Year in Review – Part 3: International highlights

There have been some interesting shifts, recently, in terms of how Caribbean art is positioned in the international context. Several contemporary artists of Caribbean descent have established a strong and respected presence in the international art world – Nari Ward, Renee Cox and Ebony G. Patterson, who are all Jamaican-born; Christopher Cozier from Trinidad and Tobago; Edouard Duval-Carrie and Tessa Mars from Haiti; Hew Locke from Guyana and Scotland. Although only a few of those artists live and work in the Caribbean, much of their work reflects on the broader Caribbean history, culture and society. Many have also exhibited and been involved in projects in the Caribbean.
It is remarkable that several major Western countries will be represented by artists with Caribbean roots in the 59th Venice Biennial, one of the most prestigious recurrent international art exhibitions. The sculptor Simone Leigh, who is of Jamaican parentage, will represent the USA; Sonia Boyce, whose roots are in Barbados and Guyana, will represent the United Kingdom; and Alberta Whittle, who was born in Barbados, will represent Scotland. The exhibition will run from April to November 2022. It will be interesting to see the response to this prominent Caribbean presence. Caribbean artists and Caribbean-and African Diaspora-focused pavilions have been present before in the Venice Biennial, but not as the national representatives of some of the most powerful Western nations.
Another noteworthy initiative is the Life Between Islands exhibition which opened in late November at the Tate Britain. Curated by David A. Bailey, who is himself of Caribbean descent, and Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, the exhibition provides an impressive survey of the work of Caribbean-British artists from the 1950s to now and explores the socially and culturally transformative presence of Caribbean people in Britain. It features work in various media by artists such as Ronald Moody, Denis Williams, Aubrey Williams, Frank Bowling, Peter Doig, Sonia Boyce (Bailey’s life partner), Hew Locke, Keith Piper, Steve McQueen, Hurvin Anderson, and Zak Ové. 
While Life Between Islands provides important recognition to artists who have reshaped the British art world since the mid twentieth century, and who have also intervened in the art world of the Caribbean, it also raises some important critical questions. One is that the exhibition consolidates what is now a canonical hierarchy of Black artists in Britain, without much consideration for other voices and alternative or marginal positions and perspectives in that context. While I have not seen the exhibition, I believe that there should have been more exploration into new possibilities, as the exhibition covers what is, from my perspective, already well-trodden ground. 
It is my understanding that the Tate exhibition was initially conceived as a Caribbean-wide exhibition and there had been a visit to Barbados and, I believe,Trinidad and Tobago to that end. It is perhaps understandable that there would have been this shift, in the context of the current cultural politics in Britain, in the wake of the Windrush scandal and the BLM movement. But, I believe that the Tate still owes us a Caribbean exhibition, which is at least focused on the Anglophone Caribbean, given the history of involvement of the Tate’s founders in the Caribbean sugar industry. The statement made by the exhibition will, hopefully, also be part of more substantive changes in the institutional politics of the Tate, and other national cultural institutions in former colonizing nations and not a token genuflection to the ideological demands of the present moment. The same, inter alia, applies to the selection of artists of Caribbean descent for the earlier-mentioned national pavilions in the Venice Biennial.

But, the more worrying aspect of this exhibition is that it is symptomatic of a broader shift whereby Caribbean art is increasingly defined, in terms of its international representation, by the Caribbean diaspora, which has also produced most of the theoretical and critical frameworks through which Caribbean art is being interpreted. The marginalization of the Caribbean, itself, in this context is of great concern and makes it necessary for cultural institutions in the region to be more proactively involved in shaping the Caribbean voice in that conversation. 
For that to happen, cultural institutions in the Caribbean need to be aware of the dynamics and the stakes involved and be prepared to respond in resourceful, innovative and, where needed, provocative ways. This is not the time for feeble, uninspired statements from the Caribbean as the voices from the Caribbean Diaspora are powerful and compelling. The silence and significantly contracted scope of activity of the National Gallery of Jamaica is certainly alarming in that context but there are other cultural organizations who are picking up the slack. As I write this, I am in Haiti where I am working on an exhibition and curatorial training programme at Le Centre d’Art, which has launched a UNESCO-Fund for International Cultural Development funded exchange residency programme for female artists from the Caribbean. The Centre d’Art is also serving as the incubator for the Caribbean Culture Fund, which will become active in 2022 and will, no doubt, become as game-changer, as a major, regionally based funder supporting creation relevant to the visual and performing arts literature and film. 
The final months of 2021 have seen several noteworthy additions to the growing bibliography on Caribbean art. One is Entangled Species: Conversations on Contemporary Art by the Dutch arts writer Sasha Dees. It is based on extensive interviews with artists and other Caribbean art world figures conducted during Dees’ nearly one-year travel in the Caribbean a few years ago. Another is Liberation Begins in the Imagination: Writings on Caribbean-British Art, edited by David A. Bailey and Allison Thompson, and which accompanies the Tate exhibition. It contains essays by the likes of Rasheed Araeen, Coco Fusco, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris, Roshini Kempadoo, George Lamming, Kobena Mercer, Richard J. Powell, Claire Tancons, Anne Walmsley and Yvonne Weekes. Advance copies of the revised and expanded edition of my own Caribbean Art book, which was first published in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series in 1998, were circulated in late November and the book will be officially released in April. 

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.