Caribbean Visual Culture

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives are essential for studying Caribbean visual culture. The Museum's collections include extensive Caribbean art within their Arts of the Americas section, with ongoing acquisitions from Latin America since 1941. Their Libraries and Archives function as a research center, providing documents, photographs, reports, and records that support scholarship and provenance research related to the Museum's collections and history.

The MoMA Library offers a wide collection of modern and contemporary art, including resources related to Caribbean visual culture. Although it doesn't have a specific Caribbean collection, it features diverse materials such as paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs from Latin America and the Caribbean. The museum archives also contain primary sources like exhibition files that showcase MoMA's engagement with Caribbean art through its exhibitions and publications.

Watson Library has many resources on global art history, including those related to Caribbean visual culture. You can find books, catalogs, journals, digital materials, and rare items. Use keywords like "Caribbean art," "Caribbean visual culture," or specific artists, movements, or countries when searching the Watsonline catalog.

Cambridge University Library's Caribbean collections are extensive, including materials on the British West Indies and British Guiana, such as photographs, manuscripts, and printed materials. These cover topics like colonial administration, economic botany (especially the sugar industry), and regional history. Key holdings include photographs of Jamaica, Saint Kitts, and Guyana, dating back to the 1880s, including the Sir Daniel Morris Collection and a photograph album from Dominica. Manuscripts like the Darnell Davis collection and UWI correspondence focus on West Indian history, along with records of cable companies and the Hillsborough Estate. Printed materials include reports, yearbooks, directories, guidebooks, bibliographies, periodicals, pamphlets, fiction, scrapbooks, and press cuttings.

The University of Miami Libraries' Digital Collections include a Caribbean Documents Collection, ideal for studying Caribbean visual culture. It contains letters and documents from the 1750s to 1850s from islands like Antigua, Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Martinique. These mainly include financial, legal, and personal papers related to trade, slavery, and plantation life, with extra resources such as plantation records and slave registers on request. A detailed finding aid helps navigate the collection. Additionally, the Libraries hold the Trans-Atlantic/Caribbean Art collection, featuring sketchbooks and artworks inspired by Afro-Atlantic traditions like Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Yoruba spirituality, providing insights into their artistic and cultural expressions.

he Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, CUNY, is a leading organization dedicated to celebrating and preserving Puerto Rican visual culture and its Caribbean ties. As the largest research institute, library, and archive focused on the Puerto Rican experience in the U.S., CENTRO offers arts and cultural programs. Its Digital Archives and Community Mapping (DAM) project shows how migration influences Puerto Rican visual culture and community growth. It also features profiles of contemporary Puerto Rican artists in the diaspora, often overlooked because their work doesn't fit traditional American, Latin American, or Caribbean categories.

Florida International University's (FIU) library provides extensive resources on Caribbean visual culture, especially within its Latin American & Caribbean Studies collection. Key resources include FIU Special Collections, with the Ahlander Collection featuring brochures and artist info from Latin America and Caribbean islands like Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. Other collections include primary sources such as photographs and posters related to Caribbean history and culture.

The Latin American and Caribbean Contemporary Art Web Archive is a collection created by the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation's Art & Architecture Librarians. It is an extension of an existing effort to gather publications in all formats that document contemporary art and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of The New York Public Library, is a top institution dedicated to preserving Black history, especially Caribbean culture. It has over 11 million items, including art, photos, and manuscripts about Black life globally, with many focused on the Caribbean. The Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division holds rare Caribbean historical materials, while the Art and Artifacts Division showcases Caribbean art.

The British Library's collection includes a wide range of Caribbean visual culture, featuring 18th and 19th-century maps, lithographs, and aquatint paintings that showcase life in British Caribbean colonies. It also contains photographic materials like travelogues, photo books, exhibition catalogs, magazines, and newspapers. Check out this blog for more details.