Caribbean Women And Their Art

Overlooked in the history of artistic endeavors are the contributions of female writers, painters, and crafters of the Caribbean. The creative works by women from the Caribbean proves to be as remarkable as the women themselves. In Caribbean Women and Their Art: An Encyclopedia, Mary Ellen Snodgrass explores the rich history of women’s creative expression by examining the crafts and skill of over 70 female originators in the West Indies, from the familiar islands—Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico—to the obscurity of Roatan, Curaçao, Guanaja, and Indian Key. Focusing particularly on artistic style during the arrival of Europeans among the West Indies, the importance of cultural exchange, and the preservation of history, this book captures a wide variety of artistic accomplishment, including Folk music, acting, and dance Herbalism and food writing Sculpture, pottery, and adobe construction Travel writing, translations, and storytelling Individual talents highlighted in this volume include dancer Katherine Dunham, storyteller Louise Bennett-Coverley, paleontologist Sue Hendrickson, dramatist Maryse Condé, herbalist and memoirist Mary Jane Seacole, ballerina and choreographer Alicia Alonso, and athor Elsie Clews Parsons. Each entry includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as further readings on the female artists and their respective crafts. This text also defines and provides examples of technical terms such as ramada, slip, hematite, patois, and mola. With its informative entries and extensive examinations of artistic talent, Caribbean Women and Their Art: An Encyclopedia is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning about some of the most influential and talented women in the arts.

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses). Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it. Contributors Eli Bartra Ronald J. Duncan Dolores Juliano Betty LaDuke Lourdes Rejón Patrón Sally Price María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow Mari Lyn Salvador Norma Valle Dorothea Scott Whitten

WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women, Vol.7, 2014, edited by Lynn Sweeting, brings together 30 contemporary women writers and painters of the Caribbean in a new collection especially themed, "Voices of Dissent: Writing and Art to Transform the Culture." Includes works by Opal Palmer Adisa, Lelawattee Manoo Rahming, Vahni Capildeo, Althea Romeo-Mark, Marion Bethel, Danielle Boodoo-Fortune, Sonia Farmer, Angelique V. Nixon and more. Founded in the nineties in The Bahamas, revived in 2011, WomanSpeak is the Little Journal That Could, in the beginning Sweeting's personal labor of love, growing now into an international literary journal with a Caribbean focus. A must read for women writers and painters everywhere, as well as students of women's studies and those who love women's writing and art.

This book profiles four generations of women from one Afro-Cuban religious family. From a plantation in Havana Province in the 1890s to a religious center in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s, these women were connected by their prominent roles as leaders in the religions they practiced and the dramatic ritual artwork they created. Each woman was a medium in Espiritismo—communicating with dead ancestors for guidance or insight—and also a santera, or priest of Santería, who could intervene with the oricha pantheon. Kristine Juncker argues that, by creating art for more than one religion, these women shatter the popular assumption that Afro-Caribbean religions are exclusive organizations. Most remarkably, the portraiture, sculptures, and photographs in Afro-Cuban Religious Arts offer rare glimpses into the rituals and iconography of these religions. Santería altars are closely guarded, limited to initiates, and typically destroyed upon the death of the santera, while Espiritismo artifacts are rarely considered valuable enough to pass on. The unique and protean cultural legacy detailed here reveals insights into how ritual art became popular imagery, sparked a wider dialogue about culture inheritance, attracted new practitioners, and enabled the movement to explode internationally.

This book centers on visual and literary productions of Francophone Caribbean women. It investigates their aesthetics of violence, pain, the abhorrent, and the “uglification” of the feminine to unravel what makes them transgressive and uncommodifiable. It probes the ways in which these works destroy the regimentation of the “ideal” body.

WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women, is devoted to nurturing the creativity of contemporary Caribbean women writers and artists, to providing a forum that amplifies their voices, and preserves their work for future audiences. This new issue, Volume 8/2016, is especially themed, ""Letters to the Granddaughtes: Conjuring the Caribbean Women Writers of the Future."" New work by 27 writers and artists are collected in this new issue, including internationally recognized authors and painters, and some new voices as well. Their works are about love, pain, survival, migration, loss, justice, hope, resistance, transformation, truth-telling, and the importance of remembering and recording the stories of our lives so that the granddaughters, i.e., the coming generations of Caribbean women writers and artists, can take us with them into the future.

Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing uses a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora and gender in the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. These divergent and interconnected perspectives include violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of Caribbean identity. In these writings, diaspora represents both a wound created by slavery and Indian indenture and the discursive praxis of defining new identities and cultural possibilities. These framings of identity provide inclusive and complex readings of transcultural Caribbean diasporas, especially in terms of gender and minority cultures.