Essays

This article focuses on three performative-transformative wall drawings by Trinidadian artist Shannon Alonzo that explore the enduring power of Carnival and the ways in which its traditional characters and rituals are resurrected each year, manifesting its spirit of resilience, resistance, and liberation: Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging, a three-part mural cycle created and presented at Alice Yard in Trinidad in 2020; Mangrove, which was commissioned for the 2023 Liverpool Biennial; and Play ah mas, Play yaself, which was created in 2023 at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami as part of a Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) Fellowship through Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Within the framework of Cuban modernism from 1930 to 1970, Cuban women played a significant role as generators of modernism’s planning and organizing ideology. Their work expanded into design, architecture, abstract painting, and political and spatial thinking. At this stage, the role of women artists was consolidated as that of protagonists in the production of artistic and social ideology supported by public and private institutions. Focusing on the work of Clara Porset, Amelia Peláez and Loló Soldevilla, this essay questions the notion of “innocence” often imposed on modernist women subjects in terms of the social and artistic ideological production they proposed and reclaims their role as agents of change.

In this panoramic study of the oeuvre of the Puerto Rican conceptual artist Guillermo Rodríguez, the writer Luis Othoniel Rosa proposes the phrase “confounding artifacts of (perceptual) disidentification” to describe what Rodríguez’s work does to our senses and our way of perceiving our catastrophic historical reality. As Rosa argues, the sublime goal of this art is to make a sentient connection with the unhuman things that make up our world; to break with the identificatory market of representation, and to make science more expressive and art more inquisitive. In Guillermo Rodríguez’s art, the landscape, playful and decolonized, looks back at us.

Donette Francis’s Spring 2021 course Discourses of Creolization engaged “creole” and “creolization” as foundational key words in Caribbean studies. The class juxtaposed conventional definitions that privilege identities formed in the new world to methodologies that grapple with the particularities of historical moments and shaping relations of power that create conditions of possibilities or impossibilities for Black worldmaking. Applying these insights to Allied with Power: African & African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, the following essays highlight creolized forms of artmaking from abstraction to figuration.

Written from the perspective that major art collections are important and revealing cultural artifacts and historical documents, this essay examines institutional, corporate, and private collection practices in post-independence Jamaica. The case studies illustrate how the history of art collecting in Jamaica mirrors the history of Jamaican art itself, as well as the changing ideas about art and culture as Jamaica moved from Independence in 1962 to the contemporary era. The case studies also help us to understand how wealth, power, class, race, and other social factors have operated and been contested in postcolonial Jamaica, generally, and in the specific context of the Jamaican art world.

How can a house reflect migration’s arcs, its losses, and its gains? It is this quest for reconciliation that draws Grace Aneiza Ali into the mother’s house paintings by Guyanese-born British artist Frank Bowling OBE RA (b. British Guiana, 1934). Bowling’s practice for the past six decades has been defined by his expert weaving of autobiography and geographical subject matter into the formalist rigor of color abstraction. In tandem, his early figurative and abstract paintings informally regarded as the Mother’s House Paintings are defined by a singular motif: a 1953 photograph of the house he grew up in and often returned to—his mother’s house—in New Amsterdam, Guyana.

In this article Erica Moiah James discusses Rubén Torres Llorca’s sculptural installation History Will Teach Us Nothing (1998) within a sequence of works he made in a span of ten years, and in relation to the work of Antonia Eiriz, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Christopher Cozier. It focuses on Llorca’s exceptional craftmanship, his multifaceted aesthetic language, and how he arranges artwork within exhibition spaces to encourage audiences to have meaningful encounters with the ideas he wants to communicate.

Thinking about the Caribbean as more a space than a place, independent curator and doctoral candidate Nicole Smythe-Johnson argues that collecting Caribbean art should not be a matter of geographic focus, but rather of collecting from a Caribbean perspective. Smythe-Johnson sketches a collecting strategy informed by the multivalent intersectionality that is a hallmark of Caribbean culture, with reference to works by Caribbean artists in the Black Studies collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1961, Cuban artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was forcibly relocated to the United States due to the uncertainty caused by Fidel Castro’s rise to power in her home nation. This began Mendieta’s life of exile. Focusing on the photographic series Silueta Works in Mexico (1973-1977), artist and scholar Genevieve Hyacinthe posits Mendieta as a “New World Artist” whose interests in the figure of the Black Venus, and other Black Atlantic forms metaphorically buoyed her to re-shape her experience of exile from a narrative of intractable trauma to artistic agency.

In this essay, Jerry Philogene discusses Guadeloupe-based, multi-disciplinary artist Ronald Cyrille’s paintings and drawings within a framework that interrogates Cyrille’s interplay between Creole folklore, language, and childhood memories.