Resources for the study of Caribbean art:
ARC Magazine and website
The best resource for exploring the world of art in the Caribbean.
ARC Magazine is a non-profit print and online publication and social platform launched in 2011. It seeks to fill a certain void by offering a critical space for contemporary artists to present their work while fostering and developing critical dialogues and opportunities for crucial points of exchange, scholarship and study. ARC is an online and social space of interaction with a developed methodology of sharing information about contemporary practices, exhibitions, partnerships, and opportunities occurring in the Caribbean region and throughout its diasporas. ARC’s mission is to build awareness by fostering exchanges and opportunities that expand creative culture, within the visual arts industry across the wider Caribbean and its diasporas.
Cuban Art News
Cuban Art News is a project of The Farber Foundation, an independent private foundation dedicated to advocating, promoting, supporting, and fostering connoisseurship of contemporary Cuban art and culture.The foundation was established by art collectors Howard and Patricia Farber, whose holdings in contemporary Cuban art were the springboard for a broader interest in Cuban culture. The Farbers saw the need for an organization to support and encourage contemporary Cuban art and culture worldwide. Cuban Art News was the foundation’s first project and continues to be a primary priority. (For more about the Farbers’ holdings in contemporary Cuban art, see The Farber Collection website.)Published in English and Spanish, Cuban Art News is a global forum, news website, and content aggregator intended to promote education, appreciation, and a deepening understanding of Cuban art and culture. Our goal is to foster a broader understanding and awareness of Cuban art, music, architecture, dance, film, and literature.Arte al Día International
Blogging about the Caribbean’s Repeating Islands
Repeating Islands, launched in March 2009, quickly attracted an audience of Caribbeanist scholars, writers, and artists, and ordinary readers across the Caribbean and further afield. Posting several links each day (with occasional commentary), and covering everything from new books and exhibitions to political intrigues and environmental concerns, Repeating Islands is an essential resource for keeping up with cultural developments in the Caribbean and its wide international diaspora. Thanks to the backgrounds, research interests, and multilingual fluency of its authors, the blog transcends the linguistic barriers that can make it difficult to engage with the whole region.
Read more from Nicholas Laughlin’s article for Global Voices Online here.
Fresh Milk Barbados
The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. is a Caribbean non-profit, artist-led, inter-disciplinary organization that supports creatives and promotes wise social, economic, and environmental stewardship through creative engagement with society and by cultivating excellence in the arts. Explore their website here.
MOMA’s Teaching Guide for Latin American and Caribbean Art
You can download MOMA’s guide for teachers wishing to incorporate Caribbean and Latin American Art in their classrooms here: LAA_Full. The guide explores, among others, the work of Haitian American artist Jean Michel Basquiat, Cuba’s Wifredo Lam, Colombia’s Fernando Botero, Cuba’s Félix González-Torres, Mexico’s Frida Kahlo, Venezuela’s Marisol, and Chile’s Roberto Matta.
Small Axe Salon
The Small Axe Project seeks both to acknowledge an intellectual tradition of social, political, and cultural criticism in and about the regional and diasporic Caribbean, and to quarrel with it. This is because, in our view, it is only in and through such quarrels that an intellectual tradition can renew itself, can at once retain and re-invigorate its vitality. The Small Axe Project aims to provide a platform for the rethinking this entails. We aim to enable an informed and sustained debate about the present we inhabit, its political and cultural contours, its historical conditions and global context, and the critical languages in which change can be thought and alternatives reimagined. Such a debate, we would insist, is not the prerogative of any one genre, and therefore we invite nonfiction as well as fiction, poetry, interviews, visual art, and discussion pieces.
The Small Axe Project consists principally of two publishing platforms: Small Axe and sx salon.
The Top Ten Best Art Galleries In The Caribbean
In an article by Lawrence Garner, The Culture Trip lists the best galleries for Caribbean Art.
Having been an attractive destination for many throughout history, the Caribbean’s diverse art reflects the mix of European immigrants that have inhabited the region, blending their respective traditions with those of the Caribbean isles. Here we take a look at ten of the region’s best art galleries alongside a number of exciting upcoming and successful past exhibitions.
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, a 2014 exhibition across three museums in New York City, highlighted over two centuries of rarely seen works—from paintings and sculptures to prints, photographs, installations, films, and videos—dating from the Haitian Revolution to the present:
“This exhibition employs an inter-disciplinary approach to advance our understanding of the Caribbean and its artistic heritage and contemporary practices. It focuses on four central themes: Fluid Motions, Counterpoints, Shades of History, and Kingdoms of this World. These interconnected frameworks allow insight into the complex context from which the vital and varied artistic production of the region has emerged, illuminating the multiple histories of the region.”
The website created for the Pérez Museum in Miami (the exhibition’s second venue) is full of resources and information, which can be explored here.
Top image: Luis Fernando Roldán, Untiltled.
Fluid Ecologies 