Beyond Representation In Contemporary Caribbean Art

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

"The artists represented in this book reflect the region's hybrid culture and offer competing ideas about Caribbean identity in a variety of works done in the last six years in a wide range of media. Two introductory essays by contemporary-art historians survey the themes treated by the artists and offer insights into the different traditions and contemporary-art scenes in the region. The book contains 200 colour illustrations, including a colorplate section complemented by commentaries that place the individual works in the context of each artist's oeuvre. Artist biographies and a selected bibliography complete the volume."--BOOK JACKET.

An updated and expanded edition of this classic, illustrated survey of Caribbean art, featuring the work of over 100 artists from the period of colonialism to the present day. The Caribbean is made up of more than twenty countries, each with its own identity. Yet fascinatingly, there are significant cultural commonalities despite geographic, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity. A mixture of African, Amerindian, Asian, and European origins define the remarkable Caribbean culture, which, from the period of colonialism to the present, has also witnessed a massive diaspora. Caribbean Art examines the diverse and highly accomplished work of Caribbean artists, whether indigenous or from the diaspora, popular or “high” culture, rural or urban based, politically radical or religious. This expanded edition with a new preface has been updated to reflect and address fundamental challenges to traditional art-historical practice and its foundational connections to histories of colonialism, Eurocentricity, and race. This is explored further in two new chapters focused on public monuments linked to the history of the Caribbean, and the intersections between art and tourism, raising important questions about cultural representation. Caribbean Art features the work of internationally recognized artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sonia Boyce, Christopher Cozier, Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta, Ebony G. Patterson, Hervé Télémaque, and more than one hundred others, working across a variety of media including performance, photography, and film. This new edition makes an important contribution to the understanding of Caribbean and postcolonial art and its context, in ways that invite productive conversation and encourage further explorations on the subject.

Combining postcolonial studies, curating and contemporary art, this book surveys the role played by artistic curatorship and contemporary art museums in the shaping of identities and cultural planning in contemporary Iberia. The book’s main hypothesis is that contemporary art has been pivotal in the construction of contemporary Iberia, a process marked by the attention paid (in heterogeneous, not always satisfactory ways) to the entanglement of the legacies of colonialism and the present-day status of Iberian territories as cosmopolitan societies now integrated in the European Union. We argue that, at least from the 1990s, curating emerged as a key activity for Iberian societies to display and configure an image of themselves as modern and fully integrated in the European cultural landscape. Such an image, however, had to cope with the legacies of colonialism and the profound socioeconomic transformations of these societies. This book is concerned with bringing together, while redefining and expanding, Iberian and curatorial studies.

Analyzing the confluence between coloniality and activist art, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future argues that there is much to gain from approaching contemporary politically committed art practices from the angle of anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial struggles. These struggles inspired a vast yet underexplored set of ideas about art and cultural practices and did so decades before the acceptance of radical artistic practices by mainstream art institutions. Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that art activism has been confined to a limited spatial and temporal framework—that of Western culture and the modernist avant-garde. Assumptions about the individual creator and the belated arrival of derivative avant-garde aesthetics to the periphery have generated a narrow view of “political art” at the expense of our capacity to perceive a truly global alternative praxis. Garrido Castellano then illuminates such a praxis, focusing attention on socially engaged art from the Global South, challenging the supposed universality of Western artistic norms, and demonstrating the role of art in promoting and configuring a collective critical consciousness in postcolonial public spheres. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7166.

The main objective of this book is to explain how contemporary literatures in Spanish and Portuguese are dealing with artistic creativity when artmaking is no longer a specialised field of cultural production, but rather an expanded field of socioeconomic interaction, personal and creative self-definition and collective imagination. The project positions the contemporary art novel as the most suitable place to understand how the economisation of cultural labour is affecting writers and artists alike. The authors examined in this book, including José Saramago, Rita Indiana Hernández, María Gainza, Mayra Santos Febres and Ondjaki (amongst others) explore the contradictions of the art market, the dynamics of art education, the multifaceted activity of curators and socially engaged artists in relation to broader debates on the role of culture in the configuration of socioeconomic dynamics. The book maps a new trend within contemporary literature that taps into the visual art system to reassess the role of literature in critical ways.