Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

By Carlos Garrido Castellano

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share.

This book is not only valuable for breaking ground as a scholarly approach to Caribbean contemporary art and art curation as a whole, but for doing so in a much needed radical way, confronting prevailing stereotypes about the region and its cultures. Its discourse assumes the implicated complexities instead of reducing them. This is probably due to a manifold approach based both on thorough research and on the author's own direct, committed involvement with the diverse artistic practices in the islands, and with socially engaged art in particular. Gerardo Mosquer, Founder of the Havana Biennale, Independent art critic, historian and curator

Reading this book immediately impressed upon me new ways of interpreting Caribbean art and art practices. Garrido Castellano has not created a framework for prescriptive viewing but challenges us to find different spaces of enunciation that our artists allow us to enter through their imaginative freedoms. Patricia Mohammed, author of Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation

Critique d'art excerpt of Beyond Representation by Carlos Garrido Castellano Critique d'art

Carlos Garrido Castellano is a lecturer at the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies Department at Cork University in Cork, Ireland and a researcher at the University Lisbon in Portugal.

Contents
Introduction
1          Being Here and There. Curatorial-specific Approaches to Caribbean Reality
2          Caribbean Art Institutions, Critique and the Public Sphere
3          Art Melting in Site-Specificity. Performance Art and Public Space in the Dominican Republic
4          Towards a Diasporic Counterstreaming Caribbean Imagination
5          Subversive Alliances. Collaborative Agency beyond Representation
Coda: Artistic Agency, Space, and the Praxis of Caribbean Studies
Bibliography
Index

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