Cuban American
She / They
Miami, FL/ USA
Dayana Ruiz (dayanaruizart.com)
Addressing the policing and hyper sexualization of women’s bodies and other marginalized communities, my body of works applies methods of performance and street art.
Moving away from the traditional white cube space, bringing art to a demographic that normally does not engage in art spaces.
Breast Shirt – the project
Breast Shirt, an interactive installation, is a printed image of one’s uncensored breasts on a t-shirt worn in public or private spaces.
The series was inspired by the constant frustrating over the obvious hypocrisy that Instagram engages in, censoring normal women’s bodies and women artists from sharing content involving the female nude.
Its notion lies on normalizing women’s nipples by overestimating the viewer with the image of an uncensored chest, hoping to end the stigma over female nipples.
Since creating Breast Shirt it has expanded to be an ongoing global project through collaborations with different artists. Currently, collaborating with, German artist, Jennifer Adler who leads Breast Shirt Berlin.
As I continue working on the series I often get requests from people to acquire their own Breast Shirt via social media or email. Like many emerging artists today relying on social media for their livelihood, visibility on the platform is very important. Although, it has become difficult to photograph participants due to the global pandemic, using social distancing and other safety methods I’ve had the opportunity to continue to produce Breast Shirt.
The first time posting the piece on social media was a big deal for me, using all the hashtags I could think of in hopes to reach the right audience. It simply showed the t-shirt hung on a white wall, but it didn’t take long for it to get censored on Instagram.
After countless attempts reposting the image was I finally able to successfully post work on the platform.
However, the only way for Breast Shirt to exist on Instagram is either without any hashtags, meaning without any visibility or self-censoring the work by covering the nipples.
This discourages and limits me from posting on social media in order to not tip the scale where it might results to completely losing access to my profile and all the connections made using the platform.
Self-censoring Breast Shirt completely strips away the meaning behind the work by covering the most important part of the piece.
In response to having to censor my work I would occasionally cover the nipples using the middle finger emoji, pointing out that the platform would rather have you flip them off than see female human nipples.
This inspired more ongoing works in juxtaposition to the response over Instagram threatening to suspend my account if I continue to post images of female nipples; works such as, cum.mod.I.tee shirts, a mock-up of Breast Shirt with censored nipples with designs created with collaborating artists, and Nipsticks, a street art series of female nipples stickers posted all over the world.
As I continue to document the work and response from Instagram as to why they remove the post/story lead me to create the series #Censorship, a print of a side-by-side screenshots of the response from Instagram and the art they censored.
These series of works help be another voice advocating for the visibility and autonomy of all marginalized groups not only on social media platforms but in our daily lives.
