From AMA Art Media Agency

Boasting a fusion of African, Latin American, and European traditions, the Caribbean is home to an extremely rich contemporary art scene. With over 40 million inhabitants, this multilingual archipelago is home to a huge number of artists, particularly Cuban, Jamaican, and Puerto Rican. Despite a still unequal market and insufficient infrastructure that force some of these artists towards careers in North America, the Caribbean appears to be a real hotbed for contemporary creation, which has several advantages. According to the Larry’s List report Art Collector Report 2014, Puerto Rico is home to 7% of Latin American collectors, which means it is ranked in fourth place in the region. Furthermore, with important galleries such as OBRA Galería Alegría in San Juan, Puerto Rico, St Thomas Gallery in St Thomas, the Virgin Islands, and Avistamientos gallery in Havana, major events such as the Biennale of Havana or the Triennale Poli/Gráfica in Puerto Rico, and large-scale institutions such as the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the archipelago boasts a promising emerging art scene. Links between the art world in the Caribbean and in North America are required by the former to increase their development opportunities and desired by the latter to support the vast outreach of American culture. More precisely, these links are made between Afro-American and Latin American cultures, such as seen in the policy of the Bronx Museum of Arts in New York, which, alongside works by African American and Latino ethnic minorities, exhibits the works of Caribbean artists, who are also sometimes associated with the Afro-American cause. For example, the Jamaican artist Albert Chong was featured in the group exhibition “Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera” (2008), which was hosted by several American institutions including the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Caribbean art seems to have a promising future, as the demand for Afro-American art is increasing. For example, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work Dustheads was sold by Christie’s in 2013 for $33.5 million, breaking a world record for sales of contemporary art.

An artistic heritage recognised by American institutions
The major American institution MoMA is home to a dozen works by famous Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, and several other important North American institutions are actively promoting Caribbean art, especially contemporary creation. The Visual Arts Unit of the Organization of American States, which became the Art Museum of the Americas in 1976, located in Washington D.C. has been in charge of the promotion and the boosting of Latin American and Caribbean art since the 1940s. Possessing over 2,000 works, the museum boasts one of the biggest collections of Caribbean art in the United States, alongside that of New York’s Museo del Barrio, which is devoted to the heritage and contemporary art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Other North American institutions work in a similar vein, such as the Bronx Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which hosted the exhibition “Caribbean: Crossroads of the world” in 2014, tracing two centuries of Caribbean artistic production, and which displayed the works of African American painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000). This example once again attests to the proximity of these two cultures.

In terms of private organisations, the collectors Howard and Patricia Farber have carried out several trips since 2001, being responsible for bringing several dozen works by famous Cuban artists such as Kcho, Manuel Mendive, and Los Carpinteros, onto American soil. The Cisneros Collection, founded by Gustavo A. and Patricia Phelps Cisneros in the 1970s, also supports Latin American art and includes Caribbean works such as those by Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto, born in 1978, who created the installation Biblioteca Blanca, composed of 6,000 blank books, which was displayed at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and whose works are also held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Bronx Museum.

What is attractive about North America? Educational opportunities, the market, and the prestige of their museums
Despite the quality of the production, the overall lack of infrastructure and means being in the Caribbean hinders the progress of a large number of artists. The director of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Amanda Coulson, deplored the lack of educational opportunities in Frieze Magazine in April 2014. “Too few people are trained in art history, conservation, restoration (which is so crucial in a tropical climate), and criticism, which leaves artists with the task of making everything themselves and they are often left to learn ‘on the job’,” she said. The lack of these necessary jobs for the development of art and its market, both in terms of the training of artists and the creation of works, as well as exhibiting works and selling them forces a large number of artists to emigrate to North America or Europe, either permanently or temporarily.

Many Caribbean artists move to North America for their careers and several established Caribbean artists are currently based in the United States. The Puerto Rican Enoc Perez, who has lived in New York since 1984, has seen his works enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the MOCA in Miami, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His auction record was realised by Havana Riviera Hotel, La Havana, Cuba, which sold for $374,500, above its high-end estimate of $300,000 at Sotheby’s New York on 10 May 2012.

Unlike Enoc Perez, some Caribbean artists remain in their own county to study, live, and work, whilst trying to be represented in the United States where they can benefit from the market, the art fairs, and the prestige of the museums. From this point of view, the career of the Cuban artist Kcho, born in 1971, resembles a success story, especially as exchanges between the United States and Cuba were extremely limited during his career. Although he began by being exhibited in Cuba in 1991, his work was then displayed in a solo exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1996, and in another the following year, “Todo Cambia”, at the Museum of Contemporary art in Los Angeles. Having also had a solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2001, Kcho is an established artist who has a decisive presence on the American art scene.

Expatriated artists engaged in Caribbean culture
Caribbean artists who are either temporary migrants or who worsk permanently in the United States continue to maintain their culture of origin in different ways. For example, Annalee Davis, an artist who moved to the United States for her studies, returned to live and work in Barbados, where she was born in 1963, and has tried to compensate for the lack of infrastructure devoted to contemporary art there, by founding Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. This organisation supports emerging Caribbean creation, both in the archipelago as well as in its diaspora, to reduce the distance between the artists and their Caribbean audience as well as the linguistic division within this art scene which, according to Annalee Davis, has a weak primary market and non-existent secondary market. For other reasons, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has continued to work between Chicago, where she studied, and Havana, where she was born in 1968, especially in order to actively contest the regime of her native country.

In December 2014, she organised Tatlin’s Whisper, a performance that took place at Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, which consisted in giving a microphone to passers-by, so that they could freely express themselves. This subversive work cost her a few days in prison and the confiscation of her passport. Furthermore, living in the United States is not incompatible with the demand of a Caribbean identity. For example, the famous Jamaican Albert Chong, whose has been teaching in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder since 1991, is still considered to be Caribbean, despite him emigration. He represented Jamaica at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and is also to represent his country at the Triennale Poli/Gráfica in Puerto Rico from 24 October 2015 until 27 February 2016. His profile is very similar to another Jamaican artist who works in the United States, Ebony G. Patterson, whose work was displayed in the 12th Havana Biennale, which took place from 22 May until 22 June 2015, and in the exhibition “Caribbean: Crossroads of the world” in 2014. Represented by the gallery Monique Meloche in Chicago, the artist mainly deals with the violence of the society from which he originates, especially in his series of coloured and flowery tapestries inspired by crime scenes in Jamaica.

Finally, the works of Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto, who currently lives and works in Chicago, which were also displayed at the Triennale Poli/Gráfica in Puerto Rico, openly symbolise this American-Caribbean syncretism. The series Tropicalamerican (2014) brings together prints of American flags whose structure is kept but the symbols are replaced by green motifs. However, expatriation and syncretism do raise issues of identity. As explained by chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Charles Campbell, the borders of Jamaican and Caribbean art in general surpass the archipelago, which makes defining the local art scene more complex.

Exchanges and appropriations: moving towards a more balanced relationship
Caribbean artists do not only benefit from the opportunities that the United States offer. Their works also serve to popularise Caribbean identity as well as being integrated into the North American art scene. Bob Marley, whose museum Barack Obama visited in Jamaica in April 2015, is far from being the only one to have left an important mark on North American culture. In 2011, the United States were represented at the Venice Biennale by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, an American-Cuban duo based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, whose work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States, as well as in South Korea. The artistic landscape of New York must also be mentioned: Alexandre Arrechea, born in Cuba in 1970, transformed it with No Limits (2013), a series of monumental sculptures installed along Park Avenue. Benefiting from the prestige of such an exhibition space, the artist broke his auction record when Sotheby’s sold his work Punching bags dust for $118,750, above its high-end estimate of $35,000 on 26 May 2015. Unlike North American exhibitions and projects devoted to the Caribbean, these examples attest to the possibility of the appropriation of one culture by another and vice-versa, as well as the simple discovery of one art scene by another.

However, the relationship of mutual discovery between these two cultures also contributes to a fertile multiculturalism that institutional exchanges can encourage. The project Wild Noise was established between the Bronx Museum and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, which is to display around a hundred works from the collections of the New York museum until 16 August 2015. In return, the Cuban museum will loan a number of works to the Bronx Museum in spring 2016. An exchange of artists is also planned, and special educational programmes are also to take place in these two museums. According to the CEO of the Bronx Museum, Holly Block, the recent revival of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States should ease exchange procedures between the institutions of the two countries as well as facilitate obtaining visas for participants, although this museum partnership still remains in progress since 2012. Corina Matamoros, curator at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, said about this more balanced relationship that such exchanges between American and Caribbean institutions could promote: “Due to the isolation that has continued for the last 50 years, I don’t think that the United States knows Cuban art well. I think that seeing the artistic production that has been taking place from the 1960s until today will be a revelation for them.”

It seems that the opening up of Cuba could play two roles in the development of the Caribbean art scene and the creation of a more balanced relationship with the North American scene. On one hand, it would allow the United States to discover all the artistic production of the Caribbean, by welcoming the North American audience as well as allowing Cuban works and artists to be diffused more freely in the United States. On the other hand, being home to over a quarter of the Caribbean population, Cuba could contribute to the strengthening of the local market and, thanks to its strategic position, it could become an interface between the Caribbean, North American, and Latin American markets. Furthermore, the linguistic division that seems to hinder the unity of this emerging art scene is not unbeatable, and has generated initiatives such as “Caribbean Linked”, to which Annalee Davis has contributed, which aims to encourage inter-Caribbean exchanges with an annual residency programme. Although this all remains hypothetical, it is still possible to imagine a Caribbean art scene strengthened and unified by an interior market based around Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, which would boast for a global standing comparable to that of the United States, improving the prospects of South Americans, Europeans, and Africans alike.

For more on this story go to: http://en.artmediaagency.com/111798/the-caribbean-art-scene-in-the-united-states-an-identity-that-crosses-borders/