The Brooklyn Rail

I didn’t know Lumin Wakoa, but I loved her paintings. In her work, I saw a relationship to the gestures of Joan Mitchell, to the glittering light in Édouard Vuillard, and to the seriousness of women artists like Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Eva Hesse whose works consistently pull me across a room. The matrix of art world and interpersonal structures that shape the field for women artists is a lattice over which their careers climb, vine-like, curling through and around the spaces these interstices make and block; like steadily growing plants, women shape these structures and navigate them. In recent years, my research has centered on the ways women support each other as they build their own careers, drawing each other onward even as they push themselves forward. I was watching Lumin climb alongside her community.

Lumin and her friends came to Maine and made themselves a residency here. In their camaraderie and marveling appreciation for the place I live, I sensed the immediacy of their connection to each other, and the way this place, known to Maine’s Indigenous peoples as the Dawnland, glowed in the close space of their friendship.

When I first came across Wakoa’s work in 2021, I immediately saw echoes of Mitchell’s moving Sunflower paintings of the later sixties in Wakoa’s gestural florals that cascaded downward in their wilting. Mitchell told the art historian Judith Bernstock of her interest in sunflowers, “Sunflowers are like people to me [...] If I see a sunflower drooping, I can droop with it, and draw it, and feel it until its death.” Bernstock noted the way sunflowers turn toward the sun; in their growing, turning, and dying, sunflowers are emphatically alive and animated. In Mitchell’s 1969 Sunflower at the Met, a creamy golden yellow-orange pom near the top of the painting dissolves, moving down the canvas into fragments of its yellow, intercut with green, violet, pink, white-green, and finally a brown form surrounded by flecks of yellow leaning over a pile of brown, yellow, green, pink. It could be a bouquet of flowers or a time-lapse of the same; the flowers live and die all at once—a memento mori but also a still life (nature morte). The painting holds onto everything alive as it falls away.

Lumin’s paintings were full, bursting, overflowing. Her 2021 White Rose Dispersal centers what seems to be a flower’s bud on a stem, yet the marks around the green center combust in a halo of white, brown, pink and yellow—not fading but exploding from one state to another. Like Mitchell’s, the flower dies in front of us—a fellow living thing. In a thoughtful review of Wakoa’s show at Deanna Evans Projects that year, Elizabeth Buhe concluded that Wakoa’s plein air and skeleton paintings “feel mostly like they are about perseverance: about continuing to paint, and all the infinitesimal choices and adjustments one makes in an effort to do so.” Life spilled out of these canvases during the depths of Covid, when death was all around. They kept reaching toward the available light of their time.

What I saw of Lumin’s life and work I saw from afar. Even through that backlit glass, her growing life and career were fresh and determined. I saw her kinship with other women painters, and the close support of that circle. In a 2019 interview, Art of Choice asked Wakoa “If you could change one thing about the current landscape for working female artists what would it be?” She answered: “To have the playing field be so wide open and equal that I don’t have to constantly define myself as a ‘female’ artist,” echoing generations of women artists before her who wanted to be free to paint as themselves, whoever they might be or become.

Lumin is part of a history of women artists who pushed toward their own light, found it, and shared it.