Art

Leroy Clarke

LEROY CLARKE
LeRoy Clarke

LeRoy Clarke was born in Belmont, Port of Spain, and is considered to be one of Trinidad & Tobago’s finest contemporary artists. Clarke himself states in no unclear manner that he paints for enlightenment, to bring people closer and that he paints with an intention for revolution. He also describes his as being ‘obeah’, a deliberate evocation of untainted African energy and spirituality, both erased from modern consciousness. His paintings are intended as destroyers of the enemies of humanity, particularly African humanity. His work explores the symbol of Douens, who were the sad playful characters of Trinidad and Tobago folklore. He saw these as a symbol of ‘the plight of third world peoples under the tutelage of conquerors.’ This idea is central to his work. He looked at the image of them as powerful, a radical way of relating old and familiar insights and image to the turbulent politics of the late 20th century Caribbean.

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Clarke's Works

 

Imna Arroyo

IMNA ARROYO
Imna Orroyo

She is described as focusing her art on visualizing her identity as a woman of Hispanic, African, and Taíno descent. She also encourages exploration of the issues and joys of heritage and identity. She also focuses on the role of women in society, the presence and participation of Latinos in mainstream America, and also on her connection as a Black Puerto Rican woman with her roots as mentioned earlier.

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Orroyo's Works

 

Fred Wilson

FRED WILSON
Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is an artist from the Bronx, New York. His work challenges colonial assumptions and narratives of history, culture, and race, pushing viewers to look at marginalized histories, especially exploring how models of categorization exemplify and display fraught ideologies and power relations inherent in institutions. He also does work with the Murano glass company, with black glass, taking up a particular interest in the role of the colour black as representative of African American people through being placed upon them as a representation. He works with sculpture, photography, collage, printmaking, painting, and installation art.

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Wilson's Works

In Mining the Museum, Wilson juxtaposes the museum’s artifacts, essentially reassembling the Maryland Historical Society’s existing collection, which had aimed to tell stories of colonization, slavery, and abolition, in a way which was new, surprising, satirical, and ironic. For example, he assembled ornate, colonial-era silverware, pitchers, and teacups along with a pair of iron slave-shackles, pushing the viewer to reconsider the biases which underlie historical exhibitions in museums, and how those impacted the meanings viewers attach to those objects. Another example is his placement of an old baby carriage with a Ku Klux Klan hood substituting the bedding, and a photograph of Black nannies and white babies next to it.

This automatically brought the viewer to understand the persistence of racial hierarchies, and bring attention to the way that prejudices are absorbed by children. This was a way of critiquing museum institutions from within in a provocative way that made people consider marginalized histories side-by-side with what is mainstream, making the racism within museum institutions apparent. Additionally, it was also a way of making apparent the biased way in which history is often recounted.

This is a collection of Black glass chandeliers made with Murano glass. Wilson’s chandeliers have been vehicles of his meditations on Blackness, beauty, and death. Speak of Me as I Am was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, investigating the history of Venice’s African population, and probing into how Africans were depicted and portrayed in 17th and 18th century Venetian painting and decorative arts, and titled the different chandeliers using phrases from Shakespeare’s Othello. Chandelier Mori, one among the others in this exhibition, was the first black chandelier to be created in the entire history of Venetian glassmaking. His works utilize the seductive beauty of Venetian craftsmanship while simultaneously moving away from homogenous European culture.

The expansions of his work with chandeliers, The Way the Moon’s in Love with the Dark in his installation for Afro Kismet, exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial, combined black Murano glass with traditional metal and glass elements of ottoman chandeliers, drawing attention to the complicated relationship between Venice and Istanbul. 

These are ways in which he has been able to meld cultural symbols to bring to light questions surrounding erasure and exclusion in society.

 

 

Daniel Lind Ramos

DANIEL LIND RAMOS
Daniel Lind Ramos

Daniel Lind Ramos is a painter and assemblage sculptor born in Loíza, Puerto Rico. He uses found materials to create assemblages that connect Puerto Rico’s history to present-day life, traditions and rituals. He pays tribute to Afro-descendant communities through presenting the materials and practices that represent them, and evaluating their contribution to history. He also likes to employ a mix of organic and industrial, ancient and anodyne, and the tension/contrast that creates. He often draws on his Afro-Caribbean heritage, and the history of Loíza (traces its origin to the settlement of cimarrones, or free Black individuals and enslaved people who escaped). To him, “paying tribute to traditional Afro-descendant communities through the presentation of the materials and practices that represent them is to evaluate their contribution to history and, at the same time, suggest a fundamental part of the strategies of an expressive program that tries to create, from the particular and specific, an aesthetic which reflects from the polysomic of its meanings humanity as a whole.”

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Ramos' Works

 

Christopher Cozier

CHRISTOPHER COZIER
Christopher Cozier

Christopher Cozier was born and continues to work in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, as a painter, writer, and curator. He explores and transforms conventional readings of where he is from, and his experience of being from the Caribbean affects how he sees the world. He also looks to investigate the relationship between contemporary and historical conditions. He seeks to transform everyday objects into signs or vocabularies to generate dialogues across different geographies, histories, and contemporary experiences. His work investigates the problematic space of post-independence, symbols of power which remain and shape narratives of development, and commercial expansion and profitability.

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Cozier's Works

In this exhibition, Cozier uses cut geometric patterns from paper, patterns originally seen in suburban concrete ‘breeze bricks’. These patterns became more prevalent after Trinidad’s independence from the British, in the 1960’s and 70’s. In other tropical countries, these bricks were used as ventilation, in Cozier’s work they represent the possibility and longing of those in political and social transition across the world. It is intended to articulate a nation’s unresolved promise for a brighter future and the inevitable compromise and sense of displacement that accompanies “progress.” The images he depicts not only represent where he lives, but they also resonate as trans-cultural symbols.

In this video installation, Christopher Cozier presents to the viewer two single channel videos, Gas Men and Globe, which explore the presence and impact of multinational oil companies in various international locations. Through these works he aims to express the politics of the global oil economy. With the videos portraying suited men swinging fuel pump nozzles and hoses in the air like cowboy-style rope tricks and whip cracking, Cozier calls attention to the power dynamics present in this economic paradigm that has grave effects on seemingly anonymous places, lives, and histories.

 

Boscoe Holder

BOSCOE HOLDER
Boscoe Holder

Boscoe Holder pursued arts associated with local folk traditions which he incorporated into many of his own works himself. After a trip to Martinique where he encountered the Nardal sisters whose journal contributed significantly to Black culture in Paris, he focused his own work on blending his various talents into choreographic dramatizations of Caribbean culture. His younger brother, Geoffrey, is also a dancer and painter.

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Holder's Works

 

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and later went on to study film and video in Chicago. Her documentaries often blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, deeply concerned with the documentarian’s desire for truth and the artist’s aesthetic concerns. To her, the camera is a tool with a two-fold function, both revealing and fabricating reality. Actors transcend the limits of their identities and realities in reimagining historical events Muñoz documents, alluding to the possibility of social and political transformation as they rewrite history and their role in it. Through her work, she explores artifice, authenticity, and narrative, and how these shape our understanding of history and identity. Her work also captures the ironies of postcolonial conditions in the Caribbean, alluding to material, local, and symbolic histories, documenting specific communities and public sites.

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Muñoz's Works

In Fábrica Inútil, or ‘Useless Factory’, she restages a series of events surrounding layoffs at a factory in Puerto Rico. The video begins with a tragically banal scene of factory bosses emotionlessly announcing layoffs, but progresses to more fanciful and buoyant images of workers gathering to observe the sunrise and participate in wrestling matches etc. The artist turns her sharp critical eye on the social injustices of global capitalism and also intimates utopian alternatives through her imaginative play and connection to natural beauty.

In La Cueva Negra, or ‘The Black Cave’, Muñoz explores the Paso del Indio, an indigenous burial ground in Puerto Rico that was discovered during the construction of a highway, and eventually paved over. Using interviews with local residents and archeologists involved in the excavation, the artist’s video offers a reflection on the origins and meanings of the site, which, in the process, becomes an allegory for the island;s convoluted history. The camera tracks two teenage boys wandering through the area, their freedom of movement and sense of curiosity symbolizing the romantic but ultimately misguided desire to find and preserve paradise.

 

Juan Sánchez

JUAN SÁNCHEZ
Juan Sánchez

Juan Sánchez is a graphic artist, painter, and assemblage artist, combining photography, collage, writing, and drawing. He lives and works in New York, USA, where he has become a prominent community leader as well as a member of Puerto Rican nationalit movements such as Comitè Pro Libertad de los Nacionalistas. His works are statements on social/political/cultural issues of Puerto Rican heritage. He deals with the condition and identity of Puerto Ricans, religious syncretism, racial and gender discrimination, struggle for PR’s independence.He considers the search for “racial, cultural, social, and political definitions rooted in and rising from a hostile environment” central to his creative process, including the exploration of the history of the Colonizers and the Colonized, and “taking back what is rightfully ours”. 

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Sanchez's Works

 

Adal Maldonado

ADÁL
Adál

Born in Utuado, Puerto Rico as Adal Maldonado, he relocated to New York City at seventeen, and was trained as a photographer and master printer in San Francisco. He is the co-founder and co-director of Foto Gallery in SoHo, NYC, an experimental gallery solely devoted to photography and photo-derived works as a fine-arts medium. His punning on literal meanings has become the primary artistic principle in his work, allowing him to address a tricky characteristic of his own biography – his double cultural allegiance as Nuyorican. He describes his own art as a journey of self-discovery, the conflicts between his experiences as Nuyorican and Puerto Rican culture. His work alludes to the phenomenon of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, problems of identity, the political status of Puerto Rico, and the perception of Puerto Rico abroad.

Biography Source

Adál's Works

This is a series of twenty out-of-focus black-and-white photographic portraits of Puerto Rican artists, community members, and activists, accompanied by Pedro Pietri’s poem ‘Nuyoricans Out of Focus’ (1966). This installation also depicts artifacts from the conceptual nation ‘El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico’, a politically charged nation in the vein of the Chicano nation Aztlán, the governing center of this nation being El Puerto Rican Embassy, developed by Pietri and Adál, rather than a White House. The Puerto Rican Embassy is meant to elevate the position of Puerto Rico from colony to equal nation, since only sovereign nations direct embassies. The out-of-focus Nuyoricans serve as ambassadors of the Embassy.

Adál collaborated with poet Pedro Pietri on this artistic endeavor, founding a website, www.elpuertoricanembassy.org. This encompassed a ‘Puerto Rican passport’, naming ambassadors to the arts, and composing a national anthem written in what is known as ‘Spanglish’. El Puerto Rican Embassy, described as a ‘sovereign state of mind’, affirmed Puerto Rican Identity in the metropolis, proclaiming artistic liberation by challenging the confines of Puerto Rico’s colonial condition which deprives islanders of their own citizenship and diplomatic and political representation.

Kara Walker

KARA WALKER
Kara Walker

Originally from California, Kara Walker’s work are haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation, shedding light on the ongoing psychological injury from the legacy of slavery. Her work focuses on giving the viewer a critical understanding of the past and simultaneously examining contemporary racial and gender stereotypes. She uses silhouettes to explore the nature of race representation, interrogating the representation of the Black body by modern artists. She has also touched on the way that images of Black bodies in pain continue to be a European/American spectacle.

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Walker's Works

This title of this installation refers to the Margaret Mitchell novel, Gone with the Wind, set in the context of the Civil War. Walker’s narrative in this piece begins and ends with coupled figures, but the chain of tragicomic and turbulent imagery refutes the promise of romance and confounds conventional attributions of power and oppression. 

This wall installation inaugurated Walker’s signature medium: black cut-out silhouettes of caricatures of antebellum figures arranged on a white wall in uncanny, sexual, and violent scenarios. She revives this 18th century cut-paper silhouette style as a way of critiquing historical narratives of slavery and the perpetuation of ethnic and racial stereotypes.

In this paper installation, Walker uses cut-paper silhouettes, known to have been a refined 28th century, high-society craft, to portray graphic narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation, and confronting stereotypes to depict scenes in which masters and mistresses engaged with enslaved people and children, a surreal version of history. Through this installation, she aimed to examine the problematic nature of appropriating and exoticizing Black identity, culture, and vernacular across time and across the world. ‘Endless Conundrum’ is a direct reference to ‘Endless Column’ (1918), by a Romanian artist named Constantin Brancusi, who is often credited with inventing the terms of modern abstract sculpture and zigzag motifs of his work. This is a way of drawing attention to the unattributed adoption of African and Oceanic art in the creation of early 20th century European modernism, as with ‘Endless Column’.

‘A Subtlety’ refers to ‘Subtleties’ which were once a luxury. They were sugar sculptures made for the rich and elite, basically as edible table decorations. This was possible because sugar became a lot more widely available in large part due to slave labour. Walker looks at the history of slave trade in America, questions like who cut the sugar cane? Who bleached it? Who sacked it? This sculpture is a 35 foot tall ‘Sugar Baby’, a Black woman-sphinx made out of bleached sugar, which acts as both metaphor and reality since sugar is brown in its ‘raw’ state, lodged in the back of an enormous warehouse built in the late 19th century that Domino used at one point for storing raw sugar cane as it arrived from the Caribbean for refinement and packaging. The sculpture is enormous, yet still wears a kerchief around her head to remind the viewer where she comes from. Walker is intentional with this enormity not only for the viewer to see her, but so that the sphinx can so boldly display this position that is regal yet totemic of subjugation, beat down but standing.