At the end of January 2020 (just typing that sentence feels like it was decades ago), the inaugural Caribbean Art Fair took place in the cool hills of Mandeville. The event was conceptualised by Jamaicancanadian curator and Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue director Karen Carter. Fun fact: Carter’s family hails from Spaulding, so with varying degrees of support nearby, Manchester was ideal for the fair’s first staging. From that intimate weekend, which promoted the “contemporary visual arts movement across the 26-plus countries in the region”, a large exhibit was born: When Night Stirred at
Sea. When Night Stirred at Sea: Contemporary Caribbean Art opened at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives (PAMA) in Brampton, Ontario, on October 29. This location, too, is fitting as Brampton is home to a large Jamaican population. PAMA partnered with the Caribbean Art Fair and Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue to showcase the work of 10 Caribbean artists, including Rock-born Krystal Ball, Storm Saulter, Javier Dayes, Katrina Coombs, and Owen V Gordon; London-based Vanley Burke and
Brampton-based Janice Reid are of Jamaican lineage.
This exhibit is timely and didactic in so many ways. Often when the wider art world speaks of “Caribbean art”, it refers to artists who hail mainly from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Want proof? Today is the culmination of a two-and-a-half month exhibition in the new Kulturstiftung Basel H Geiger — the highly-touted “culture hub” in Basel, Switzerland. Last December at Art Basel Miami, the gallery’s exhibition — one month after being known in that island — was praised for putting “Caribbean artists Picasso and Klaus Littmann’s nature project in the mix.”
What is interesting is that of the eight featured Caribbean artists, only Trinbagonian Christopher Cozier is from the English-speaking Caribbean. By the way, and we’re not trying to be funny, but do Venuezalans consider themselves Caribbean? Leave it to SO2 to offer readers a conversation that lies at the intersection of geopolitics and art.
In an exclusive convo Krystal
Ball commented, “It is always a good feeling to have my art viewed and embraced internationally. I strongly believe in community, and its importance in growing each other. So I jumped at the opportunity to link members of the Jamaican creative community with good people like Karen Carter, who is pushing, in an unbiased way, for the work of local and regional artists to be seen by people who can offer further opportunities.”
The survival of creative economies, especially in a POST-COVID world, needs investment. In July, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development urged Caribbean leaders to diversify their creative economies as “the true potential of the Caribbean creative economy is still largely untapped with a lot of room to grow”.
The pandemic has highlighted that culturally specific and regional creativity has been the balm of Gilead. Without Bollywood and Nollywood content Netflix would have almost run out of new shows for its 28 million global subscribers to watch. It was a pleasure to see content created inwardly and for the satisfaction of members of those communities shared and embraced without being placed on the conveyor belt of homogeneous whitewashing.
“Art has been an essential part of human survival. The artists in this exhibition span a wide range of life experiences, and their works explore many themes. Some works were made in direct response to the current global pandemic of COVID-19 and Systemic Racism while others deal more broadly with the themes of identity, community, colonisation, gender and place,” said co-curators Karen Carter and Greg Manuel. These varied life experiences are why museums, like the Tate Modern in London, have begun researching Caribbean artists for forthcoming exhibitions, and why Canadian dealers have been buzzing since the When Night Stirred at Sea debuted.
Commenting to SO2, Storm Saulter noted, “I’m particularly interested in the point of view of Caribbean people in how we see the world, not only those based in the Caribbean but those of us who live in different parts of the world.” He gets it. Knowing who you are, and super-serving a niche is indeed a recipe for success. Remember when Facebook launched, it was exclusively for American college students to share their experiences. Now the platform has a global reach and can influence everything from meme creation to presidential elections.