CLARK CONFERENCE

BEYOND BOUNDARIES: SEEING ART HISTORY FROM THE CARIBBEAN

Bios

Anna Arabindan-Kesson (co-convener) is an associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Born in Sri Lanka, she practiced as a registered nurse in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History. She focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book is Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). She is the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, a Senior Research Fellow of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism www.artandcolonialmedicine.com. A list of current research projects can be found on her website: www.annaarabindakesson.com. 

Andrea Chung is an artist who lives and works in San Diego, California. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her recent biennale and museum exhibitions include the Addison Museum of American Art, Prospect 4, New Orleans and the Jamaican Biennale, and California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the Ford Foundation. In 2017, her first solo museum exhibition, You broke the ocean in half to be here, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She has participated in national and international residencies including the Kohler Industry Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Artnet, and Hyperallergic, among others. Her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Cleveland Clinic Art & Medicine Institute, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Addison Museum of American Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Petrina Dacres, Ph.D., is an educator and curator of contemporary Caribbean and African Diaspora art and visual culture. She is head of the art history department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. Her research focuses particularly on the art and politics of memory in the Caribbean. She is also a founding member of Tide Rising Art Projects, an organization created to support and promote contemporary Caribbean art and film, where she serves as its resident curator and education director. 

Aldeide Delgado is a Cuban-born, Miami-based independent Latinx art historian and curator, founder & director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). She has a background in advising and presenting at art history forums based on photography, including lectures at the Tate Modern, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), DePaul Art Museum, King’s College London, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and The New School. Delgado is a recipient of a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge award, the 2018 School of Art Criticism Fellowship by SAPS - La Tallera, and a 2017 Research and Production of Critic Essay Fellowship by TEOR/éTica. Delgado conceptualized the world’s first-ever feminist photography collective conference, WOPHA Congress: "Women, Photography, and Feminisms" (November 17-20, 2021). She publishes and curates from feminist and decolonial perspectives on crucial topics of the history of photography and abstraction within Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx contexts. Prior to founding WOPHA, Delgado created the online feminist archive Catalog of Cuban Women Photographers, the first comprehensive survey of Cuban photography history highlighting women’s contributions from the nineteenth century to the present. She is an active member of PAMM’s International Women’s Committee and PAMM’s Latin American and Latinx Art Fund, US Latinx Art Forum, and the steering committees of the Feminist Art Coalition and Fast Forward: Women in Photography.

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto, and author of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke, 2021). His research, curatorial and artistic practice considers historical and contemporary imbrications of desire, power and ecology. Dr. Gosine's multi-year project "Visual Arts After Indenture" led to numerous publications, including special editions of Small Axe, Wasafiri and Asian Diasporic Visual Arts of the Americas, production of artworks for his solo exhibitions All the Flowers and Coolie Coolie Viens (various venues in Canada) and curation of the exhibitions Wendy Nanan (Art Museum of the Americas, 2020-21) and everything slackens in a wreck (at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2022). He is currently engaged in creative collaborations with many artists to further elaborate ideas in Nature's Wild toward the production of new creative works which will be exhibited at various venues internationally over the next five years.

Yanique Hume, PhD, is an interdisciplinary scholar, priestess, dancer, and choreographer who specializes in the festive and sacred arts and popular cultures of the Caribbean and broader African Diaspora. She is head of the department of cultural studies and lecturer at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. She has co-edited several volumes, most recently Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2018), with Maarit Forde, and Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013) and Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016), both with Aaron Kamugisha and published by Ian Randle in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also conducted substantial research on the creative and cultural industries of the Caribbean. She is President of KOSANBA: The Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and other Africana Religions and is a member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Consortium. As a dancer and choreographer, Dr. Hume has worked with companies in her native Jamaica as well as in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. She is the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Development Research Centre, Ford Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Deborah Jack is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting, and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology, and climate change, while negotiating a global present. Last fall her retrospective exhibition Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City (2021). This fall, her work will be featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago, Illinois (2022). Previous group exhibitions include The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at TENT Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited at the 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Jersey City Museum, The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Art Burst Miami, and The New York Times. She is professor of art at New Jersey City University, and she lives between St. Maarten and Jersey City.

Erica Moiah James, PhD, is an art historian, curator, and assistant professor at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, in Florida. Before arriving in Miami, she was the founding director and chief curator of the National Gallery of The Bahamas and taught at Yale University. Her work centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and the African diaspora. Select publications include Charles White’s J’Accuse! and the Limits of Universal Blackness (AAAJ, 2016), Every N***r is a Star: Re-imaging Blackness from Post Civil Rights America to the Post-Independence Caribbean (Black Camera, 2016), and Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (NKA, 2019). Numerous curatorial essays include “The Black Sublime: Rene Pena’s Archangel, 2018” (SX, 2019), “Ricardo Brey’s Adrift” (MER, B&L, 2019), and the book chapters “La luz de cosas” on the artist Juan Francisco Elso (N.A.M.E., 2022) and “Gust of Grace: Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas, 2019” (CMA and Yale University Press, 2022). She will curate the exhibition Didier William: Pictorial Moves of Revolution for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2022. 

patricia kaersenhout is an artist who was born in the Netherlands, descendant of Surinamese parents, whose artistic practice investigates her Surinamese background in relation to her upbringing in a West European culture. The political thread in her work raises questions about the African Diaspora’s movements and its relation to feminism, sexuality, racism, and the history of slavery. She considers her art practice to be social, and her work seeks to empower young men and women of color and supports marginalized people. By revealing forgotten histories she tries to regain dignity and create transformative justice. She frequently exhibits in the Netherlands and abroad. Recently four major Dutch museums acquired the installation Guess who’s coming to dinner too?, which refers to Judy Chicago’s canonical work The Dinner Party, only this time honoring erased and forgotten black and brown heroines of resistance. www.pkaersenhout.com

Daniella Rose King is a writer and curator concerned with artistic practices of the Caribbean and diaspora, with a particular focus on feminist readings of transatlantic geographies and their histories of extraction. She is adjunct curator of Caribbean Diasporic Art at Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, where she works with the curatorial teams at Tate Britain and Tate Modern and recently collaborated on the landmark exhibition Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950 to Now (2021–2022). She has been an Art Hx Interpretive Fellow at Princeton University (2021–2022), Iniva Research Network Associate (2021–2022), a mentor for the 2020 Curatorial and Art Writing Fellowship, NLS Kingston, Jamaica, and a Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow (2017–2020) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, where she curated The Last Place They Thought Of (2018) and Deborah Anzinger: An Unlikely Birth (2019). Her writing has appeared in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s to Now (Tate, 2022), Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (July–Nov. 2018), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), and the forthcoming Eco-Caribbean Art for Planetary Survival (2023). She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.

Charl Landvreugd, PhD, is an artist and head of Research & Curatorial Practice at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Born in Paramaribo, Suriname, he grew up in Rotterdam in an environment and time when many different migrant communities were making the Netherlands their home. Having long been part of this vibrant space, he advocates for local continental European concepts and language that have the potential to speak about the sensibilities specific to the area. Using a broad range of artistic disciplines, he applies the results of his research to think about citizenship and belonging and how this is expressed in the visual arts in continental Europe. A Goldsmiths, University of London (BA), Fulbright fellow, and Columbia University, New  York (MA) alumnus, he completed his PhD in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London. He is on several supervisory boards and also serves as head of research at the Masters Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch, the Netherlands. www.landvreugd.com

Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist. She completed a BA in visual arts at Rennes 2 University in France (2006), after which she returned to live and work in Haiti. She moved to the Netherlands in 2020 to attend the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where she still resides. Mars’ work has been included in two group exhibitions in 2022: Who Tells A Tale Adds A Tail at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado and Kazal: Narrating Haitian Memories at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. In her practice Mars proposes storytelling and image making as transformative strategies for survival, resistance, empowerment, and healing. Her recent work features recurring female characters, one of them being her own alter ego, moving through imaginary landscapes. Through these characters Mars investigates gender, history, and traditions, and she challenges dominant narratives that seek to simplify and flatten the experience of people in the “margins.”

Wayne Modest (co-convener) is director of content of the National Museum of World Culture—a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum—and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is also professor by special appointment of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone, 2019, with Nick Thomas, et. al.), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, with Timothy Barringer). Modest has co-curated several exhibitions, including What We Forget (2019), with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.

María Elena Ortiz is a curator and writer, currently working at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. Prior to joining The Modern, she was curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she led and founded the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI) with the support of the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation. Her writings have been published globally. A recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and Independent Curators International (ICI) Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean, Ortiz’s curatorial practice is informed by the connections of Latinx, Latin American, and Black communities in the United States and the Caribbean.  

Jerry Philogene is an associate professor in the department of American Studies at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on interdisciplinary American cultural history, art history, and visual arts of the Caribbean and the African diaspora, with an emphasis on the Francophone Caribbean. She has published numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays, including a text on contemporary Haitian diaspora art and artists for Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (2017). Her essay on modern and contemporary art of Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe is forthcoming in Harvard University’s The Image of the Black in Western Art: Latin American and the Caribbean. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. With Katherine Smith, she is co-curating an exhibition on the contemporary textile works of Haitian artist Myrlande Constant for the Fowler Museum at UCLA, which opens in March 2023. She is completing her book project The Socially Dead and Improbable Citizen: Visualizing Haitian Humanity and Visual Aesthetics and working on a monograph on Luce Turnier. 

Marcel Pinas is an artist who was born in 1971 in the district of Marowijne in East-Suriname, in the village Pelgrimkondre. As a teenager he moved to the capital city Paramaribo, where his art teacher in school recognized his talent and convinced him to enroll at the Nola Hatterman Art Institute, from which he graduated in 1990. Pinas went on to study at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica and has served as artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. The theme Kibri A Kulturu (preserve the culture) is his main driving force and source of inspiration. With his art Pinas aims to create a lasting record of the lifestyle and traditions of the Maroons and hopes to create a worldwide awareness and appreciation for the unique traditional communities in Suriname and the serious threats they are facing today. He is the founder of the Kibii Foundation, which includes an art park and cultural center, where the youth from his hometown are trained and motivated to build a future based upon the strength of their own culture.

Veerle Poupeye is a Belgian-Jamaican art historian, curator, and critic, educated at the Universiteit Gent in Belgium and at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her publications include Caribbean Art (1998; 2022) and various book chapters and catalogue essays on Jamaican and Caribbean art and culture. She contributes to journals such as Small Axe, Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, and the New West Indian Guide, and she has a weekly art column in the Jamaica Monitor. Poupeye was the Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica from 2009 to 2018, and prior to that served as Curator. Exhibitions include Religion and Spirituality (2013), the Jamaica Biennial (2014, 2017), and Digital (2016) at the National Gallery of Jamaica; Arrivants: Art and Migration in the Anglophone Caribbean (2018) at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, which she co-curated with Allison Thompson; and Archipelago: Nine Caribbean Women Artists (2022), at Maison Dufort for Le Centre d’Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She lectures on curatorial studies, art criticism, aesthetics, and material culture at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and is part of the Technical and Scientific Committee of Le Centre d’Art.

Adrienne Rooney is a PhD candidate in art history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She specializes in twentieth-century art and visual culture in the Americas with a focus on the Caribbean. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966–1981,” attends to the conceptualization of the monumental, multilingual, ongoing festival and its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. She has presented work at the annual conferences of the Caribbean Studies Association and College Art Association, among others, as well as at the Paul Mellon Centre, the Tate, Emory University, Oxford University, and Rice University. She is part of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop Class of 2022, administered by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She is also currently a resident of “Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism,” a two-year program by British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Faith Smith (moderator) is an associate professor of African and African American Studies and English at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Her book Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is the author of Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2002) and editor of the anthology Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2011). Her new project, “DreadKin,” examines visual culture—the texture of black(ness?) on canvas, in the work of artists such as Philip Thomas, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Toyih Ojih Odutola—and fiction of the last decade to ask: How do the Caribbean’s descendants of enslavement and indenture weigh the claims of memory, desire, kinship, and prosperity in our contemporary global moment.

Shawn Michelle Smith (moderator) is professor of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois. She studies the history and theory of photography and gender and race in visual culture. Smith has published seven books, including American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999), Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), and the award-winning titles At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Duke University Press, 2013) and Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke University Press, 2020). For 2022–2023 she is the Critical Race Theory and Visual Culture Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. During this fellowship she is working on a book entitled Environmental Double Consciousness, which approaches environmental catastrophe through the lens of critical race studies, a project that is also supported by a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator from Kingston, Jamaica. She is a PhD candidate in the department of art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently, she worked on John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Florida (2017–2018), and the Folk Art Museum in New York city (2018–2019), and most recently served on the curatorial team for the Kingston Biennial opening in June 2022. She was also editor of Caribbean Quarterly, the University of the West Indies’ flagship journal of culture and has written for a number of magazines and journals, including Terremoto, Flash Art, and the Small Axe project’s sx visualities.

For any questions, please contact [email protected].