Island Echoes: Exploring Caribbean Connections

Diaspora—that bond with a place you’re far from—can feel so strange. My siblings and I were born and raised in New York City, as were our parents; but their parents moved here from Cuba and Puerto Rico—Caribbean islands I’ve never been to. So while I am physically and generationally far from both places, they have undoubtedly shaped me in ways large and small. Like knowing the saying “de un pájaro las dos alas”¹—a line from a poem by Puerto Rican writer Lola Rodríguez de Tió that compares Cuba and Puerto Rico to two wings of the same bird—because older folks so often repeat it whenever I claim both Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage. Like using Caribbean Spanish that turns “bus” into guagua and “gossip” into bochinche. Like enduring loud Pentecostal church visits with titis in the Bronx and late-night at-home Santeria misas with my dear great-grandma on the Upper West Side. But beyond my story, rooted both here and there, these five boroughs and the Caribbean archipelago share other physical and historical links.

Like those islands I’ve never been to, Manhattan is a sliver of land surrounded by water. And Caribbean people have been laying down roots here since the 1600s. They include Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, and Puerto Ricans who have taken up residence across the city. Today, the enclaves of the Lower East Side, Washington Heights, Inwood, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Richmond Hill, and Jamaica reveal the city’s enduring and diverse Caribbean realities.

In recognition of Caribbean American Heritage Month, and the intertwined histories that connect New York, the Caribbean, and New Yorkers of Caribbean descent like me, I’m highlighting five works on view at MoMA this summer. Created by artists with Caribbean roots and varying degrees of connection to this city, they explore place, identity, and the artists’ lived experience.
—Oriana E. Gonzales

Carolyn Lazard. CRIP TIME. 2018

“I think slowness has a lot to do with the mundane,” stated New York/Philadelphia-based artist of American, Haitian, and French descent Carolyn Lazard in a 2021 interview about CRIP TIME. Time is essential to Lazard’s practice, especially in this ten-minute-long video. My experience watching this work was sensorially layered–I watched it, stood on my two legs while doing so, and listened as the artist dropped hard pills into containers. Their performance of one aspect of living with chronic illness–organizing daily medication–might also symbolize how time is a universally relevant aspect of everyday life. If you were to document how you care for yourself every day, what senses might that documentation demand of your audience? Going beyond duration, the white doily fabric on which this scene takes place also transported me out of my body into my memory. It recalled domestic spaces curated by my great grandma and great aunts, who painstakingly laid decorative and delicate textiles beneath lamps and tchotchkes to protect furniture from signs of wear. Their intimate–and often invisible–labor resonates with another aspect of Lazard’s practice: “Care is a through line in all of my work,” the artist has said.

Carolyn Lazard. CRIP TIME. 2018

Lazard’s video is currently on view on the second floor, near the Crown Creativity Lab.

Lorna Simpson. Wigs. 1994

Lorna Simpson acquired the hair represented in her portfolio Wigs at Fulton Mall in her home borough of Brooklyn, where she was born and raised. A multimedia artist of African American and Jamaican-Cuban descent, Simpson is well known for photographic works exploring stories, ideas, and stereotypes about Black women. For this work, she incorporated a waterless lithography process to transfer the image of these objects onto twenty-one pieces of felt. Alongside the figureless silhouettes are seventeen textual felt panels that, according to the artist, “speak about historical moments in which one’s appearance becomes an important challenge.” One of them is about blues musician and entertainer Gladys Bentley. It reads, “[A] night club in LA in 1940…had to get a special permit to- ‘Allow [the]…250 pound colored entertainer to wear trousers instead of skirts during her art.” Bentley, also of Caribbean (Trinidadian) descent, became popular during the Harlem Renaissance for performing at gay clubs, rejecting gender binaries through her self-presentation, and claiming an openly queer identity. By combining narratives about experiences like Bentley’s with everyday beauty accessories, Simpson’s work may guide us to consider how anyone uses material objects to “become someone else or become closer to the person that one sees oneself to be.” ³

Lorna Simpson. Wigs. 1994

Simpson’s lithographs are currently on view in gallery 208, on the second floor.

Nari Ward. Vertical Hold. 1996

“Just walking around the neighborhood, not scootering or driving.” That’s how Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward dissolves his creative blocks at home in Harlem⁴. (This is true for me as well.) The insight makes sense of how he explores community histories in his practice: his iconic assemblage and installation works often use found objects. Vertical Hold comprises discarded bottles that Ward found on the fringes of the last Shaker village, in Maine, while completing a residency there. He compared the process of finding the bottles to the Shakers’ commitment to faith: “I dug for unbroken bottles every day. Every time I would find one it was a moment of joy. I tried to correlate that with this idea of faith. I didn’t know what I was going to do with these things. I just knew that I wanted to collect as many as possible.”⁵ His preoccupation with place allows his work to become a vessel for dialogue with various cultures, identities, social issues, memories, and stories by using physical objects. And how do you develop a relationship with a place if you don’t familiarize yourself with it?

Nari Ward. Vertical Hold. 1996

Ward’s sculpture is currently on view in gallery 208, on the second floor.

Firelei Báez. Untitled (Terra Nova). 2020

“It’s always filtered as this place of pleasure and that is void of history,” said New York–based artist Firelei Báez while speaking about how the Caribbean is perceived in the US. Baéz’s multimedia figurative works unearth and reimagine stories about Afro-Caribbean women, African diasporic spaces throughout the Americas, and their legacies of colonialism and subversion. Having grown up in the Dominican Republic and Miami, with Dominican and Haitian roots, the artist is familiar with the experience of feeling pressured to choose one of her multiple identities. ⁶ So she has used her work to “create alternate pasts and potential futures” by depicting figures that straddle different identities. ⁷ Here, Báez superimposed the painted image of a Ciguapa—a seductive feminine trickster with backward feet and mountain origins—onto a 1541 European map that purports to depict parts of the Americas. By foregrounding a creature from Dominican folklore over Eurocentric geography, Báez flips a historical power imbalance. She prioritizes Afro-Caribbean storytelling over that of white male colonizers, leaning into her creative project of “self-definition.” ⁸

Firelei Báez. Untitled (Terra Nova). 2020

Báez’s painting is on view in the exhibition Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift and Beyond.

Ana Mendieta. Nile Born. 1984

“My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the universe,” said interdisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta ⁹. Born in Cuba, she was sent to live in the US at age 12 as part of Operation Peter Pan; after attending graduate school in Iowa, she moved to New York City. Popular for her earthworks, Mendieta explored her experience as a woman living in exile by combining organic elements with her own body. The artist’s body is a recurring material in her works: she captured her face pressed up against glass, photographed the mark left behind by her body’s impression on earth, and filmed herself covering her naked body with blood and feathers. In Nile Born, Mendieta used sand and wood to reproduce her shape and height.¹⁰ Grounding her figure physically and metaphorically, Mendieta’s works explore multiple senses of self entangled with nature.

Ana Mendieta. Nile Born. 1984

Mendieta’s sculpture is currently on view in gallery 420, on the fourth floor.

Explore Caribbean arts, culture, and history in NYC
CaribBEING
CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute)
CENTRO (The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College)
Little Caribbean NYC
Little Dominican Republic
Nuevayorkinos