The artist stresses the tension between these variables through a queering aesthetic, which allows William to engage in personal discussions about his own Caribbean background and diasporic experience.
William’s work often uses the representation of the gaze as a means of transforming and negating the human body. Notably, Lind-Ramos’s installation and sculptural pieces have been showcased with positive critical reception in this year’s Whitney Biennial.
TESSA MARS
B.
Lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The complexly layered art of Didier William offers a challenge to the viewer by resisting categorizations from a technical, material, or thematic standpoint. Using various materials—such as lace, beads, paper collage, and fabrics, among many others—she tells complex stories of identity-building that collapse the traditional boundaries of time and space, while addressing intergenerational legacies of, for instance, racial tropes.
Recent larger installations and dynamic three-dimensional hanging pieces—such as the “…for those who bear/bare witness…” series (2018)—signal a deeper intersectional direction in the nature of her art.
MARÍA ISABEL RUEDA
B.
More broadly, the unearthing of new histories and denouncing of current power structures is contributing to amend the fraught effects of such artists’ underrepresentation.
MARÍA MAGDALENA CAMPOS-PONS
B. Her paintings are currently featured in “The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art.”
DANIEL LIND-RAMOS
B.
“By painting them as strong, thoughtful individuals I like to show them in their individuality and support their strength.”
‘Woman with Flowers in her Hair’ (2009), watercolors on canvas by Heidi Berger
‘Women’s Work’ (2013), mixed media by Heidi Berger
Berger pays extra attention to the background of her paintings.
Between 2004 and 2013, Rueda also created “The Real. “The women of Barbados have inspired me with their resilience, their courage, their humor and their compassion, sometimes in spite of adversity in the form of poverty, abuse or lack of education” says Berger. Works such as We the People (2011) and Breathing Panel: Oriented Right (2015) signal Ward’s interest in criticizing the inherent flaws of representation of dominant political systems as well as connecting with his African Diasporic roots.
His subjects seem immersed in what they are doing, unaware of their surroundings. The series’s title plays on the Cuban animated movie Vampiros en la Habana. His mixed-media works are assemblages of found objects and drawings. In turn, discussions have grown around Caribbean artists and the relationship between the continent and the islands; the configurations of race and the rights to representation; the use of disposable materials; the persistence of colonialism; the recovery of ancestral knowledge and spiritualities; and the connection to the environment.
Most recently, a new exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, “The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art,” curated by María Elena Ortiz and Marsha Pearce, is showcasing the work of emerging artists from the Caribbean.
Smith is inspired by his Caribbean ancestry—he is both Trinidadian and Haitian—as it highlights notions of fluidity, identity construction, and the sociopolitical history of the region.
Smith’s work Isle de Tribamartica (2017), part of the series “Bundlehouse Borderlines,” satirizes previous imperial impulses to label and organize the Caribbean.
Works like Centinelas (2013), a totemic installation made out of coconut palm trees and metalware, propose a retrieval of colonized peoples’ historical, political, and cultural narratives.
Also an established painter, Lind-Ramos has long investigated themes related to the carnivalesque, racial politics, and the diasporic experience.
His quiet, intimate settings are recognizable to anyone in the Caribbean.
‘Conch Stand’ by Sheldon Saint. Lives and works Chicago and Kingston.
In the past decade, painter, mixed media, and installation artist Ebony G. Patterson has built a body of work characterized by a unique, lavish, and daring layering of patterns and materials.
For example, Gas Men / Globe(2014) and Development Blocks (2018) investigate the influence of capitalist extraction of oil reserves as it relates to notions of progress, politics, space, and body movement.
MAKSAENS DENIS
B. Their work reflects the multitude of experiences of the region’s 26 countries as well as its many diasporic cultures in metropolitan centers.
Over the past 15 years, numerous exhibitions have contributed distinct readings of the work of artists of the Caribbean.
Lives and works in Port of Spain.
Christopher Cozier’s art reflects the history, race, culture, and politics of the Caribbean, specifically within the context of post-independence Trinidad and Tobago.
