I
The Florida Peninsula protrudes into the Caribbean sea, making it the northernmost land mass and forming part of the Antillean Archipelago. The latter was wrongly named by Columbus as the Antilles, after the mythical islands populated by the Lusophones who escaped the Moors’ ruthless treatment of Christians, following their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the first millennium. Other names for the region such as the West Indies or the Caribbean also stem from either misconceptions or deliberate attempts to vilify the original inhabitants of the region. The first came from Columbus himself who was convinced that his quest was to discover a new and shorter route to the East in order to eliminate the control of the myriad of intermediaries that taxed all movements of goods from the Orient to Western Europe. The most used term for the region - Caribbean - stems from the term Caribe which denoted the anthropophagous nature ascribed to the islands’ inhabitants by the Spaniards to vilify them in order to best serve their purpose of systematically exploiting the indigenous populations. These actions culminated in the almost total eradication of the local populations, creating what is known historically as the Black Legend. Despite major revisionist efforts, this dark moment in Spanish history remains un-eradicated and the label Caribbean survives.
What ensued after the first encounter which occurred on those islands is a long, complex series of events which have produced a region homogeneous in many respects but as varied as the succession of islands that descend in an arch south from the tip of the Florida Keys down to the coast of South America. A definite constant in the region is the wrath of mother nature exercised throughout the islands during the yearly hurricane season. Along with the damage wrought by the weather, colonization, slavery and plantation economies could also be seen as agents of destruction in the region. The ways in which these institutions impacted negatively varied from island to island to the same degree in which the colonizing nations of Western Europe differed from one another. Compounding this, were the differences within the groups of slaves that were deported from Africa to work on those hellish plantations. Hundreds of studies have been made on the subject of the transatlantic slave trade but the African slaves and their provenance is a vast domain that still today lacks thorough research.
The indigenous populations of the archipelago were decimated not long after the European discovery due to mistreatment and the introduction of contagious diseases against which they were not immunized. The native peoples were quickly replaced by a myriad of African slaves who were put to work on plantations that sprung up all over the islands in one form or another after it was realized that local rivers were just carrying water and not gold as had been expected. For much of these islands’ histories, the plantation economy was the dominant factor converting them into a very sophisticated prison-like system where social stratification of society was based on the color of skin. The region has evolved throughout the centuries. Revolutions, emancipation from slavery and liberation from colonial domination has improved some of the worst aspects of this dire situation. Yet still today, the region is one of fragile economies and for the most part, political instability. Whereas, on the rest of the planet, great forces of upheaval are necessary for people to be driven away from their homelands, in the Caribbean, ongoing emigration is the norm, not the exception. Even though some of the islands have managed to reinvent themselves as lovely tourist destinations, even these are careful constructs that could and have derailed at any time.
What I am aiming at here is to make sure people understand that whatever the artistic constructs might be and however varied they are, when analyzing the Caribbean region’s cultural production, the underlying notion is that our history is fraught with serious social and economic fragility. One can add to this picture a racial situation that is closer to patchwork than whole cloth and an evolution that is rather short in span.
My aim with this exhibit is manifold. The region’s history as a colonial/plantation backwater of European powers interested only in a systematic exploitation of their colonies has not been conducive to artistic expressions worthy of that name. When certain Caribbean nations broke away from their respective colonial overlords their newly gained independence created the need for some sort of affirmation of their cultural prerogatives. This was done in some cases as a conscious effort of the governing elites, as in the case of Cuba, to promote and nurture the national cultural expressions, through institutions such as art schools, museums etc. At the other end of this cultural assertion program is the case-model of Haiti, which asserted its cultural identity by the sheer will and ingenuity of its peasantry in the total absence of any elitist guidance. The case for the rest of the island-nations of the Caribbean can be said to vacillate between these two models. Some have programs, others do not. And for those who do, the question is whether these programs benefit a discourse whose aim is the betterment of the society as a whole or are just misguided attempts at social manipulation and control. What is evident is that there are more questions concerning the artistic evolution for the region than not. And one that is truly pertinent in this era of globalization is the question of the validity of regional identity. Though most of the art world seems to find comfort and sound commercial directives in having a common and easily identifiable definition (ie. Latin American art), this is exactly what many artists find too tight a shoe. And to me this is because ultimately artists defy classification at any level particularly in this highly individualistic and diversified art world. And to prove this point the selection of artist I have made is reflective of this fact. Not only does the thematic become tailored to each artist’s particular vision but it is frequently enhanced by their unique aesthetics as manifested through their innovative mediums.
Because of this I feel that the national provenance of these artists is at times irrelevant even when they strive to create a discourse that could be coined as regional. Alex Burke’s, Andre Eugene’s and Arthur Simms’ employment of discarded industrial refuse, though addressing the condition of the Caribbean as the backwater if not dumping ground of the industrial world, can be reinterpreted as an ode to the waste of mass-produced manufacture. The video work of Joelle Ferly , Jean Francois Boclé, Alexandre Arrechea, each in their own way, while addressing their own positioning within ever changing visual, cultural, if not political boundaries, confront the dilemma of being from a space that as of yet has to be defined. These bombard us with urban images that speak of the global market we live in today, with the myriad of products being peddled, hailing from the four corners of the globe. Close to this in spirit, is the work of Blue Curry whose installation reminds us of the overwhelming plethora of tourists disembarking daily, perverting the quaintness of his island. The scathing lens of David Damoison’s camera chronicles a world poised between decay and somnolence but paradoxically bristling with life. Keisha Castello’s, Raquel Paewonsky’s and Kendra Frorup’s work may speak of gender issues but what they ultimately convey is a sense of the drama of living in isolation.
Some of these artists have not forgotten the tragedy of their historical legacy and this is best conveyed in the works of Jocelyn Gardner. Her truly accomplished piece sends us right back to the images of slavery, which illustrated most of our history manuals. The works of Nicole Awai, Charles Campbell and Jorge Pineda explore similar territory. Christopher Cozier’s work could be said to sum up the differing views one could have of the region: the fracturing of the Caribbean space, its tumultuous history, past and present and the practical impossibility to view that space as one. The construct of Gustavo Pena’s work also speaks volumes on so many of the region's characteristics. The isolation inherent to the region is translated in his work by an amalgam of objects strewn across the canvas, all castoffs from far away cultures that we as people have to reinvent according to a vocabulary that is still in gestation. Isn’t this art … What then ?
My aim with this exhibit is not just to show that these islands all have artists worthy of the appellation but more so to underline the universality of their “regional” visions. Whether they are part of well intentioned cultural directives or they are solo acts whose productions are in defiance of all odds, I want to honor their efforts by presenting them and their works in a pristine new facility, which provides the proper environment to enhance their visuals acts.
Edouard Duval Carrié
Artist residing in Miami/Curator
Boclé Jean-François (b. 1971, Martinique. Lives and works in France)
After his studies in Modern Literature at Sorbonne University, he was trained from 1991 to 1998 first at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Bourges and then at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
In a sometimes sarcastic and willingly provocative manner, he brings closer together individual narrative and history: his childhood in his “immeasurable island”, until the age of 15, the experience of being taken away from his native land, and history, which is the history of his continent, America, the history of the “divisions of the world, in Valladolid, Berlin, Versailles, Yalta, or Davos”. His work is a poetic and political approach of the contemporary world marked by migrations, exile, exclusion, the exchange, the loss. His ways of artistic expression move from one medium to another: installations, videos, drawings, sculptures, photographs, interventions in public spaces, writings. “When I go to Fort-de-France, Cali, Santo Domingo or New York, I am as much immersed in the permanence of the balance of power coming from La Encuentra as in the experience of the American or Caribbean Us. It is this gestation of a global Us which is now taking place in our urban dynamics and in our current globalized Humanity.”
The work of Jean-François Boclé was featured in France, among other places: at Centre d’Art Contemporain Le Parvis (at Ibos, personal exhibition) and at Fonds régional d'art contemporain Champagne-Ardenne (FRAC, Reims); in Europe, in London, Brussels, Thessaloniki, Liverpool, Florence, Moscow, Prague; in Latin America, in Bogotá, Quito, Martinique, Panama.
In 2007 he took part in the 1st Thessaloniki Biennale (Society must be defended, State Museum of Contemporary Art, Greece).In 2008 his most important personal exhibition, I Did Not Discover America, was displayed in Sweden in the BildMuseet (Umeå).
In 2009 he displays his work in collective exhibitions, notably in the 10th Biennal of Havana (Cuba), in the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris (KREYOL Factory), in La Cambre (Brussels), in the Museo de arte contemporaneo (Panama), and in the Museo de Arte Moderno (Republica Dominicana). He had a personal exhibition in the new space of Gallery Nomad in Brussels, part of the Brussels Art Days.
Eugène Andre (b. 1959, Haiti)
André Eugène is the founder of the Grand Rue movement (Port-au-Prince, Haiti). He started out as a house builder, but influenced by the creative energy of his neighbourhood, he began to learn traditional sculpting in wood and became increasingly influenced by his contemporaries. “There was always something happening in our neighbourhood, and Vodou was all around”. Eugène fuses the fetish effigies aesthetic with an apocalyptic MTV futuristic vision.
Eugène André has participated, since 2000, in selected group exhibitions in several Caribbean islands, in Haiti, (Bourbon Lally Gallery, Independence Museum and Haitian Museum in Port-au-Prince), in Barbados and Ile de la Réunion, in the United States (Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, New York at Columbia College, and in Chicago) and in Europe (The Foundry in London, the Ethnographical Museum in Geneva, and the Kreyol Factory, at the Parc de la Villette in Paris).
Peña Gustavo (b.1979. Lives and works in the Dominican Republic)
Gustavo Peña has a fascination for the human condition and the tacit way humans interact with objects and their surrounding. He tends to collect toys, masks, furniture, music, instruments, cameras, video games, among many other elements that he uses as props and perhaps even characters interacting in his paintings. More recently he has been inspired by the connections between the virtual world and our own, exploring the possibilities and encounters of this second life and the experiences found within. Peña’s work excels at exhibiting a kind of juvenile preoccupation with the self and the varying iterations of our own personalities.
Arrechea Alexandre (b. 1970, Cuba. Lives and works in Spain)
He graduated from the“Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA)” in Havana in 1994. For twelve years he was a member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, until he left the group in July of 2003 to continue his career as a solo artist. The interdisciplinary quality of Alexandre Arrechea’s work, rooted in the scrutiny of power structures, reveals a profound interest in the exploration of both public and domestic spaces. The visual manifestation of this reflection is constructed as a highly aesthetic display of surreal architectures and the absurd engineering of impossible mechanical devises as if born out of the set of a science fiction B movie.
He has recently exibited in Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece, American University Museum at the Katzen, Washington D.C., San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, Brooklyn Museum, New York, U.S.A. He participated in the 2006 Taïpei Biennal and 21st Venice Biennal.
Simms Arthur ( b.1961, Jamaica. Lives and works in United States)
Arthur Simms moved in 1969 to the United Sates, and received both a B.A. ( 1986 ) and M.F.A. ( 1993 ) from Brooklyn College, Brooklyn ,New York.
Arthur Simms creates large and small assemblages composed of everyday objects tied up with wires as a symbolic thread that connects disparate elements of the diasporic experience. His works evoke memory, loss, and cross-cultural ties. The work as a group, through object and thought, embodies power and history. Through their formal rigor and the poetic associations that the recycled elements trigger, the sculptures narrate stories of personal identity, family, spiritual and physical journeys, erotic tensions, and nostalgia for home.
He has exhibited in New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art C; Five Myles Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. He participated in the 49th Venice Biennale and in 2007 to "Infinite Island", Brooklyn Museum, USA
Burke Alex (b.1944, Martinique. Lives and works in France)
In the 1970s, Alex Burke decided to begin expressing himself using archaic forms and to leave behind the omnipresent figuration. His installations of everyday objects and of dolls bound and wrapped in multicoloured fabrics are inspired by Voodoo imagery, embody the memories of slavery and question his “collective memory”. Using the tools of an archeologist, he questions the History of the Caribbean and of the Americas, in order to put it into perspective with respect to the modern world, the world of “globalization”.
Alex Burke has participated in several one-man shows as well as group exhibitions, in Paris, at the Musée des Arts Derniers in 2009, at la Villette, Kreyol Factory, and also at the Brooklyn Museum in the United States. He also participated in the Biennials of Havana (Cuba) in 2000, of Taiwan in 2001 and Ecuador in 2009. His works can be found in various Public French collections, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC) as well as a number of Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain (FRAC).
Campbell Charles (b. 1970, Jamaica. Lives and works in Canada)
Charles Campbell moved with his family to PEI Canada in 1975, and completed an MFA in London ( UK) in 1998 and returned to Canada in 2002.
Charles Campbell’s works include installations, performance art, sounds, video and paintings. He employs for them the language of geometric pattern, symmetry and abstract repetition of form derived from the tradition of the Hindu and Budhist “mandalas”. Charles Campbell deliberately charges his seemingly contradictory “mandala”, image that refers to the trauma of the Middle Passage, with a tension between the violence and suffering associated with slavery, on the one hand, and the harmony, enligthenment, and healing represented by the “mandala” on the other, in order to “produce enigmas out of mere paint and canevas”.
He has held solo exhibitions in Jamaica and Canada, and participated in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, Georgetown, Grand Cayman, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. In 2007, he participated in “Infinite Island”, Brooklyn Museum, ( USA).
Gardner Joscelyn ( b. 1961 Barbados. Lives and works in Canada)
Joscelyn Gardner works primarily with installations whose practice focuses on her (white) Creole identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective. She was born to a family that has resided on the island since the seventeenth century and spent her early childhood in South America, West Africa, and the Caribbean. She holds a B.F.A. (Printmaking) and a B.A. (Film) from Queen’s University, Canada, and an M.F.A. from the University of Western Ontario. While residing in Barbados, she taught art at the Barbados Community College (1987-1999), founded and directed the Art Foundry galleries (1996-1999), and worked actively on many committees including the Art Collection Foundation, the Barbados Gallery of Art, the National Art Gallery Committee, and the Barbados Museum Council. Since 2000, Gardner has been residing in Canada where she teaches art at the University of Western Ontario and at Fanshawe College, in London, Ontario.
She has represented Barbados in many international exhibitions including the Sao Paulo Biennials (1994, 1996), has held solo exhibitions in the Caribbean region, Canada, and the U.S.A., and has exhibited in group shows in Europe, U.S.A., Canada, the Caribbean, South and Central America, and India. In 2005, she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts international residency grant at Caribbean Contemporary Arts in Trinidad and continues to work on a project there. In 2006, she attended the KHOJ Kolkata International Artists’ Workshop in India and was included in the major exhibition of contemporary Caribbean Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007-8.
Frorup Kendra (Bahamas. Lives and works in the United States.)
After spending her childhood in the Bahamas, she welcomed the opportunity to study in the United States and began to create representational images that showed a commonality with her culture.
Frorup earned a BFA from the University of Tampa and an MFA from Syracuse University both degrees in Sculpture. She is currently an Assistant Professor in sculpture at the University of Tampa.
“From my Bahamian heritage comes a sense of identity, sensibility, and even a strong work ethic.” Frorup combines cultural motivation and a through investigation of materials and their evocative qualities in her sculpture.
She has exhibited her work at the National Gallery of The Bahamas, and frequently throughout Florida.
Ferly Joëlle (Lives and works between England and Guadeloupe)
Joëlle Ferly holds degrees from the Université de Paris 8 Central Saint Martin and Byam Shaw School of Art.
Joëlle Ferly is a French photographer of Caribbean origin, who draws inspiration from her personal experiences. The notion of national, sexual or ethnic identity rests at the heart of her concerns. Her work--video, installations and performances-- explores continuously the life experiences of minorities in the Western World.
Joëlle Ferly has participated in numerous exhibits in England, Montreal, the Caribbean and France, such as the "Dans le Cadre de Latitudes" exhibit in 2008-2009, at the Tjibaou Art Center, New Caledonia, the Bienal de Havana, Cuba, the "Pavillon de la Ville de Pointe-à-Pitre", Guadeloupe, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de la Ciudad de Panama, the Fondation Clément, Martinique, and the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti.
Blue Curry Lives and works in London
Works with sculptural assemblage, installation and video. Much of his recent work touches upon the fantasies of the native, the tropical and the exotic and how these are created, reinforced and played into. His work positions itself knowingly somewhere between cultural artifact, tourist souvenir and contemporary art piece. The objects he creates are often luscious, grand and elegant, while simultaneously impoverished, unsophisticated, and shambolic.
Blue has recently graduated from the Masters in Fine Art program at Goldsmiths College in London where he currently lives and works. He will be a featured artist in a BBC4 documentary on recent art graduates which will be aired in the UK in the Spring and was selected for 'Anticipation', a showcase of emerging talent in the Selfridges Ultralounge, London, September 2010. Among spaces where his work has been shown are the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Germany, the [space] Project Space, London and Real Art Ways, Connecticut. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of The Bahamas and private collections in Europe and the Caribbean.
Cozier Christopher (b. 1959, Trinidad)
Christopher Cozier received an M.F.A. from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, , and a B.F.A in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.
Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer and has participated in a number of exhibitions focused on contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. Since 1989 he has published a range of essays on related issues in a number of publications. He is one of the 3 founder members of Alice Yard, a virtual creative space and a network of collaborators based in Trinidad, but extended out into the Caribbean and further afield. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of The University of Trinidad & Tobago (UTT).
Diago Roberto ( b. 1971, Cuba)
Roberto Diago received his degree from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba.
His works uses a conglomeration of media and ‘simple’ or ‘naïve’ techniques in a sophisticated treatment of his subject. Conscious of the inequality of blacks in Cuba, a theme recurrent in his work, he uses found objects, graffitis etc… on images to bring stark attention to their state of poverty .
He has exhibited in the Museo National de Bella Artes and Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wilfredo Lam, both in Havana. And in 2007 in Infinite Island, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Damoison David (b. 1963, Martinique)
David Damoison is a French artist from Martinique, who studied photography in Paris while working for fashion and advertising photographers. He has personally researched the issue of identity within the Antillean community of Paris and cooperated with “Revue Noire” in a group of illustrations and a series of encounters with visual artists for the Caribbean region. He has been following, since 1991 –starting date for this reappropriation of origin—the human movements through the Caribbean, crossroads of the world. He has contributed to numerous publications with Caribbean writers including Raphael Confiant, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, etc. In 2009, he participated in the "Kreyol Factory" exhibition, at the Parc de la Villette, Paris. His works are included in French and American public collections, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Musée de l’Immigration, Paris, as well as the Museum of Afro-American Diaspora, in San Francisco.
Arrechea Alexandre (b. 1970, Cuba. Lives and works in Spain)
He graduated from the“Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA)” in Havana in 1994. For twelve years he was a member of the art collective Los Carpinteros, until he left the group in July of 2003 to continue his career as a solo artist. The interdisciplinary quality of Alexandre Arrechea’s work, rooted in the scrutiny of power structures, reveals a profound interest in the exploration of both public and domestic spaces. The visual manifestation of this reflection is constructed as a highly aesthetic display of surreal architectures and the absurd engineering of impossible mechanical devises as if born out of the set of a science fiction B movie.
He has recently exibited in Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece, American University Museum at the Katzen, Washington D.C., San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, Brooklyn Museum, New York, U.S.A. He participated in the 2006 Taïpei Biennal and 21st Venice Biennal.
Awai Nicole (b. 1966, Trinidad. Lives and works in the United States)
Educated in the US, New York artist Nicole Awai belongs to a new generation of artists from the Caribbean now striving to establish their presence on the international contemporary art scene. She investigates her own between-ness in a series of drawings, Specimens from Local Ephemera, in which a jointed dual female figure represents spatial and cultural shifts by collapsing and reconstituting the artist’s Caribbean identity, blurring gender, class, race, and tradition.
She received an M.F.A. from the University of South Florida, Tampa. Her work has been exhibited at the Jersey City Museum, New Jersey, and in New York at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and studio museum in Harlem. She also participated in the “Open House: working in Brooklyn” exhibition in 2004 and in 2007 at the exhibition “Infinite Island” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
Rosado Betty (Puerto Rico)
Betty Rosado studied photography at New York City's School of Visual Arts and began her career in New York as a stylist and fashion photographer.
She is a photographer keenly adept at rendering the unspoken, searching her subjects and illuminating their truths with a keen sense for the intimate and the revealing. Rosado’s most current series explores modern variations on Norman Rockwell’s work. Other series Rosado has completed explore notions of identity. Her un-cropped, un-manipulated black and white portraits are warm and abstract, honest and visually sophisticated. They are conversations between photographer and subject that encourage self-revelation and steal a glimpse into the subject's spirit. By focusing on her subjects’ personal effects, she examines how we choose to define ourselves, and how various parts culminate to create a whole.
Pineda Jorge (b. 1961. Lives and works in the Dominican Republic)
After studies at the Universidad Autonoma (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), Jorge Pineda starts to work at the Frank Bordas Studio in Paris.
Jorge Pineda’s drawings, paintings, etchings and installations show his firm commitment to the cause of justice denied to children in the Dominican Republic. While his references are local, what he questions in general is the totality of child exploitation processes, most notably child soldiers. Childhood and the innocence remaining in each adult is one of his favorite themes, and his work is imprinted with the universal characteristics surrounding the children’s paradise theme.
His work has been shown in Europe, at Galerie Confluences, Lyon (France) in 2004, at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon (Leon, Spain), and also at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as well as the XXIIIrd Visual Arts Biennal. He aso participated in the VIIIth Havana Biennal (Cuba), the VIIth International Biennal of Cuenca in Ecuador, the IInd Ibero-American Biennal of Lima (Peru), and in 2007 in the Venise Biennal’s Latin American Pavillion. In 2009, he participated in « Kreyol Factory » in the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris.
Pierre Vickie (b. 1970. Lives and works in the United States)
Vickie Pierre is a Haitian-American artist. She received a BFA from the School of Visual Art.
Informed and inspired by Surrealism, textile design and the decorative arts, the paintings of Vickie Pierre are executed in a graphic, minimal style against flat monochromatic color fields, suggesting elements of graffiti but also taking on the appearance of boldly designed fabric patterns.
The repeated application and manipulation of Disney female icons recall the abstractions and distortions of flora as well as the human body (internally and externally).
Vickie Pierre’s paintings and works on paper have been exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach, Pulse, Scope, Aqua fairs.
Locke Hew (b.1959, Scotland)
Hew Locke’s artistic formation took place in Georgetown, Guyana, from 1966 until 1980. Upon returning to the UK, he was awarded his M.A. at the Royal College of Art of London in 1994.
Hew Locke investigates the links between personal and national identity. Having grown up in Guyana, a former British colony in Latin America, he conveys the tension between the contemporary English society and its colonial past with works assembling eccentrics objects - plastic weapons for children, false pearl necklaces, fake diamonds, dolls and flowers. He puts himself on show and adopts the codes of colourful clothing belonging to the characters of his childhood or of those of Brixton, the area of London known as the capital of the British Caribbean community.
His work is regularly shown in the UK and internationally: Victoria and Albert Museum in 2000, Tate Britain and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (USA) in 2004, CRAC Alsace in 2005, Valencia’s Biennal in Spain in 2006, the Henry Moore Institute and the Brooklyn Museum in 2007 and in 2009 the Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki. His work is in numerous collections, including those of the Tate, the Arts Council of England, the Brooklyn Museum, the Eileen and Peter Norton Collection, the Government Art Collection and the Arnold Lehman Collection.
Griffith Marlon ( b. 1967. Lives and works in Trinidad and Tobago)
Attended the John S. Donaldson Technical Institute and has worked as a Carnival designer for several years in Trinidad and internationally; the traditions of carnival inform most of his work using the Carnival as a process and as a mode for critical dialogue, investigation of phenomenological 3 aspects of the embodied experience, which has been displaced by the empty glamour of its recent incarnations but lives on in other aspects of Trinidadian culture.
He has been an artist-in-residence at Bag Factory and City + Suburban Studios in Johannesburg and the Mino Paper Art Village in Japan. He has also participated in workshops in Martinique and Guadeloupe and several exhibitions in London, Japan and South Africa and most recently the Gwanju Biennale in Korea, and Cape Bienalle in Capetown, South Africa. In 2007 he had his first solo show in Jamaica at The CAG[e] Gallery, Edna Manley College, in completion of his residency programme with Caraibes en Creation through the French Embassy and in 2009, with Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Paiewonsky Raquel (b. 1969. Lives and works in Dominican Republic)
Raquel Paiewonsky received a B.F.A from the Parsons School of Design, New York.
Her work is an exploration of the post-modern world that resonates with social and psychic symbolism. Raquel Paiewonsky considers that the “body is a vessel capable of containing our life experiences within itself, sometimes in mysterious and subtle ways, other times more forcefully”.
Her work has been exhibited in 2008 at the Museo de Arte, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Lyle O’Reitzel Gallery, Santo Domingo and Miami, Florida. She participated in the V Bienal del Caribe, Santo Domingo and the VIII and IX Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba, in 2007, in “Infinite Island” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and in 2009 in the exhibit “Courants Chauds, Créateurs Contemporains Dominicains et Haitiens”, Musée du Panthéon National Haitien, Haiti.
Castello Keisha (b. 1978, Jamaica. Lives and works in England)
She received her undergraduate degree from the Edna Manley College of visual and Performance Arts, Kingston, Jamaica.
Inspired by nature, Keisha Castello creates compelling assemblages of new and beautiful hybrid forms from found objects such as fish bones, crab shells, feathers, insects, leaves, and dried lizards, boxed like natural-history specimens. The work’s hybrid “realities,” carries a very personal dialogue, and also play with notions of identity and self-definition. The concept of hybridity has particular resonance in the changing and mixed cultural environment of the Caribbean, where it extends to race, geographical origin, language, and the ongoing process of cultural convergence and transformation.
She has exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica and The Mutual, both in Kingston. In 2007-2008, she participated in the exhibit Infinite Island, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Martinez Melvin (b.1976. Lives and works in Puerto Rico)
Melvin Martinez studied art at the San Juan Arts School, where he received a BFA in 2005.
Using materials more common in creating decorative crafts, Martinez captures the distinctive celebratory elements of the Caribbean region where he lives; his Fresh Paint are made with both oil and acrylic paint adorned with glitter, confetti, and other decorative ornaments, evoking a sense of joy, festivity and pleasure in those who view the paintings.
This young and prolific artist, winner of the 2005 Castellon Paint Prize (Spain), has shown his works in many prestigious museums of Spain and is part of several important collections in the United States, Europe and Latin America. In 2006 Martinez was awarded the AICA Special Prize for Outstanding Representation of Puerto Rico in Spain. He has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as: Yvon Lambert, New York; Wolfsonian Museum, Miami; Alcorcon’s Art Center, Madrid; Espai D’Art Contemporani, Castellón.