The exhibit, curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, an internationally renowned artist living and working in Little Haiti in the heart of Miami, is a major project launched by Caraibes en Creation, a new program of Culturesfrance, the French Government agency for international cultural exchanges. The exhibit will showcase contemporary artists from the Caribbean.

“It’s a natural for this exhibit to happen in Miami for the city has become home to the largest diaspora from Caribbean nations,’’ said Duval Carrié. “More so, Miami has become the epicenter of the art world, thanks to the presence of major art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Miami, and the approximately 25 other art fairs during the first week of December.”

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The exhibition “The Global Caribbean – Focus on the Caribbean Contemporary Art Landscape” was initiated in Miami by Culturesfrance, through its program “Caraibes en Création”, after a long trip throughout the Caribbean, where extensive contacts were made with the region’s writers and artists.

Culturesfrance launched its “Caraibes en Créations” program in June 2007 at Citadelle Henry, in Haiti. Culturesfrance is the cultural agency for international artistic exchanges of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Communications.

Two facts had become evident to us throughout this process: first, the access of Caribbean contemporary art productions is seldom seen on the international art market, and second, Caribbean artists are much too rarely given the opportunity to meet and share ideas about their work. Our answer to this state of affairs was to facilitate an exhibition of high quality and wide scope in one of the major contemporary art centers of the world as well as a cultural and linguistic cradle for those of “creole” cultures: the City of Miami.

Then came the point for artist and venue to coincide. Edouard Duval Carrié, an internationally renowned artist, based in Miami, whose passion and advocacy of the Caribbean region and its artistic expressions are well known, showed great and immediate enthusiasm for the project. The venue was then identified: the Little Haiti Cultural Art Center, a magnificent, brand new complex dedicated to the art of the Caribbean region, located in the heart of the Little Haiti neighborhood, built and operated by the City of Miami.

The Global Caribbean exhibition to be presented in this Center will coincide with the internationally renowned Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair. This exhibition, which is being curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, has been one of the few selected to be included in the official Art Basel program. The exhibit will continue in the spring of 2010 to France , where it will be presented at the Musée des Arts Modestes located in southern France in Sète.

We are delighted that The Global Caribbean is taking place in the heart of Miami’s “Caribbean” neighborhoods , where Cubans, Jamaicans, Haitians, Dominicans and Trinidadians interact with each other on a daily basis, and where sentences incorporating French, English, Spanish and Creole words can routinely be heard. The spirit of the “Caraibes en Créations” program and the nature of Culturesfrance’s objectives meet here: the cultural diversity, reflective of today’s modern world, is what we wish to promote and support by enabling the artists of this “Tout-monde”, to quote Edouard Glissant, in their act of creation.

Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, Director, Culturesfrance

Sophie Renaud, Director, Department of Cultural Exchanges and Cooperation, Culturesfrance