Curating in the Caribbean

In describing the contemporary condition in art of the Caribbean Diaspora, what he calls the ‘Third Moment,’ Stuart Hall identifies two major factors impacting the movement to give greater visibility to work which has been excluded from the metropolis centres: globalization and a growing ‘curatorial drive’. But, he warns, let’s not fool ourselves: “Some people are more global than others just as some people are more visible than others.”[i]

In this conversation filmed specifically for the February 2009 Black Diaspora Visual Arts conference in Barbados, curator David A. Bailey invites Hall to elaborate on his formulation of three distinct moments of Modernity in the visual arts as experienced by its ‘Others’ in a post-World War II Diaspora. In particular he urges Hall to articulate more fully the third moment, the present moment. This discussion provided a framework for an on-going series of discussions, symposiums, exhibitions and workshops with the shared aim of bringing increased visibility to the art of the Caribbean region and strengthening networks and exchanges throughout the wider diaspora.

This current book, Curating in the Caribbean, is a direct outgrowth of these discussions. Ten authors, many of whom participated in one or more of the Black Diaspora Visual Arts (BDVA) events which took place in Barbados, Martinique and Liverpool have been invited to contribute essays which explore the current curatorial drive within the Caribbean. This theme of curatorship has been considered in its broadest context. It encompasses a wide range of projects and initiatives aimed at creating a platform for the visual arts; making visual art ‘visible’ by bringing it to a wider audience and broadening the critical discussion around it. The authors, all of whom were born in the region and /or work in the Caribbean, were encouraged to draw on their own experiences and projects in assessing the terrain and in making proposals for the future. As a result, there are a range of approaches to the topic of curating.

At the most recent BDVA event - the symposium “Black Jacobins: Negritude in a post global 21st century” which took place in Barbados and Martinique in February / March 2011 - contributors to the book were invited to make presentations on the theme of their essays and engage in dialogue with the other contributors. In this way, the project has been as much about documenting the current state of the profession as it has been about establishing dialogue and linkages for future projects.

Jose Manuel Noceda Fernandez (Cuba) reminds readers that there have been various approaches to defining the Caribbean region based on its geography, history, racial composition, culture, or a combination of these. He argues that the Caribbean exceeds all possible classifications, and that in fact various Caribbeans coexist as a result of the asynchronicities or asymmetries across the region including such factors as access to art education, varying stages of development in the infrastructure of cultural entities including museums and galleries as well as the overall economic development and stablility. In his essay, Islands in the Sun: Caribbean Art in the 1990s, Noceda focuses on Caribbean art in the 1990s, identifying certain ‘discursive orientations’ in the production of this period that challenge stereotypical notions of the Caribbean and instead informs audiences about the space of culture and identity. He sees an expanded sensibility across the entire chain of islands and territories, including the Caribbean Diaspora. He describes this as a ‘new aesthetic’, a ‘re-articulation process’ by artists interested in finding their own language and working from their space-time possessions but simultaneously with an informed glance towards the ‘outside’, and their intersections.

Claire Tancons (Guadeloupe) takes as her starting point the overseas metropolitan art centres and their attempts to curate Caribbean art. In particular she examines the role of carnival in efforts to conceptual these exhibitions but also its absence in their realization. In her essay Curating Carnival? Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Art and the Paradox of Performance Art in Contemporary Art, Tancons proposes as fundamental, questions about whether or not Carnival should be curated at all and if so whether or not its place is outside of the traditional exhibition and museum context. She examines various efforts to address Carnival as an artistic and curatorial object, and offers her own contribution to the debate and practice of Carnival as part of the discourses and practices of contemporary Caribbean art as well as performance art within contemporary art. Carnival has been “marginalized at best, left out at worst” in contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions in the United States and the United Kingdom and has been virtually absent from all contemporary art exhibitions, whether Caribbean in focus or international. But given the centrality of performance art within mainstream contemporary art discourse, “what more propitious a time could there be to the advancement of the debate on the place of, not just Carnival but of performance in general within contemporary Caribbean art practice?”

The earthquake that devasted Haiti on January 11th 2010 destroyed much of the country’s artistic heritage including the frescoes of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Barbara Prezeau(Haiti)writes that it also marks a shift in artistic pracitice, even if the country had been witnessing significant change during the preceding decade. In her contribution to this book, Haiti Now-The Art of Mutants, Prezeau proposes a number of factors contributing to these changes and highlights their consequences. Chief amongst these is the international recognition earned by the artists from the area in Port-au-Prince known as Grand Rue which has played a decisive role in the revalorisation of sculpture in Haiti and the relationships between artistic creation and the hardship of daily life in the country’s urban centres. The success of this group, self-titled Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) has debunked the myth of the naive peasant artist and circumvented the traditional network of Haitain gallery owners and dealers. Communications technology has also facilitated the circulation of information on Haitian art and artists. Collaborative inititiaves by artists and independent critics have proven that this network is no longer necessary and that the dissemination of art is following different paths today. While the centres of creation are still the shantytowns, the availability of modern technology has empowered the artists to forge contacts with the rest of the planet. With the literal collapse of the major art centres and institutions during the earthquake, Prezeau asks what is the future of traditional networks of Haitian art; what of the professional methods and practices developed in terms of the dissemination and conservation of works of art. While these questions are not new, after the earthquake there is an increased sense of urgency to develop new strategies.

In Unconscious Curatorships, Sara Hermann contemplates the physical proximity of Haiti to her native Dominican Republic (the two countries share the island of Hispanola) while acknowledging its invisbility within the general consciousness of the Dominican population. Hermann was inspired to explore the connecting channels betweent the two countries and production of meaning generated in the field of Dominican and Haitian contemporary visual arts. The visible results – exhibitions and artistic production – up to the beginning of the 21st century revealed that the position and role of the curator in Dominican Republic did not respond to real cultural needs. There was a general absence of specific content and critical analysis, and a deficiency in methodological rigour as well as a lack of objectivity in the curatorial discourse. Hermann looks at how the figure of the curator as a negotiator appears in the field of Dominican arts at the end of the twentieth century in response to changes in cultural production and the roles of the cultural institutions and actors.

In her essay, How to Install Art as a Caribbeanist, Krista Thompson (Bahamas) considers how Caribbean art is positioned within the museum. She deliberately refrains from defining what ‘qualifies’ as Caribbean art but rather asks “what are some of the aesthetic practices and structures of visuality in the region that influence Caribbean art and how might they inform our understanding of our curatorial approaches to it?” To address this Thompson examines an art project staged by Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith in the Bahamas in December 2010 as part of the festival, Junkanoo. She urges readers to pay attention to structures of visuality in curatorial practices given a lack of in-depth attention to visual aesthetics in the discursive frames that surround Caribbean art both in terms of exhibition spaces and their accompanying catalogues. In a discussion that in many ways complements Tancons’ essay, Thompson cites the 2007 ‘Infinite Island’ exhibition organized at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. While curator Tumelo Mosaka is credited for his bold curatorial choices, Thompson argues that the categories into which he organized the show belie the challenges of translating curatorial visions into corresponding exhibition practices and narrative frames, falling back on interpretative categories that speak less to the aesthetics of the work and more to their status as documents and reflections of ‘Caribbeanness. ’ More recent terms such ascréolité, hybridization, or syncretism continue to rely on anthropological approaches instead of engaging what the work does visually. The processes of vision and the aesthetic concerns that inform artists’ work may offer curators and writers a more ‘nuanced’ approach to presenting and discussing Caribbean art.

The work of art in the Caribbean, according to Winston Kellman (Barbados) has been subjected to a number of external definitions, a legacy of colonialism that has meant that the aims and ideals of political Independence such as cultural self-definition have never been fully realized. In his essay, The Invisibility of the Visual Arts in the Barbadian Consciousness: Notes on the Omission of the Visual Arts from the Cultural Develoment of the Island (Considerations For Curatorial Activity), Kellman argues that social divisions established in colonial times have persisted, resulting in fragmented and divisive visions of Barbadian cultural identity. The visual arts have failed to live up to early post Independence expectations thus have remained in a state of ‘invisibility’. A community with a capacity to express and disseminate its culture through the arts, demonstrates and affirms its autonomy and reflects the ideals of the Independence era. In Barbados this process has suffered from a lack of support from governmental institutions whose mandate it was to encourage and support this development. And so culture has reverted back to colonial models, relying on validation from ‘outside‘. Like several of the authors, Kellman takes issue with the recent rise of the overseas ‘Caribbean exhibition’ which has typically featured works by artists based in the metropolitan art centres such as New York and London, part of this ‘latest Diaspora’. He sees these exhibitions as pandering to ‘international taste’, undermining the lived experience of the artists based in the Caribbean and exhausting limited resources.

In her essay, Curating in Curaçao, author Jennifer Smit recounts her own experiences as an independent curator during the last two decades on the Dutch Caribbean island where she has acted as “the only so-called ‘qualified’ curator”. What has this ‘luxurious’ position meant? Smit too laments the insufficient institutional infrastructure, due in part to the fact that the Dutch ‘cultural policy makers’ have always considered culture in the Dutch Caribbean islands to be a pale imitation of Europe. Carib Art, an exhibition which was pivotal in bringing the Caribbean region together in the Dutch Antilles, helped to foster a new focus on the region rather than on the Netherlands. Despite this, the visual arts in Curacao are regarded as a luxury while at the same time deemed to fall below international professional standards, so that the role of the curator is not acknowledged. Smit discusses the recent exhibition ‘Antepasado di Futuro (Ancestors of the Future), Curaçao Classics 1900-2010, curated by Smit and Felix de Rooy for the Curaçao Museum on the occasion of the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles in 2010, and the declaration of Curacao as a constituent country. Nevertheless, organizers still had to rely on funding from the Netherlands, in this case the Mondriaan Foundationto ensure its realization. The curator continues to be required to employ creativity, improvisation and above all perseverance in the face of insufficient cultural infrastructure and professional acknowledgement.

Dominique Brebion also examines her own experiences within the island of Martinique which remains a department of France. In her essay, Act Locally and Think Globally Brebion observes that within much of the Caribbean, curating remains a complementary or secondary activity, very often carried out by volunteers; a passion more than a profession. Pointing, like Smit and Kellman, to the insufficiency of existing structures in the smaller islands or Lesser Antilles, she notes that in the Caribbean, there are more independent curators and artist-curators than curators employed by institutions. With the central themes of exhibitions typically tied to national identity rather than a more general or universal theme, as is seen more frequently in exhibitions organized in mainland France, Brebion suggests that the role of the curator may be compromised as he / she has to reconcile curatorial demands and regional promotion: “Is the fact of being a sort of ambassador for the visual arts of our respective islands and playing a supporting role for artists from the Caribbean zone at the front of the scene an obstacle to a curator’s work or, on the contrary, a fruitful constraint?” The Fondation Clément is one of the few institutions which has had the vision to provide opportunities for individuals to conceptualize and present more adventurous exhibitions. Nevertheless, the Caribbean remains a terra incognita for the international art world. Brebion asks then how should we proceed in the future.

In her essay, Curating in the Caribbean: Changing Curatorial Practice and Contestation in Jamaica, Veerle Poupeye traces the earliest calls for a black art patronage to the anti-colonial, nationalist stirrings of Marcus Garvey in the 1930s. The eventual establishment of the National Gallery marked the beginning of the professionalization of curatorial practice in Jamaica and indeed of the English speaking Caribbean and included the laying out of a canonical national art history under its first director, David Boxer. While the prominence given to artist Edna Manley was predictable and reinforced what had already been institutionalized, the canonization of the ‘Intuitives’ was controversial and threatened the emerging hierarchies of Jamaican art. Poupeye identifies other challenges to established notions of art which in hindsight could have been understood as institutional critique and inspired new curatorial strategies to increase audience investment, but these possibilities were not acknowledged or pursued at that time. Vocal public criticism from the artistic community claiming exclusionary practices and controversy surrounding works such as Laura Facey’s Emancipation Statue gained in importance with initial defensive positions giving way to slow curatorial change. Recent exhibitions such as the Curator’s Eye series with invited externally based curators and the Young Talent V have indicated a promising new direction in the local curatorial practice, making a meaningful connection between the critical interventions of contemporary art and its intended audiences.

In the end there are only nine essays. Haydee Venegas (Puerto Rico) died on December 31, 2011 after a determined battle with cancer. Her commitment to remain active and involved as an art critic and curator was evident to all as she attended the AICA annual congress in Paraguay in October as a member of the AICA executive board. Haydee was a fierce Caribbeanist and a proud Puerto Ricena and worked with grace, humour and strength to make a space for Caribbean art in the international arena. We dedicate this book in her honor.