Archipelagic Affinities in an Ocean of Shifting Tides

by Annalee Davis

Commissioned by David Art Initiative for the 2016 publication
Sea is History | Caribbean Experience in Contemporary Art

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2016

“In its first three years, the Davidoff Art Initiative program has embraced the regional network of Caribbean artists and provided new opportunities for those committed to Caribbean art to come together and develop their work.”

–caryl* ivrisse crochemar

caryl* ivrisse crochemar, the founding director of espace d'art contemporain 14°N 61°W based in Fort de France, Martinique, contributed the above quote to the inaugural 2015 edition of the Davidoff Book Collection as part of his Connecting the Caribbean text. This year, in Olympic fashion, the baton has been passed from caryl* to me, and I thought it could be interesting to make reference to his statement by breaking it down into three questions: (i) Who is the regional network of Caribbean artists to which he refers? (ii) Who is committed to Caribbean art and (iii) What opportunities are there to develop artists’ work?

But first some context. At the moment of writing this essay, the world is somewhat foreboding. On the political front, repercussions of the Brexit vote are still being felt with fallout contributing to a dramatic increase in hate crimes in the UK and Europe. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US presidential race has been divisive and we are aware of the need for the #BlackLivesMatter movement to actively rebuild Black liberation in that country. The EU is being confronted with the migration of traumatised human beings fleeing war-torn countries. On the environmental front, NASA says that planet Earth has had the hottest fourteen months on record, prompting the USA’s Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, to call for a climate state of emergency. Many Caribbean countries are still in recovery from the 2008 economic crisis and even closer to home, my country’s government here in Barbados recently presented their budget, and we are ranked the third most indebted country in the world. 

Common responses to these profoundly dark moments include increased security measures supported by heavy surveillance, insular thinking, nationalism, xenophobia, fear mongering, fragmentation and the fortification of borders. The Caribbean archipelago is vulnerable to outside influences in many respects. For example, Brexit happened, the value of the Sterling dropped and the repercussions are felt by the Caribbean’s tourism industry. While the region is often seen by the outside world as a deceptively simple, unified, homogenous space, fault lines are drawn based on geographic, linguistic, cultural and racial fractures; not to mention, the region is also faced with challenging issues related to violence, discrimination related to sexual orientation and gender awareness, climate change and race relations. The ongoing struggle for decolonisation is real. 

Although the arts sector is often spoken about in public fora by politicians as the next cash cow and in hyperbole, in reality the cultural sector has arguably been mostly neglected at the state level. In addition, practices of nepotism have creeped into the majority of cultural institutions, threatening to undermine strides made to professionalise the arts in some quarters. 

And yet, it is possible to encounter illuminated moments of trans-Caribbean kinships among artists, some of whom directly engage these concerns through their pratice. The collective actions of many working in the arts across the Caribbean are building momentum and cohering the region in significant ways. 

So let’s look at the three questions.

(i) Who or what is the regional network of Caribbean artists to which caryl* refers? 

While there are several networks across the region, in caryl’s* quote, he is referring to those which the Davidoff Art Initiative (DAI) has been engaging. In 2015, on the residency front, this network included six artists from the Dominican Republic (DR) who attended residencies in New York, Berlin and Beijing. That same year, the DAI’s residency in the DR hosted artists from France, the USA, Chile, Kuwait/Puerto Rico and Mexico. For the 2015/2016 selection, the DAI opened up its geographical sector from which this year’s Caribbean artists were selected including two from the Dominican Republic, one from Puerto Rico and one from Guadeloupe.

But there are multiple networks connecting the Caribbean which have been evolving organically for decades with growth spurts facilitated most dramatically by the Internet. Intra-Caribbean artist led initiatives have spawned the networks I mostly engage with. Artist-cum-activists are more often than not generating these entities, many of them linking with relatively small local communities buttressed by larger, online, regional, diasporic and international, critical thinking art communities. 

(ii) Who is committed to Caribbean art 

When we ask who is committed to art we are asking where the critical engagement with and support for art practice lies. Where does funding come from and what are the economic models which point to sustainability for arts organisations in the region. There is an increasing cadre of art writers, curators and artists moving the discourse forward in complex and compelling ways. Artists are exploring the impact of tourism on small island developing states, pushing the boundaries of digital media, unpacking the continual effects of the transatlantic slave trade, visualising alternate futures, critiquing failed nation states and challenging the construct of racial andsexual mores. They utilise humour, technology, the archive, performance, dancehall and myriad approaches to deconstruct the past, critique the present and to project alternate futures and ways of being.

Increasingly, Caribbean governments and intra-regional organisations including CARICOM among others, are speaking about the Cultural Economy. Each Caribbean country is at a different stage of developing their cultural policy or passing cultural legislation, which unfortunately and erroneously, is often done without having first mapped the cultural sector. Aside from Cuba, the rest of the region has scant data on the cultural sector and there is, in general, a lack of coordinated efforts or integrated approaches to the arts, amongst Ministries of Culture and other National Cultural Foundations  

Tertiary level art educational institutions across the region, all of which are underfunded, are staffed by tutors who are generally working to do their best in typically difficult environments. There are formal art schools in Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, Martinique, Puerto Rico, the DR, Cuba and The Bahamas where students can earn either an Associate Degree or a BFA and to a lesser extent in the larger Hispanophone islands, an MFA. Most of them cater to a national student base although there are small numbers of students from other Caribbean countries, including some from where there is no tertiary level art school option. 

Some Caribbean countries have National Art Galleries, many of which are led by women and refreshingly, several opened these traditionally national spaces to function more regionally by inviting artists, curators and writers from around the Caribbean and its diasporas to curate, participate in exhibitions and develop programming. Still, others are restrained to maintain a nationalistic approach to programming.

Although there are some exceptions, in general, corporate engagement with and philanthropic support for the arts tends to be underdeveloped and it is challenging  for most artists to make a sustainable living as a full time artist in the Caribbean. 

A few Caribbean nations have relationships with Europe as overseas territories, giving them some access to funding for the arts, as if the case to greater or lesser degrees, in the Dutch and French Caribbean. Independent Caribbean nations typically dedicate small budgets to support contemporary art practice. Barbados, for example, shamefully, doesn’t even have a national art gallery. 

(iii) What opportunities are there to develop artists’ work? 

At the moment, there are a number of micro-residency programmes, many of which operate out of family owned spaces and are managed by practicing artists themselves, some offering alternate art educational and exhibition opportunities. Their impact is evidenced by growing local audiences and increased numbers of researchers and curators coming into the region. Some have more intellectual support regionally and internationally than they do locally. There is pressure on these artist led initiatives to contribute to the professional development of the art sector with little subventions or local investment. While they are doing important work expanding visibility for contemporary visual artists, the sustainability of these mostly volunteer-led organisations is at risk. 

Several national galleries are exhibiting works by non-national artists and are beginning to host regional exhibitions such as EN MAS’ at the National Art Gallery of the Cayman Islands and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. At the National Art Gallery of Jamaica, up their call to artists for the Digital exhibition was most refreshingly opened to artists living across the Caribbean and to Caribbean artists living elsewhere (although that has recently changed to favour a more narrow vision for the 2017 iteration). 

In 2014, Martinique launched the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (BIAC) promoted by the Regional Council of Martinique. The BIAC invited non-nationals to curate the inaugural edition in 2013 including US-based, South African born, Tumelo Mosaka and a Vincentian, Holly Bynoe, Editor-in-Chief of ARC Magazine at the time. The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands will host the Museums Association of the Caribbean 27th Annual General Meeting entitled The Essential Museum - Redefining the role of the cultural and heritage sector for 21st century audiences. This will hopefully provide opportunities for those working in the museum sector to participate in robust discourse about precisely that - keeping up with the demands of the 21st century in terms of artists’ needs, best practices, governance, transparency and accountability to those whom they serve.

Under such challenging circumstances, many artists of the Caribbean choose to migrate to the Global North in search of opportunities. Some find teaching jobs at universities, mostly in the USA or Canada. A few find representation with galleries. The Jamaican artist, Ebony G. Patterson, for example, who lives between Kentucky, where she teaches, and Jamaica where she maintains a studio, joined the Chicago based moniquemeloche gallery. She is exhibiting at the prestigious 32nd Bienal de São Paulo. Patterson has created a route to sustainability and success outside of the region in ways that are not yet typically possible  or common within the Caribbean. 

My own recent appointment with the British Council as Caribbean Arts Manager demonstrates the organisation’s interest in investing in the region, yielding opportunities for people working in the arts on both sides of the pond. Partnering with Small Axe, the academic journal, and Outburst, the Belfast-based queer arts festival, to show Caribbean Queer Visualities at the prestigious Golden Thread Gallery in Northern Ireland, is an example of how this new post envisions creating opportunities for artists in the UK and the region. It’s striking that a city plagued by sectarian division and violence is open to showcasing this body of work which might be more difficult to show in many Caribbean countries where homosexuality is still taboo and in many countries illegal. In addition, the British Council Caribbean office is designing an artist’s residency programme for UK and Caribbean artists to participate in residencies in both the UK and the Caribbean. 

I have become involved in several trans-Caribbean projects in response to the isolating vacuum which many artists find themselves operating. Two projects with which I am associated exemplify modes of connecting Caribbean artists and art professionals as part of a wider critical community. Caribbean Linked and Tilting Axis have evolved organically, building on mammoth work that has come before. They are born out of what might be seen as deficiencies in certain areas: a lack of safe spaces in which to bring together young artists, and insufficient opportunities to bolster a professional network to collectively push the sector forward.

1. The Caribbean Linked Artist Residency Programme 

is an annual three-week residency which builds awareness across disparate creative communities of the Caribbean and uses the model of the residency to connect young and emerging artists with each other.  Because Caribbean artists don’t often travel to other Caribbean countries, this regional residency project focuses on the sustainable development, regional integration and critical education of younger artists while exposing Dutch Antillean, Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanic artists to each other. Caribbean Linked is actively creating opportunities for young artists, writers, critics and curators to work together, fostering the holistic development of the Caribbean’s arts community. Linking these young artists with arts professionals facilitates easier access to wider global conversations, while allowing them to create work, exchange ideas and participate in larger dialogues around art practice.

Caribbean Linked is managed by a core team including Elvis Lopez (Ateliers ’89), Holly Bynoe (ARC Magazine) and me with the support of Margriet Kruyver and Gerrit van der Hout who are based in the Netherlands. Our process is necessarily informed by a collaborative approach with colleagues from other contemporary arts spaces throughout the Caribbean, well connected to their local art scenes, to identify and nominate promising emerging artists to participate in this unique annual residency. We take into consideration the inclusion of artists from islands on the fringes of the region that may often be left out of the larger conversations which take place in relation to Caribbean contemporary art. The 2016 iteration included, for the first time, artists from Guyana, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. While the majority of economic support for Caribbean Linked comes from Stichting DOEN and Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands, private and public sector investment from within the Caribbean in addition invested in four of the residents. 

The driving force behind Caribbean Linked is to cohere the region through the arts and dissolve boundaries between the islands, whether linguistic, geographical or cultural. By highlighting what binds us rather than what separates us, this programme aims to plant the seeds of long term relationships that will strengthen and promote the growth of a healthy, unified and integrated cultural ecosystem in the Caribbean. The impact on the artists and the organisers is profound for each year’s posse who fall in love with the Caribbean through linking with one another during an intense three week period. 

2. Tilting Axis

The inaugural edition of the Caribbean-driven visual arts conference, Tilting Axis, took place in February 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados. This initial encounter saw thirty-two arts professionals spanning the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch Caribbean convene on Caribbean soil alongside a number of international participants. Building on this experience, one year later, Tilting Axis 2 took place at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in February 2016, with more than seventy attendees coming together to discuss this year’s topic, ‘Caribbean Strategies’.

Conceived by Fresh Milk and ARC Magazine, Tilting Axis invited the collaboration of core partners, Res Artis and PAMM. PAMM hosted the 2016 meeting in Miami, a city that not only aspires to be a vital art centre in the 21st century, but acts as a hub between the Caribbean and the global North. Their large diasporic population and, in many ways, shared history, made Miami a strategic location for the conference to travel to.  

It was important that the first meeting took place within the region. I was interested in this notion of ‘tilting the axis’ which refers to shifting the focus of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make the Arts more visible and sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean. While the meeting itself shifts locations in and out of the region, it is critical that the heart of Tilting Axis and the commitments made by all those in attendance, continue to act as a counterpoint to many decisions often made about the region from external locations.

Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks through knowledge transfer, provide avenues for critical conversation and form action plans to extend the reach of arts and culture throughout the Caribbean. The next edition of the meeting will be hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in April 2017. Investment in Tilting Axis has thus far come from The Art and Sport Promotion Fund in the Ministry of Finance in Barbados, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Davidoff Art Initiative, the British Council and Prince Claus Funds.

Constituting New Realities 

While the Caribbean may not be considered an art world centre, its artists and art professionals want to meaningfully engage with their local artistic communities and with broader networks in the region and the wider world. Shaping opportunities for artists and facilitating meaningful exchange between their compelling work with local, regional and international audiences is paramount. Increasingly, artists in the diaspora are interested in the Caribbean as a possible nexus which they see, from the outside, as supportive and embracing in opposition to what seems less so from their own locations in the Global North. 

Regardless of the disheartening gaps and voids, there is important work that is being done and somehow, we need to keep at it and urge those in the state sector to play their part and fulfil their mandate. Ultimately, we each get to choose the kind of work we want to dedicate our lives to. Do we want to preserve fractured spaces or might we commit to building a healthy cultural eco system? The impetus now is on Caribbean cultural leaders, institutions and boards to resist nepotism, choose meritocracy and excellence, and corporate Caribbean and state entities to invest in the arts. We must resist relying on Euro-America to subsidize the Caribbean’s cultural sector and invest equally in our own.