<p>Artists like Teresita Fernández and Firelei Báez depart from established narratives to show the region anew</p>

Elyssa Goodman

Beyond paradise: contemporary visions of the Caribbean and its diasporas 

<p>The palm tree is a cliché, a long-standing symbol for another cliché: paradise in its escapism, peace and tranquility. As artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10008/Teresita-Fernandez" target="_blank">Teresita Fernández</a> said earlier this year during a public roundtable discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Caribbean artists work both with and against this cliché of paradise and its representations to create work that lives in true experiences of the Caribbean diaspora and its complexities. And there’s another side of the paradise coin: ‘The cliché of the Caribbean is always twofold – either the poverty that stems from colonization or island paradise,’ Fernández said. But contemporary art of the Caribbean diaspora is interested in a world removed from established narratives and that instead creates new, personal ones derived from reflection, not expectation.<br></p>
<p>Miami is a prime location for artists to ask such questions, given its role in a multitude of diasporas, Caribbean in particular. The city has nurtured a thriving community of artists, innovators, and incubators who look toward the next phase of Caribbean diasporic art, one in which it’s given the respect it deserves, dispels stereotypes, and stands on its own as an important artistic contribution. This is part of the reason Rosie Gordon-Wallace founded Diaspora Vibe Culture Arts Incubator in Miami nearly 30 years ago. ‘We keep trying to fit into the American model. It’s almost as if you have a car that’s out of style,’ she told the <em>Miami Herald</em> in 2022. ‘Because you wonder why is it that Caribbean artists don’t get selected for bigger shows?’</p>
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<p>A multitude of shows have worked to counter this sentiment in the last several years. Miami’s own diasporic traditions have seen tribute across the city, including in the Oolite Arts show ‘Miami is Not the Caribbean. Yet it Feels Like it’ (2022), featuring up-and-coming artists of the Caribbean diaspora, some of whom are based in Miami like Monica Sorelle, Amanda Linares, and Mark Fleuridor. The work of Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic artists continues to thrive at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) as well. The institution is known for its Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI), a platform for curation and research that, according to its website, ‘promotes the art of the Caribbean and its diasporas through scholarship, exhibitions, fellowships, public programs, and collection development’. Celebrated throughout CCI and its related collections are Haitian-born artist and longtime Miami resident Edouard Duval-Carrié, Dominican artist Bony Ramirez, conceptual artist of the Jamaican diaspora Lorraine O’Grady, and countless others.</p>

<p>In the 18 years since, Akashi has come to think of her artistic trajectory as a spiral rather than a straight line, tethered in orbit around the themes of lineage, memory, and accumulation, but perpetually expanding in terms of forms and techniques. She regularly brings new materials into her practice, engaging in a dialogue with each new medium; a meditation on what images the material might elicit in her mind or what forms its inherent structural properties are best suited for.</p>
<p>‘Forcing materials to have a premeditated form leaves more room for accidents, chaos, and entropy to enter the work,’ she says. ‘My authorship is contingent on the material’s ability to do its own thing, and my allowing it to speak its own language.’</p>
<p>The softness of alabaster, for example, carves nicely into doughy amorphous shapes, and for <em>Triple Helix</em> (2020), she blew clear, crystal quartz into the shape of a bell because of the material’s ‘amazing resonance.’ ‘It’s so structurally stable that when you strike it,’ she explains, ‘it vibrates at a consistent rate, which is why it’s used in timekeeping devices.’ The bell, suspended over an accompanying table supporting eight small-scale, voluptuous glass vessels that represent a family of women, presents lineage as a reverberation – a temporal echo that resounds through generations.</p>

<p>In the aforementioned panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier discussed the nature of the malleability of the region and how it dates back to colonial greed. ‘In the early era of expeditions, people changed the maps to make them look like what they came looking for so they could get more money. So, there’s a way in which the Caribbean is always kind of this malleable thing, a marketing proposal that is linked to a kind of expeditionary enterprise,’ he said. But what artists look for, he continued, is the ability to move past questions of geography and institutional complicity. The desire is not to be ‘trapped in the older narrative of performing something for the institution to gain visibility and resources,’ he said, and to instead ask questions of themselves and their relationship to the world. The future is so much bigger than a palm tree. It always has been.<br></p>


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<p>This article was originally published in the <em>Art Basel Miami Beach</em> magazine 2023.</p>
<p>Published on November 13, 2023.</p>
<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Teresita Fernández, <em>Manigua(Mirror)</em>, 2023 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin (New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London). Photo by Daniel Kukla. © Teresita Fernández. 2. Christopher Cozier, <em>Gas Men</em> (video&nbsp;still), 2014 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. © Christopher Cozier.</p>

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<p>‘My hope is to put work out there that ignites a healthy intellectual back-and-forth,’ the artist says ahead of his survey at Pérez Art Museum Miami</p>

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Artists like Teresita Fernández and Firelei Báez depart from established narratives to show the region anew

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