Caribbean Visual Culture

This book offers a comprehensive look at Caribbean art, showcasing 500 pieces from the late 1700s to today. It highlights the region's history, cultural diversity, and unique island identities, from the Haitian revolution to contemporary times. The book explores how Caribbean artists have represented their world, shaped national identities, and connected with colonial history, music, religion, and festivities. It emphasizes the rich visual and cultural ties among Caribbean communities and their artistic expressions.

This exhibition catalog highlights the lively and diverse festival arts of the Caribbean, including dance, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. It contains many pictures of costumes, masks, floats, and street decor, along with insights into their historical and social backgrounds. The catalog focuses on festivals such as Jonkonnu in Jamaica, Rara in Haiti, Hosay in Trinidad, and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, exploring their African and European roots.

"Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art" looks at art from Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Panama, where immigrant communities and various social factors have fostered vibrant artistic scenes within Chinese diaspora populations. The book highlights strong connections between Chinese diasporic artists and broader Caribbean art movements, showing how migration and historical influences have shaped these artistic practices across the region and beyond. It also provides an easy-to-understand overview of Chinese Caribbean art and its place in the global art world.

Caribbean art as a diasporic, fugitive phenomenon: a groundbreaking global survey The 1990s marked political changes like the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and new trade agreements influencing today's world. Emerging from this decade—also shaping Caribbean art—Forecast Form traces a path into the present, highlighting forms, materials, and processes that offer new perspectives on identity and place. This volume includes essays, illustrated plates, and focuses on 37 artists across the Americas and Europe.

New approaches to understanding Caribbean visual culture range from historical photographs following emancipation to contemporary transnational perspectives, coinciding with a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada. "Fragments of Epic Memory" places a variety of prints, postcards, daguerreotypes, and albums from just after emancipation in 1838 within a broader context of visual culture in the Caribbean.

This catalog, released alongside the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum from August 31, 2007, to January 27, 2008, features a collection of images and insights. It highlights the diverse talents of 45 Caribbean artists across photography, installation, painting, prints, drawing, video, and sculpture.

“Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 50s - Now” explores the Caribbean and Britain in art from the 1950s to the present, a social and cultural history often told through literature or music. It narrates the story of a Caribbean community in Britain as they shape a new Black British identity. Featuring artworks by artists such as Aubrey Williams, Frank Bowling, Althea McNish, Sonia Boyce, and others, this book provides a platform for Caribbean-influenced artists. It explores cross-cultural narratives, social, cultural, and political issues, and future directions, providing a vital account of postwar and contemporary Caribbean-British art and celebrating communities that shaped modern Britain.

“Surrealism and Us” celebrates a century of Black artists in Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. who transformed European Surrealism into a form of Black expression. The exhibit showcases over 50 works from the 1940s to the present, illustrating how these artists adapted the movement to reflect their diverse cultures. European Surrealism initially drew on African art, and artists in the Americas created their own versions influenced by African diasporic traditions. Notable examples include Caribbean Surrealism, inspired by African spirituality in Martinique, and the work of American artists like Romare Bearden, who engaged with Surrealist ideas. The term “Afro-surrealism” was coined in 1974 and remains relevant alongside Afrofuturism.

An overview of the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic regions over six centuries. "Afro-Atlantic Histories" features over 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries, exploring and analyzing the dynamic exchanges between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. The book is motivated by a desire to draw connections, tensions, and conversations around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic regions—their experiences, creations, worship, and philosophy.

Available Online - The Caribbean has been viewed through external mappings and categories, making it appear passive and easily categorized. This book examines how Caribbean individuals and communities use art to foster discussion and social spaces, relating to issues like citizenship, cultural agency, migration, and social justice. Covering diverse projects, including curatorial practice, social art, public art, and performance, the book highlights how Caribbean subjects reimagine their sociocultural environments.

A survey of Caribbean art history featuring works by over 100 artists from colonial times to today. Caribbean Art showcases the diverse, captivating, and highly skilled works of Caribbean artists, whether indigenous or from the diaspora, popular or 'high' culture, rural or urban, politically radical or religious.

Available Online - First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents is the definitive guide to the region's music. This third edition is updated and expanded, covering new developments like reggaeton, bachata, music videos, industry changes, and new dance styles. It includes new illustrations and video links. The authors contextualize the musical styles with themes of gender, race, sociopolitical factors, and diaspora. Caribbean Currents highlights the diverse music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the Lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities.

The contributions of female Caribbean writers, painters, and crafters are often overlooked in art history. This work examines over 70 women from the West Indies, including Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Roatan, Curaçao, Guanaja, and Indian Key. The book highlights artistic styles during European arrival, cultural exchange, and historical preservation, covering folk music, acting, dance, herbalism, food and travel writing, translations, and storytelling.

Available Online - The Caribbean figure's image has evolved since the mid-19th century, shifting from slave and plantation worker depictions to representations of social and political struggles. Contemporary artists in the 21st century re-imagine historical material as memories and dreamscapes. 'Creole in the Archive' analyzes photographs, postcards, and social documentation of colonial workers (1850-1960), alongside digital art by post-independence Caribbean artists. Using Derrida's ideas, the book sees the Caribbean visual archive as interconnected and relational, arguing that a creolizing archive can create meaningful new representations of Caribbean identities by combining contemporary art, historical imagery, and related sites.

EN MAS' highlights contemporary artworks exploring 21st-century carnival, filling a gap in two decades of Caribbean art exhibitions that lacked carnival focus. This hybrid catalog and academic reader, with a lively, carnivalesque feel, features nine commissioned artist projects. It also includes a timeline of diasporic pan-Caribbean carnivals, showing their influence on theater, dance, Broadway, contemporary galleries, biennials from São Paulo to Havana to Gwangju, the Olympics, and protests.

Available Online - "Erotic Islands" maps a long queer presence at a crossroads of the Caribbean. This transdisciplinary book foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in Trinidad and Tobago. It centers on Audre Lorde's use of the erotic as theory and methodology. The author highlights lesbian and gay artistry and activism to promote eros as a political, sensual, and spiritual lens for understanding the self and society. The analysis features Calypso Rose, Peter Minshall, and Friends For Life, traversing black studies, queer studies, and anthropology toward black queer diaspora studies.

Available Online - Images of Jamaica and the Bahamas as tropical paradises with palm trees, sandy beaches, and warm waters seem timeless. These images originate from the 1880s, when tourism promoters supported by British colonial administrators marketed the islands as picturesque paradises, hiring artists and photographers to create representations circulated through postcards and guides. Krista A. Thompson explains that these "tropicalizing images' influenced island life, with hoteliers importing tropical plants and restricting Black populations to maintain the idealized image. By analyzing historical photographers' work, Thompson shows how these images differed from traditional landscapes.

Available Online - Francisco Oller (1833-1917) was a Puerto Rican painter who spent over twenty years in Europe, becoming a prominent transatlantic artist. Oller worked in Realism, Impressionism, and naturalism, and built relationships with artists like Camille Pissarro and Gustave Courbet. These styles influenced his Realist-Impressionist approach, changing Puerto Rican painting. In Edward J. Sullivan's book, detailed analyses of Oller's work and insights into 19th-century Caribbean development are provided. With vivid illustrations, From San Juan to Paris and Back redefines Oller as an important 19th-century artist who shaped a unique Caribbean aesthetic.

A comprehensive two-volume survey of how people of African descent are portrayed in Latin America and the Caribbean. The first volume spans four centuries, beginning with the Spanish colonization of Latin America and the Caribbean in the fifteenth century; then detailing the establishment of slave colonies on the mainland and islands by the British, French, and Danish; and ending with the push for independence, starting with Haiti in 1804 and spreading throughout Latin America.

Available Online - Explore the vibrant and varied dance traditions of the Caribbean islands. Caribbean dance is a broad category that encompasses everything from nightclubs to sacred rituals. "Making Caribbean Dance" connects the dance of the islands with their rich multicultural histories and complex identities. Delving deep into the many forms of ritual, social, carnival, staged, experimental, and performance dance, the book explores some of the most mysterious and beloved, as well as rare and little-known, dance traditions of the region. Essays by leading scholars and illustrations present a wide range of imagery, providing vivid insights into the complex racial history of this period.

Available Online - Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, "The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde" traces the emergence of the visual arts avant-garde in the 1990s, highlighting its strategies to reject modernism and anti-colonialism. The book, divided into three sections, examines factors that brought this avant-garde to prominence amid dissatisfaction with post-colonial cultural policies. This shift includes moving away from traditional media toward new forms such as installation, performance, and video, and embracing a 'postnationalist postmodernism' with diasporic and cosmopolitan references.

Available Online - This collection features essays and interviews with contemporary Caribbean writers, scholars, and curators. It includes works by both trained visual artists and vernacular artists, emphasizing decorative and ornamental needlework. The focus is on indigenous regional traditions as well as modern, globalized expressions.