Current and Former Fellows

During her CCI Research Fellowship, Emilie Boone will continue developing her book project titled Haiti Chooses You: Notes on a Caribbean History of Photography. Each chapter of the manuscript proceeds chronologically along the arc of photography’s history to elucidate Haiti’s relationship to the medium, demonstrating how the history of photography in Haiti is inherently global.

To read more about Emilie Boone’s work click here.

Arthur Francietta explores the creation of Caribbean writing systems, focusing on its materiality and medium of expression. His fellowship project aims to delve into the spiritual and mythological essence of ritual graphic systems such as the anaforuana from Cuba and the vévés from Haiti. These symbols, inherited from African traditions, provide a rich foundation for understanding how signs can embody beliefs and myths.

To read more about Arthur Francietta’s work click here.

Claudia Claremi is an artist and filmmaker. Her work combines video, analog film, photography, installation, sound, and text.

To read more about Claudia Claremi’s work click here.

Petrina Dacres’s current book project After-History?: The Heroic Image in Contemporary Caribbean Art analyzes the various ways that Caribbean artists have utilized, critiqued, and redefined the conventions of heroic representation since the 1990s. Within the context of the CCI Fellowship, Dacres plans to complete the introduction to her book while also exploring selected works by artists represented in PAMM’s collection.

To read more about Petrina Dacres’s work click here.

Using photography, video, sound, and installation, Farihah Aliyah Shah’s research and lens-based practice explores themes such as identity formation, the colonial gaze, migration, race, connectivity to land, and collective memory. In the context of her CCI fellowship, Shah will expand two ongoing bodies of work: Along the Demerara and Looking for Lucille. Shah will share her research outputs in the international symposium “On the Edge of Visibility,” which will take place at PAMM in October 2023.

To read more about Farihah Shah’s work click here.

During her CCI Fellowship, Shannon Alonzo will engage in drawing, soft sculpture, and performance to deepen her research on Caribbean Carnival and the female body as a site of liberation. Through dedicated studio production, Alonzo seeks greater understanding of the ephemeral cycles that exist in Carnival praxis, when the people give themselves over to the transience of the moment and its inevitable loss.

To read more about Shannon Alonzo’s work click here.

During the Fellowship, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will work on the production of her ongoing film project focused on the legacy of writer, anti-colonial, and feminist activist Suzanne Césaire, and the installation version of the artwork Too Bright to See, which will premiere at PAMM in April 2023. For the shooting of the film, Hunt-Ehrlich will collaborate with actors, musicians and community members from the Francophone and Caribbean diaspora in Florida.

To read more about Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s work click here.

Proposing artworks as tools of perception, during the fellowship period Guillermo Rodríguez will explore two parallel investigations. Turning “satellitally” inwards, his screen-prints series Doppler Landscapes proposes an atmospheric conception of landscape. His Interstellar Topographies, a series of large-scale tactile sculptures, translates astronomical data into three-dimensional objects based on models developed by NASA and other agencies for the blind-visually impaired (BVI) community. This fellowship is present in collaboration with Bakehouse Art Complex.

To read more about Guillermo Rodríguez’s work click here.

Highlighting the cardinal presence of women artists within the Cuban and Caribbean modernism periods, Abel González Fernández’s research project Architecture of “enclosed spaces” attempts to expand the narrative of Cuban modernism art history, not only by reconstructing the modernist ideology that framed the creation of modern objects, but also exploring how women artists situated within it developed their voice and perspective.

To read more about Abel González Fernández’s work click here.

The project Guáyiga Maniel by Eliazar Ortiz proposed the recovery of the legacy, memory, and ancestral knowledge of Afro-Antillean cultures through artworks made with organic materials and pigments collected from his own natural environment in the Dominican Republic.

To read more about Eliazar Ortiz’s work click here.

Jessica Taylor, a curator and researcher from Barbados currently based in London, engaged in a close study of a selection of works in PAMM’s collection by artists from the Hispanic and English-speaking Caribbean to explore the significance of travel, movement, and cross-border exchange for creative practitioners from the region, and consider the relationship between production and travel in the formation of collections of Caribbean art today.

To read more about Jessica Taylor’s work click here.

Haitian-American artist and filmmaker Monica Sorelle expanded the project Reeds/Wozo, a collection of works utilizing video, photography, and sculpture that engages the history of Haitian people, specifically women, as the poto mitan, or pillars of society, despite the weight of political and international pressure on the island. This fellowship is present in collaboration with Bakehouse Art Complex.

To read more about Monica Sorelle’s work click here.

Florida-based Research Fellow Erica Moiah James focused on developing a chapter for her second academic book, which aims to historicize the concept of the global over a period of 500 years through a series of artworks created in the Caribbean, from the landing of Columbus to the present day. During the fellowship year, James studied a series of contemporary works in PAMM’s collection that directly engage notions of time, history, and the decolonial process in ways central to the project.

To read more about Erica Moiah James’s work click here.

During the fellowship, Julián Sánchez-González expanded his research on art and spiritualities in the Caribbean by engaging with artworks from PAMM’s collection.

To read more about Julián Sánchez-González’s work click here.

During the fellowship period, Ronald Cyrille had a studio for art production at Mémorial ACTe, Centre Caribeén d’Expressions et de Mémoire de la Traite et de l’Esclavage, in Guadaloupe, where he created a series of artworks that will be part of an upcoming exhibition and publication organized by Mémorial ACTe.

To read more about Ronald Cyrille’s work click here.