Fellowship Type: Artist Fellowship

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.