Forever forged, forever becoming

ARC Magazine, in collaboration with the African and African Caribbean Design Diaspora, presents a collection of contemporary works by 20 established and emerging visual artists and photographers from 13 countries, including Suriname, Curacao, Trinidad, Grenada, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Barbados, St. Kitts, Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana, The Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and Cuba. This collection investigates the awakening of the... artists’ experience in order to unite, and at times criticize, stereotypical representations of ‘Caribbeanness’.

Formal elements of portraiture are met with revised ideas of self, occupation and presence. Resolve and ownership are present in the faces, inhabited spaces and deep within the ‘new’ landscape, one that is internal, often collaborative and highly deliberate. These 20 artists’ works elaborate on ideas of locale and the personal, which are observed through an expanded field of representation where the complexities of various histories, migrations and dispersals intermingle.

Photography is primarily used as a device where the artist questions notions of his or her perspective; the flexibility of the medium brings about a dynamic approach in viewing each artist’s narration of the world they inhabit. The vulnerability present in Radcliffe Roye’s ‘Nigga Beach’ portraits juxtaposed against Charl Landrveugd’s ‘Atlantic Transformerz’ portraits – which seek to define blackness – are piercing presentations that allow for the viewer to interact with each subject as an un-rendered site, one not often depicted. Madeleine Hunt Erhlich’s clarity on defining the phenomenological entanglement of presence in ‘To Live and Die Caribbean in America’ offers a succinct rumination on the transcending power of the Caribbean’s continuous flux.

The platform provided to ARC by the AACDD allows us to celebrate and be proud of our elusive and tangible heritages while building a deeper, more precise understanding of the value and necessity for artists’ works. We hope this will be a site of stimulation and sharing – to expand ideas of creative self-expression and uniqueness. And we trust that the vision presented, resonates and calls into question the repeating face of the Caribbean – forever forged, forever becoming.

Participating Artists include:

Kwesi Abbensetts | Terry Boddie | Malaika Brooks-Smith-Lowe | James Cooper | Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich | Gerard H Gaskin | Roger Gibbs | Nadia Huggins | Marlon James | Mariamma Kambon | Mark King | Charl Landrveugd | Manuel Mathieu | Lavar Munroe | Lara Stein Pardo | Adachi Pimentel | Radcliffe Roye | Keisha Scarville | Stacey Tyrell | Rodell Warner

Curated by