As a comply with as much as our earlier submit, Artwork Exhibition: “Caribbean Transitions,” right here’s a evaluation by Mark Jenkins (Washington Publish) who writes, “’Caribbean Transitions’ represents a area the place African, European, Asian and Indigenous populations have each clashed and melded.” [Many thanks to David Lewis for bringing this item to our attention.]
“Caribbean Transitions” is on view on the Katzen Arts Heart, American College Museum (4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC).
Anybody who takes probably the most direct path by means of the American College Museum to “Caribbean Transitions” will first encounter a cell by Joiri Minaya that dangles a number of photographic cutouts within the breeze. The person items are formed like physique elements, with photos of girls on one facet and tropical fruit, floral patterns and maps on the opposite. The hanging array appears to concurrently endorse and dispute tourist-industry photos of the Caribbean, with a selected emphasis on the depiction of girls of shade.
The complexity, visible in addition to philosophical, is attribute of this eclectic survey of labor by 20 artists rooted within the Caribbean archipelago. The present is numerous, colourful and something however minimalist. It encompasses many modes and media — most tellingly, assemblage and collage — to symbolize a area the place African, European, Asian and Indigenous populations have each clashed and melded.
Two of the artists had been born within the U.S., though a kind of — Minaya — then grew up within the Dominican Republic. Most of the others stay, or have lived, within the mainland U.S. However their sensibilities are largely derived from their heritages and experiences of their birthplaces: Cuba, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico or Trinidad and Tobago.
One factor that mingled distinctively within the Caribbean is faith, yielding such African-European hybrids as Vodun, Santeria and Rastafari. The facility of those and different sects may be seen in such works as Alejandro Guzmán’s altarlike assemblage of material flowers and shards of mirror glass on hen wire, a mixture that seems as solemn because it does funky.
Many different entries are equally ritualistic. Pepón Osorio’s sculptural assemblage shows fiery and bloody non secular iconography inside a mannequin home supported by dozens of picket crutches. Arthur Simms’s totemic 3D collage of feathers, sticks and bones is affixed to a mule-deer cranium. Albert Chong’s silvery black-and-white movie {photograph} exhibits a easy chair remodeled right into a throne with the location of a cranium and choices of fruit. Laura Facey’s picket items — red-black and carved into shapes that trace at human organs — are organized ceremonially atop a tree stump. Edouard Duval-Carrié’s metallic collage-painting depicts a person who appears to be crawling by means of a jungle pool with an Asian-style mandala on his again.
There’s additionally a shrinelike high quality to Miguel Luciano’s 3D collage, by which a baby’s bicycle, outfitted with a chrome-plated machete, stands earlier than a Puerto Rican flag whose purple, white and blue have turn into purple, black and inexperienced. (The latter colours are these of the African liberation flag.)
Among the many most vibrant legacies of Euro-African non secular mash-ups are the various festivals and carnivals celebrated within the Caribbean space, as exhibition curator Keith Morrison notes in his catalogue essay. These celebrations are mirrored within the costumed revelers in Paul Anthony Smith’s photo-paintings — he calls them “picotages” — and Carlos Estevez’s kites, whose summary designs recommend masks.
Not all of the artworks are so fanciful or figurative. To memorialize the South Asian indentured servants delivered to Trinidad and Tobago, Renluka Maharaj superimposes a photograph of a girl over a British emigration go designed for Indian ladies. Ada Bobonis locations in color-coded frames 4 dozen photographs of small homes constructed by a Puerto Rican redevelopment company between 1936 and 1943. Nari Ward’s found-object piece, dripping with dangling shoelaces, affords a two-word testimonial to Afro-Caribbean labor: “Black sweat.”
That large nation on the north facet of the Caribbean basin shouldn’t be altogether ignored. Scherezade Garcia’s expressionist work embrace unfastened renderings of kids carrying Mickey Mouse-eared hats, and Luis Cruz Azaceta’s colourful Cubist-influenced canvas depicts a surprising second from current U.S. historical past: the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. An exile from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Azaceta has lengthy translated human occasions into photos whose themes are common however whose type has a Caribbean lilt.
[Shown above: “Lonely Soul,” by Pepón Osorio, is part of the exhibition “Caribbean Transitions” at the American University Museum. Osorio’s sculptural assemblage is made from wooden crutches, fiberglass, wood, plastic foam, resin, pins and wheelchair wheels. (Pepón Osorio).] For full evaluation and extra photographs of the exhibition, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/06/28/american-university-museum-caribbean-transitions/