Art Review
Islands Buffeted by Currents of Change
‘Caribbean: Crossroads of the World’ Spans 3 Museums
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Crossroads of the World Ebony
G. Patterson’s “Untitled, Species I” (2010-11), foreground, at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, is part of this exhibition, also on view at El
Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum of Art.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 14, 2012
In size, cultural scope and freshness of material, the three-museum exhibition “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World” is the big art event of the summer season in New York, itself one of the largest Caribbean cities.
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Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Crossroads of the World Enrique
Grau Araujo’s “Mulata Cartagenera” (1940), at El Museo del Barrio, is
part of this exhibition, also on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem and
the Queens Museum of Art.
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Hanging at left, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado’s “Vanishing
Point: Multiple for Assembly” (2003), and at right, Alejandro
Aguilera’s “Che y Carlos Santana” (2006), at the Queens Museum of Art.
To take in the entire thing requires traveling between the Studio Museum in Harlem and El Museo del Barrio, both in Manhattan, and across the East River to the Queens Museum of Art
in Flushing. If you’re short on time or patience, any single segment is
dense and vivid enough to give you the flavor of the whole. But if you
can see all three, absolutely do.
Each tells a hugely complex story from a different thematic angle —
collectively, a telling that has been long in the planning, and is long
overdue. (Caribbean material has thus far not shared in the aura of
glamour that has gathered around Latin American art.) While not strictly
speaking a masterpiece show, its like won’t be attempted again on this
scale and in this depth for some time.
The story is woven as much from questions as from answers, from
intangibles as from facts. Is the Caribbean a place? If so, what are its
boundaries? Are Florida and Colombia as much part of it as Cuba? Is
there a Caribbean culture, and how do you define it, given the mix of
African, Asian, European and indigenous elements that blend, in quite
different proportions, on some three dozen islands in the region?
And even if the Caribbean is defined, loosely and poetically, as a state
of mind, a mood, how do you capture that in an exhibition, when so much
of that mood has, traditionally, been expressed more in music and
performance than in static visual forms?
A team of nine scholars and curators — Gerald Alexis, Rocio
Aranda-Alvarado, Deborah Cullen, Hitomi Iwasaki, Naima J. Keith, Yolanda
Wood Pujols, Lowery Stokes Sims and Edward J. Sullivan, led by Elvis
Fuentes, curator for special projects at El Museo del Barrio — has
pondered these matters, produced a book that is sure to become a staple
reference, and shaped an exhibition so crowded with unexpected sights as
to appear at times practically shapeless, absorptive rather than
expository.
It says a lot that although few interpretive labels accompany the more
than 500 objects assembled, many of which cry out for elucidation, the
show still makes sense.
Even as you puzzle over the details — What’s this? Why is it here? — you get the big picture.
Historically the picture starts at the Studio Museum, late in the 18th
century. By this time indigenous peoples throughout the Caribbean had
been suppressed; masses of captive Africans had been imported; a white
population, largely mercantile, had settled in. From a European
perspective the region had become the subject of myths — pleasurable,
fearful and often centered on race.
For decades émigré painters to the Caribbean, many working for colonial
estate holders, had depicted life there as a sequence of serene
multicultural picnics set in parklike tropical gardens. All imagined
idylls were decisively shattered, however, in 1791, with the slave
rebellion in Haiti that led to that country’s independence from France.
The uprising coincided with the French Revolution, when the ideal of the
brotherhood of man was ascendant in Europe. In that spirit a leader of
the Haitian struggle, Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave born in
Senegal, was elected to the National Convention in Paris. There’s a
remarkable chalk drawing of him in the show, by Anne-Louis Girodet de
Roussy-Trioson, a student of Jacques-Louis David.
Dated 1797, it depicts him wearing a stylish European waistcoat and
posed like a classical Apollo. At the same time his fastidiously
detailed Negroid features and provocatively sexualized body make him
look less a Romantic political hero than a well-dressed New World wild
man.
Racial difference, as an alien and threatening reality, formed the
fundamental view of the Caribbean — as it did, and still does, of Africa
— in the eyes of much of the rest of the world.
A second gallery at the Studio Museum, labeled “Land of the Outlaw,” is
filled with European images of the Antilles as a nightmare of ravenous
beasts, hostile natives and monstrous phantoms associated with
indigenous religions.
But monstrous is in the eye of the image maker. Race, or the perception
of it, can function as a social unifier; it can also be approached as an
unstable and alterable condition. The exhibition includes an amazing
sculpture, pieced together almost entirely from matchsticks by the
contemporary Jamaican artist Dudley Irons, of Marcus Garvey’s fabled
Black Star Liner, conceived as a trans-Atlantic slave ship in reverse,
bringing former slaves back to Africa from America.
And there’s a knockout collage portrait, finished last year, by Ebony G.
Patterson, who divides her time between Jamaica and Lexington, Ky., of a
young black man with a masklike white face. The image refers to the
often-against-the-law world of Jamaican dance-hall culture, and
specifically to its fashion for skin-bleaching as a cosmetic means of
both attracting attention and — playing around with the idea, dating
back to slavery and forward to Michael Jackson — determining social
status based on skin color.
Ms. Patterson’s glitter-encrusted portrait, part monument, part mug
shot, suggests the double-edged potential of radical identity
transformation. It pays off with immediate rewards, but you may not like
where it takes you, and there may be no going back. Applied to other,
broader subjects, this is also the theme of the section of the show
installed at El Museo del Barrio.
In the first gallery we find 18th- and 19th-century paintings, by
European artists and Caribbean ones trained in European styles, of the
colonized islands as an earthly Eden. Yet there is subtle evidence that
we’re seeing a labor-intensive profit-making paradise, with sugar and
tobacco as early export commodities, and oil coming later.
And it becomes increasingly clear, as idealized views of Caribbean life
recede in art, that the producers of these commodities not only derived
little benefit from them but also incurred direct harm. Working
conditions were harsh; the drive for productivity was ruining land. In
Albert Huie’s 1955 painting “Crop Time” black smoke pouring from a
processing-plant chimney darkens the Jamaican sky.
In recent decades offshore oil drilling, which can pollute water and
contaminate beaches, has endangered the one major cash-generating
resource Caribbean residents can claim as their own: tourism, with its
vision of island life as state of natural purity and innocence. That
vision has been in wide circulation throughout the West for centuries.
We see it in an 1856 painting by Camille Pissarro of St. Thomas, where
he was born; in exuberant prints Paul Gauguin made after visiting
Martinique; in art by sojourning European Surrealists; and in work by
Caribbean artists who chose not to join the international Modernist
mainstream but rather to seek what felt like a truer foundation in their
native or national cultures.
But there is no pure state, no unblemished source, no unburdened goal,
as the show repeatedly emphasizes. That’s the message in William Blake’s
dolorous poem “The Little Black Boy” from “Songs of Innocence and of
Experience,” seen in a hand-colored 1789 etching. And it’s the reality
implied in a 1990s sculpture called “All-Stars” by the Jamaican-born
artist Nari Ward, which consists of a baseball bat — contemporary
Caribbean emblem of heroic aspiration — wrapped in medical tape,
bristling with nails and coated with raw sugar, on which bits of cotton
are stuck like fungal growths.
Reality itself — social, economic, spiritual — is in a constant state of
flux, and this is the theme of the portion of the show at the Queens
Museum of Art, where the dominating images are of change and
interchange, embodied in the movement of water. In painting, photographs
and videos we see it sluicing among islands, washing against
shorelines, penetrating interiors, carrying trading ships and
battleships, fishing boats and ferries.
Its flow is even echoed in the flow of air currents that carry aloft a
fabulously absurdist wooden airplane designed and built by Charles
Juhasz-Alvarado, an artist based in Puerto Rico of irrepressible
imagination.
And, of course, where there are boats and planes, there are people
coming and going. For centuries the Caribbean has received, and sent
out, streams of them: Africans, Americans, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans,
Sephardic Jews, South Asians, all bringing art, attitudes, cuisines,
languages and religions with them. They’re all represented in the large
second part of the Queens installation, built around the theme of
carnival. And here the dizzying array of visual impressions
characteristic of the show overall becomes almost overwhelming.
Paintings are ganged together on walls. Figural sculptures teeter across
the floor. Masks pop up in 19th-century prints, in paintings by Ada
Balcacer, Minnie Evans and René Portocarrero; in collages by K. Khalfani
Ra; and in sculptures by Peter Minshall. The great Everald Brown
supplies unearthly musical instruments; there are rituals, religious and
secular, and festival dances everywhere.
If you’ve come this far — or even if you’ve seen only one of the show’s
three segments — you will have encountered histories you never knew and
artists you have rarely, if ever, heard of.
Isn’t telling us what we don’t know part of the job of museums? In this
case three small institutions with limited staff and resources have cast
their nets wide and dug deep, and come up with something big.
It’s a summertime vision of worlds within worlds. And one of those worlds is the crossroads that is our city.
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