tafur to imagine her relocation to the United States as a panacea for life’s troubles. Then as now, America represented a pipedream for immigrants fleeing violence; it was a place of relative physical security. However, the United States also held a complex socio-economic system of prejudices that prohibited Tafur from snugly assimilating into her new surroundings. Growing up as a queer woman of color in such a normative zone of whiteness, Tafur experienced numerous transgressions against the intersectionality of her identity — outbursts of homophobia and xenophobia from a nation that still expected its immigrants to assimilate or disperse.

excerpt from “The Personal Is Always Political: The History Paintings of Catherine Tafur”, an essay by Zachary Small included in Tafur’s monograph "Yearning To Breathe Free"