Elyssa Goodman (Art Basel) writes, “Artists like Teresita Fernández and Firelei Báez depart from established narratives to show the region anew.” [This article was originally published in the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine, 13 November 2023.]

The palm tree is a cliché, a long-standing symbol for another cliché: paradise in its escapism, peace and tranquility. As artist Teresita Fernández said earlier this year during a public roundtable discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Caribbean artists work both with and against this cliché of paradise and its representations to create work that lives in true experiences of the Caribbean diaspora and its complexities. And there’s another side of the paradise coin: ‘The cliché of the Caribbean is always twofold – either the poverty that stems from colonization or island paradise,’ Fernández said. But contemporary art of the Caribbean diaspora is interested in a world removed from established narratives and that instead creates new, personal ones derived from reflection, not expectation.

Miami is a prime location for artists to ask such questions, given its role in a multitude of diasporas, Caribbean in particular. The city has nurtured a thriving community of artists, innovators, and incubators who look toward the next phase of Caribbean diasporic art, one in which it’s given the respect it deserves, dispels stereotypes, and stands on its own as an important artistic contribution. This is part of the reason Rosie Gordon-Wallace founded Diaspora Vibe Culture Arts Incubator in Miami nearly 30 years ago. ‘We keep trying to fit into the American model. It’s almost as if you have a car that’s out of style,’ she told the Miami Herald in 2022. ‘Because you wonder why is it that Caribbean artists don’t get selected for bigger shows?’

A multitude of shows have worked to counter this sentiment in the last several years. Miami’s own diasporic traditions have seen tribute across the city, including in the Oolite Arts show ‘Miami is Not the Caribbean. Yet it Feels Like it’ (2022), featuring up-and-coming artists of the Caribbean diaspora, some of whom are based in Miami like Monica Sorelle, Amanda Linares, and Mark Fleuridor. The work of Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic artists continues to thrive at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) as well. The institution is known for its Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI), a platform for curation and research that, according to its website, ‘promotes the art of the Caribbean and its diasporas through scholarship, exhibitions, fellowships, public programs, and collection development’. Celebrated throughout CCI and its related collections are Haitian-born artist and longtime Miami resident Edouard Duval-Carrié, Dominican artist Bony Ramirez, conceptual artist of the Jamaican diaspora Lorraine O’Grady, and countless others.

Most recently, this work has continued in the exhibition ‘Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today’, which is now touring the United States (it is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston). One of the artists in this show is Firelei Báez, a Haitian Dominican artist who grew up in Miami and whose work was also presented at PAMM through CCI. ‘I’m half Dominican and half Haitian, and part of my work has been to invert the narrative I inherited as a young person – that the Caribbean was a historic, that it was there primarily for other people’s pleasure,’ Báez said in 2021. ‘When people think of the Caribbean, they think of a vacation spot, but it’s far more than that.’

‘Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See (Part I),’ the third exhibition organized within the framework of CCI and currently on view at PAMM, celebrates Suzanne Césaire, a visionary writer from Martinique and surrealist thinker whose legacy had been erased and forgotten. ‘This exhibition highlights the role that museums can play in the process of memory building and speaks directly to CCI’s mission of expanding the understanding of the Caribbean as a multilayered and deeply rich cultural region,’ says Iberia Pérez González, the Andrew W. Mellon Caribbean Cultural Institute Curatorial Associate at PAMM.

In the aforementioned panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier discussed the nature of the malleability of the region and how it dates back to colonial greed. ‘In the early era of expeditions, people changed the maps to make them look like what they came looking for so they could get more money. So, there’s a way in which the Caribbean is always kind of this malleable thing, a marketing proposal that is linked to a kind of expeditionary enterprise,’ he said. But what artists look for, he continued, is the ability to move past questions of geography and institutional complicity. The desire is not to be ‘trapped in the older narrative of performing something for the institution to gain visibility and resources,’ he said, and to instead ask questions of themselves and their relationship to the world. The future is so much bigger than a palm tree. It always has been.

For original article, see https://www.artbasel.com/news/caribbean-artists-teresita-fernandez-firelei-baez-suzanne-cesaire

[Shown above: Firelei Báez’s “the vast ocean of all possibilities (19°36’16.9″N 72°13’07.0″W / 41°30’32.3″N 81°36’41.7″W),” 2022.]