In this post written by Ellesse Garvin, learn about 10 Caribbean artists to know.
Ebony G Patterson
Meet the Jamaican based artist, Ebony G. Patterson, whose mixed media artwork questions the construction of masculinity in popular culture from body politics and beauty to stereotyping and rituals. Patterson touched on the trend of skin bleaching in her earlier works after studying the street and Dancehall culture of her hometown. Patterson also uses installation, drawing and painting, public projects, photographs and tapestries to explore the boundaries of gender today, often questioning the parallels between masculine and feminine and the fluidity of gender.
Nicole Awai
Multimedia artist and Trinidad native, Nicole Awai refers to herself as a “perceptual artist.” Her work focuses on questioning the meaning and associations to what we see. Through her artwork, Awai show viewers that nothing is fixed, but that everything is constantly transforming, such as: history being recorded, retold, represented, re-imagined, re-envisioned and re-vised. Her aim is to create an awareness of here, the present moment, which ultimately transcends location and identity.
Roshini Kempadoo
As a lecturer as well as photographer and media artist, Roshini Kempadoo has studied the visual representation of the Caribbean. Working mainly in the United Kingdom, the British Guyanese artist’s research has fueled her artwork to discover the ways in which historical photographic archives have shaped past and contemporary society. Kempadoo now works to combat these photographs with re-interpretation and imaginative narratives these stereotypes with intriguing juxtaposed images of colonial and postcolonial Caribbean and Britain.
Sandra Brewster
With issues of race, identity, memory and representation at play, Sandra Brewster creates a dialogue between juxtaposed old photographs and recreated elements using painting, drawing, and gel transfers through compare and contrast. Her work focuses on her Guyanese heritage and the Caribbean as well as her current home, Canada and African Canadians. Brewster also address perceptions of a monolithic Black community in an ongoing series called Smiths.
Brianna McCarthy
Brianna McCarthy is a self-taught artist who uses personal experiences and cultural influences to examine issues surrounding beauty, representation and stereotypes. Where Afro-Caribbean women are portrayed as strong, suffering, alluring females of hardship, poverty, abuse and scorn, McCarthy subverts these claims through the use of performance art, traditional media, installation, fabric collage.
Simone Leigh
Born to Jamaican parents in the New York, Leigh defies odds and pursued art despite her personal afflictions. While at Earlham College she studied Philosophy and Cultural Studies but decided to take a ceramics class. Leigh once said in an interview at Tilton Gallery that she tried not to be an artist for a long time. Thankfully she pursued her passion to create multimedia works from installation to sculpture. Through her ongoing exploration, Simone Leigh challenges ideas of black female subjectivity through African art, ethnographic research, feminism and performance influences.
Kwesi Abbensetts
Hailing from the Caribbean coast of Guyana, Kwesi Abbensetts has lived and studied in Maryland, DC and Brooklyn where he studied film. Though he studied at Brooklyn College, Abbensetts is a self-taught photographer who uses film and photography to show his creative process, experimentation and a sense of evolution. His work mainly captures women and himself in a transformative essence that he considers “working with magic.” Abbensetts also uses his memory of the Caribbean to manifest in his work his childhood and culture.
Christopher Cozier
Since 1989, Cozier has published numerous essays exploring issues surround contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. His writing has influenced and shaped the current reception of contemporary art in Trinidad by building a context for new media works to be exhibited in the Caribbean. While writing, Cozier still maintains a steady artistic practice through installation, video, sound, printmaking, drawing and performance. His artwork vocalizes local concerns (not the typical ‘Caribbean aesthetic’ of pretty flowers and beaches) in contemporary language that resonates globally.
Jean-Ulrick Désert
Jean-Ulrick Désert is a Haitian conceptual and visual artist with a goal of rendering “conspicuous invisibility.” By combining historical metaphors with traditional iconography, Jean-Ulrick Désert achieves this goal by disrupting concepts of race, gender, and sexuality as a way to reconstruct and defy fixed identity. He works through various forms, such as: paintings, site-specific installations, video, and public billboards.
Albert Chong
Albert Chong is a Jamaican born artist of African and Chinese descent whose work deals heavily with the problems of his ancestry and African Diasporic identity. Through the use of mainly photography and installation and occasional video and sculpture, Chong also address his concern for humanity and its rapidly disintegrating connection to the natural world. A notable body of work is Title Photomosaics which includes a portrait of Angela Davis and her iconic afro made of thousands of photographs of African American women with processed hair.
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