Ebony G. Patterson's work performs a similar mingling of artifice and authenticity, blurring which side of the looking glass we're actually standing on. Tapestry, glass flowers, tassels, beads, gold leaf, glitter, shells all piled together. Step closer, and the illusion starts to reveal itself: disembodied limbs, watching eyes; wreckage from a world driven by consumption and indifferent to who pays for it. Patterson’s impulse towards this kind of spectacle finds its most literal form in the Jamaican custom of the "bling funeral", a lavish, glittering send-off for someone the world spent decades not seeing. As one New York Times critic put it: "You may not have noticed me when I was alive, but you will damn well see me as I leave." Grief, glamour, and visibility, collapsed into the single, glittering form of a casket.

That same conservatory, the one that held my homesickness at bay for a season, also became a space Patterson made entirely her own. During a residency at the NYBG, she filled the grounds around the glasshouse with four hundred glittering vulture sculptures. The exhibition dug into decay as something a garden actually needs, not something to be tidied out of sight. The vultures, colloquially called John Crows in Jamaica, stand in for the working-class, often invisible labor that keeps a thankless society running.

Patterson's two installations in Venice distill these ideas further. In when the land is in plumage…a peacock is in molting (2020), two hands rise from a mound of gilded conch shells, palms open. It is a pleading or an offering, or both at once. Above them, a peacock sculpture stands nearly buried in delicate white flowers, a form more bloom than bird. Complemented by a trail of pearlescent beads, the peacock is absorbed entirely in its own finery. That vanity feels like its own camouflage, and the effect was similar to an earlier work …three kings weep… (2018), a three-channel video installation of three young Black men doning elaborate finery, jewelry, and dancehall-inspired clothing while tears roll down their faces. The footage is shown in reverse; what looks like dressing is actually undressing, run backward. The effect exposes both the vulnerability underneath the performance of Black masculinity, and the deliberate choice to armor oneself in beauty rather than surrender to anyone's gaze.

…fester… (2023), made during the NYBG residency, extends her use of visual density into new territory: jacquard tapestry, lace, gold leaf, and glitter built into a wallpaper of her own design, so that the wall itself becomes part of the garden. The vultures return here deliberately; the same figures that stood in for invisible labor in the Bronx now preside over Patterson’s most ambitious garden yet, a through-line from residency to Biennale. As with much of her work, the artist’s garden is never simply a garden. It’s a place where old folklore and present-day politics grow tangled together, thorns included. Its beauty seduces, doing the double duty of both an invitation and a warning.

Both works sit inside what the Biennale’s curatorial team has named “Processional Assemblies,” one of several undercurrents (alongside Shrines, Enchantment, and Rest) that curator Koyo Kouoh mapped out before her death in 2025. Patterson, specifically, shines within this framing. Her gardens have always functioned as processional spaces, rooms meant to be experienced slowly. These are public performances, where meaning arrives in layers. the way it might in a Carnival march or a funeral procession, both of which she has staged herself in the streets of Kingston. At Venice, alongside artists including Alvaro Barrington, Nick Cave, and Big Chief Demond Melancon, that same Afro-Atlantic logic of movement and communal gathering finally has a room large enough, and slow enough, to hold it.

As this series comes to a close, we recognize ten artists, one Biennale, and one region, carrying centuries of water and weight, and insisting on being seen on its own terms. That has been the real subject of this series all along, more than any single artist or artwork. Not the Caribbean discovering Venice, but Venice, slowly and finally, discovering what the Caribbean has always known about survival, memory, and beauty as a refusal to be relegated to the margins.

Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican multidisciplinary artist born in Kingston in 1981, working across painting, tapestry, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. She lives and works between Kingston and Chicago. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others, and she is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Sources:

• La Biennale di Venezia, official artist page — https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/ebony-g-patterson

• Artsy, The 2026 Venice Biennale, Explained — https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-2026-venice-biennale-explained

• Artnet News, February 2026 — https://news.artnet.com/art-world/the-venice-biennale-list-2748473

• moniquemeloche, artist biography — https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/49-ebony-g.-patterson/biography/

• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebony_Patterson

• Time Out New York, NYBG exhibition, 2023 — https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/nybgs-new-thought-provoking-exhibit-combines-sculpture-and-horticulture-052423

• ArtsATL, Invisible Presence: Bling Memories — https://www.artsatl.org/review-ebony-g-patterson-atlanta-contemporary/

• Independent Curators International, quoting Ann Binlot, The New York Times — https://curatorsintl.org/records/2550-ebony-g-patterson-featured-in-the-new-york-times

• Nasher Museum, Duke University — https://nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions/ebony-g-patterson-while-the-dew-is-still-on-the-roses/

• Gaines Center, University of Kentucky — https://gaines.uky.edu/index.php/news/ebony-g-patterson

World Discovered focused on earlier work, which wrestled directly with the legacy of the Duvalier dictatorships; nearly three decades of father-and-son rule, from François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s rise in 1957 through Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s ouster in 1986, the same year Mathieu was born. The paintings from this period make abstractions out of people, land, and sites of violence, forms that resist full resolution. It was as if clarity itself were a luxury the history never afforded him, or us, or those lost to the corruption and violence of the regime. The second gallery offered a completely different and liberated Mathieu, not because his concerns had changed, but because his aperture had widened. There was a looser, more exploratory hand and mind at work. Some pieces read less like finished statements than ongoing experiments: still in process, still determining what exactly they wanted to be. That struck me as relentlessly brave and honest.

What made the show significant for me though wasn’t just the work. It was Mathieu himself, and I don’t think the two can actually be separated. An artist who paints history and humanity at its most grotesque without flinching, who trusts a room to hold whatever discomfort it needs to hold, turned out to be just as unguarded in person. I was there as he walked a group of Haitian seniors through the first room, speaking with them in Creole about memory. I also watched him guide elementary students through the spaces, unhurried, and treating their questions with real seriousness. Later, in an impromptu gathering with museum staff, he spent time giving us a preview of a line of scents he was developing: unisex, sensual, dark, vaguely troubling in the best way. Alongside the work, I recognized this as his offering, made many times over and for anyone who made themselves available to receive it.

So when I understood that Pendulum, his installation for the 61st Venice Biennale, would greet visitors with scent before image, I wasn’t surprised. I had already stood in rooms with him while he explained why he needed something beyond paint to say what he was trying to say. By the time your eyes adjust to what’s in front of you, your body has already understood. That gap, between what the senses register and what language can name, is where Mathieu has been working his entire career.

He is one of the very few artists at this year’s Biennale showing in both principal venues. In the Arsenale, Pendulum (2023), his award-winning short film, expands into space through life-size fabric figures and an scent system built during a residency at a perfumery in Paris. In the Giardini, a selection of paintings, ceramics, and mosaics, including recent works Self Preservation (2025), The Veil (2025), La fenêtre (2025), and a canvas that carries its title like a wound: GENOCIDE (2026). To understand why Mathieu works this way, across mediums, refusing to let any single material carry the whole weight, you have to go back to two ruptures: one collective, one entirely his own.

Mathieu was born in Port-au-Prince, eight months after uprisings finally ended nearly three decades of Duvalier dictatorship. The history was not abstract in his household. His maternal grandfather had been a colonel under Jean-Claude Duvalier; several relatives on his father’s side were killed under the same regime. He grew up in the residue of that era, a country where history doesn’t stay in the past tense, where the walls remember even when the people are told to move on.

Then, in his early twenties, a second rupture; this one imprinted directly onto his body. Leaving Goldsmiths in London, where he was completing his MFA, Mathieu was struck by a car. He suffered a concussion and a fractured jaw, lost his short-term memory, and carried a black eye for eight months. His memory never fully returned. When he returned to painting, he began sifting through that wreckage. Portraits of Duvalier-era figures. A prison sometimes called Haiti’s Auschwitz. His own physical and psychological trauma standing in for a country that had never been allowed to properly heal either.

What emerged from those two moments was a practice built on the simple premise that some things cannot be told. They can only be felt. Hovering somewhere between abstraction and figuration, bodies and landscapes surface and dissolve in the same breath, never quite resolving into a final form. That closure was never available to him in the first place. History, with Mathieu, is not a story with a beginning and an end. It’s scar tissue you carry but can’t name; it’s a scent that lingers without a body; it’s a name just on the tip of your tongue and so far out of reach.

And that is what makes Pendulum the right anchor for Venice, a film that examines what follows emancipation. It recalls not the triumphant moment of liberation itself, but the long, disorienting after, when the body is finally free and doesn’t yet know what to do with that freedom. As this series has been tracking what Caribbean artists carry to Venice, and what remains once they arrive, I’d offer that Mathieu carries something both weighty and intangible: the residue of two histories, a nation’s and a body’s. Those tellings won’t ever fit cleanly into a single narrative. Instead, he transforms it into sense memory, diffused into the air of a room, willing to go unnamed but never unfelt.

Manuel Mathieu is a Haitian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist born in Port-au-Prince in 1986, working across painting, sculpture, ceramics, film, and olfactory art. He holds a BFA from Université du Québec à Montréal and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Power Plant in Toronto, the Phi Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. He was a recipient of the 2020 Sobey Art Award. He lives and works between Montréal and Paris.

Next up: Ebony G. Patterson

Sources:

• La Biennale di Venezia, official artist page — https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/manuel-mathieu

• Politics of Details, Details of Manuel Mathieu, May 2026 —

• Art Plugged, March 2026 — https://artplugged.co.uk/manuel-mathieu-debut-61st-la-biennale-di-venezia-koyo-kouoh/

• Citywealth, March 2026 — https://www.citywealthmag.com/news/haitian-canadian-artist-manuel-mathieu-debuts-at-the-61st-international-art-exhibition-la-biennale-di-venezia/

• The Globe and Mail, May 2026 — https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/article-meet-the-canadian-artists-heading-to-venice-biennale/

• Kavi Gupta Gallery, Manuel Mathieu’s Paintings of Trauma and Desire — https://kavigupta.com/press/600-manuel-mathieus-paintings-of-trauma-and-desire/

• Studio International, interview — https://www.studiointernational.com/manuel-mathieu-interview-life-experience-sometimes-forces-you-to-see-things

• Artsy, Rising Haitian Painter Manuel Mathieu — https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rising-haitian-painter-manuel-mathieu-explores-complex-history-homeland

• Ocula, artist profile — https://ocula.com/artists/manuel-mathieu/

• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Mathieu

In 2019, the Puerto Rican novelist and poet, Mayra Santos-Febres, gave a talk on The Fractal Caribbean, a generous and poetic argument I return to often. Her position, roughly, was that Caribbean writers have spent decades trying to represent a regional reality that thinkers like Édouard Glissant described as inherently chaotic, fractal, and resistant to straight lines. What if that apparent chaos isn’t chaos at all, but a different kind of order, one that repeats at scale, and that offers a way of understanding selfhood beyond neat binaries or easy legibility?

Daniel Lind-Ramos’s towering sentinels have always struck me as positing those same questions. These are the watchers: semi-anotomical figures built from buckets, rope, bungee cords, pots, pans, and a plunger, assembled from objects often recovered after hurricanes in his native Puerto Rico. For me, this line of inquiry has always kept the work from being only about disaster, or only about politics. Rather, it serves as a persistent reminder about the order that persists inside the disaster; the perfect geometry that keeps asserting itself out of what should, by all logic, be ruin.

Patterns of apparent breakage or interruption and reassembly run through the history of Lind-Ramos’ Bienanale sculptures. Talegas de la memoria (2023–2024) starts small; a plastic kayak, the kind you might see on any beach in Puerto Rico. In Lind-Ramos's hands it becomes something larger: a vessel that has carried Black life across water for centuries, out of bondage and into whatever came next. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a large number of people escaping slavery fled by boat, taking refuge in the region’s dense mangroves. Maroonage was a disappearing act, a means of survival. Here, Lind-Ramos turns it inside out and what was once concealment becomes, on the walls of the Arsenale, monument.

Alongside Guardaverde (2024–2025) and Centinelas de la luna nueva (2023), the three works narrate commingling historical threads: the land protecting people from the regime of the plantation, and people protecting the land from the ecological terror inseparable from that same regime. Lind-Ramos doesn’t separate these ideas; they were never separate to begin with. This sensibility comes directly out of the community of Loíza.

Lind-Ramos was born there in 1953, the son of a household stitched together by needlework, woodworking, and mask-making. Just east of San Juan, Loíza was founded by Yoruba people brought to Puerto Rico in bondage during the 1500s, and it remains, four centuries later, the heart of the island’s Afro-Puerto Rican community. Its history also includes an episode rarely taught alongside it: when the British Navy attacked Spanish-held Puerto Rico in 1797, Black militias from Loíza helped drive them back, a defense many accounts of the island’s colonial history have simply left out.

He has never really left the town; not actually and not in the work. Though Lind-Ramos paints in oil, he also builds with cardboard, wire screen, discarded appliances, car parts, palm fronds, and the refuse of everyday agricultural and domestic labor. He walks his hometown for them, along its streets and its shoreline, and just as often a neighbor hands him something they no longer need, trusting he’ll know what to do with it. After Hurricane Maria tore through the island in 2017, that gathering took on a different weight. In earlier work Maria, Maria (2019), he has used the blue FEMA tarps that covered roofs across Puerto Rico for months, sometimes years, after the storm. The tarp is government-issued disaster relief. It is also, in his hands, a shroud, a flag, a skin. He has said as much himself: “For me, objects are charged with experiences, whether they’re personal or collective. That is what interests me.”

And this is why Santos-Febres’s idea has stuck with me throughout these years and why I continue to be drawn to Lind-Ramos’ work. He doesn’t impose order onto disaster — he shows you the order that was already there, in the wreckage, in the tarps, in the kayaks, in the buckets a neighbor no longer needed. Chaos, looked at closely enough, resolves into pattern. A hurricane scatters a town’s belongings across its streets, and a sculptor from that town gathers them back into the shape of a sentinel. That is not a metaphor for resilience. It is resilience, built at the scale of an object, repeating itself at the scale of a whole practice, at the scale of a whole people.

If, as proposed in this series on Venice, that Lassalle-Morillo carries her mother. I venture that Lind-Ramos carries Loíza itself: its celebrations, its debris, its 1797 militia, its mangroves where people once hid from men with guns. He builds guardians out of what the water and the storms left behind, and he sets them to watch over the room. At the Arsenale, something Loíza has always known finally has an audience large enough to match it: that making meaning out of chaos, and emerging whole through it, is not a Caribbean particularity. It's a universal truth.

Daniel Lind-Ramos is a Puerto Rican assemblage sculptor and painter born in 1953 in Loíza, Puerto Rico, where he lives and works. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. He is the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, the 2020 Pérez Prize, and a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.

Next up: Manuel Mathieu

Sources:

• Mayra Santos-Febres, The Fractal Caribbean (2019), unpublished lecture —

• La Biennale di Venezia, official artist page — https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/daniel-lind%E2%80%91ramos

• Artforum, Rachel Wetzler, Venice Biennale diary, May 2026 — https://www.artforum.com/columns/venice-biennale-2026-on-site-rachel-wetzler-1234750375/

• e-flux Criticism, 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys” — https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/6782422/61st-venice-biennale-in-minor-keys

• The Globe and Mail, Venice Biennale review, May 2026 — https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/art-and-architecture/article-venice-biennale-2026-art-exhibition/

• Artnet News, Jo Lawson-Tancred, April 2026 — https://news.artnet.com/art-world/venice-biennale-2026-data-analysis-2754880

• MoMA PS1, El Viejo Griot — Una historia de todos nosotros — https://www.momaps1.org/en/programs/178-daniel-lind-ramos

• Art21, artist profile — https://art21.org/artist/daniel-lind-ramos/

• Culture Type, Victoria L. Valentine, May 2023 — https://www.culturetype.com/2023/05/07/daniel-lind-ramos-gives-voice-to-black-puerto-rican-and-afro-caribbean-communities-through-monumental-assemblage-works/

• Cultured Magazine, April 2023 — https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2023/04/25/artist-daniel-lind-ramos-loiza/

• Caribbean Cultural Institute, PAMM — https://cci.pamm.org/en/on-daniel-lind-ramos-vencedor-2-1797/

• Harvard ReVista, Standing (De Pie) in Loíza — https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/daniel-lind-ramos

• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lind-Ramos

As much as Retiro (2015–2019), rests on this familial relationship as its foundation, there is more to that story than meets the eye. A camera records, and within its aperture, a daughter performs scenes from her mother's youth; scenes the elder of the two has rewritten, adjusted, revised. This is neither fiction nor documentary. The resulting work is something closer to what happens when two women stop circling one another and actually see the other.

Retiro began at a closing, with a death. After the passing of her grandmother, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo sat with her mother, Gloria María Morillo, and turned on a camera. What began as a series of interviews evolved into something unexpected: a three-channel film in which Gloria rewrites her own memories and directs her daughter in re-enacting them. The result is a film within a film within a relationship. One marked, as Gloria has admitted, by distance and by unfulfilled aspirations that Puerto Rico's history made harder to shake.

To be clear, Gloria is not a subject here. She is a co-author: an actor, director, and screenwriter on a project that is, among other things, about whether her daughter will carry her likeness, her stories, her unfinished business, whether she wants to or not. That question, tender and ultimately unresolved, is the film’s real subject. Not memory as something to be preserved, but memory as something that passes through you, with or without your consent.

Two events function as the film's psychic setting. The first was the signing of PROMESA in 2016, which transferred broad economic powers over Puerto Rico to the US government. The second, a year later, was Hurricane María, which tore through the island in 2017. Natalia and Gloria made this film through both; fighting, growing closer, irritating each other, traveling through fog in Borikén's mountains, and wading in its water. Amid the push and pull between mother and daughter, Puerto Rico becomes a third woman in the room. Two become three.

Lassalle-Morillo’s process is straighforward: sit with people long enough that something real happens. Trained as an actor before she turned to film and installation, her work is attuned to the way in which a the presence of a camera changes what people do. The performance that results is no less true for being a performance. This project begins in mourning but arrives somewhere closer to pre-emptive grief. It is a blueprint for addressing generational pain, and for making something so full of love and tenderness that it becomes the inheritance instead.

What Retiro understands (and what made it worth pushing past my own reservations) is that Gloria’s unfulfilled aspirations and Puerto Rico’s are the same grief in different bodies. The broken promise of the commonwealth. The colonial economic management that PROMESA made official. A mother who wanted more and an island that was never allowed to have it.

This series has been asking what Caribbean artists carry to Venice. Campos-Pons carries the Orishas. Davis carries the soil. Duval-Carrié carries the lwas. Gallisá Muriente carries the gap. Lassalle-Morillo carries her mother — into the room, into the archive, into the frame. At Venice, Gloria Morillo is credited as co-creator. Two Puerto Rican women, one born in 1954, one in 1991, standing together in the Arsenale. The inheritance, passed forward.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo is a Puerto Rican artist and director born in Bayamón in 1991. Merging experimental film, theatrical performance, and installation, her research-based practice examines memory and history through rigorous periods of research and co-creation. Her work has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Amant, RedCat, the 22nd SescVideoBrasil Biennial, and internationally. She lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

IG: @natalialassallemorillo

Gloria María Morillo is a Puerto Rican actor, director, and screenwriter born in San Juan in 1954. She lives in Bayamón, Puerto Rico.

Next up: Daniel Lind-Ramos

Sources:

• La Biennale di Venezia, curatorial text by Marina Reyes Franco — https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/natalia-lassalle-morillo-collaboration-gloria-morillo

• Frieze, Eva Díaz, Motherland, 2026 — https://www.frieze.com/article/eva-diaz-natalia-lassalle-morillo-259

• Burnaway, Mira el Mar, 2022 — https://burnaway.org/magazine/mira-el-mar/

• KADIST, Retiro — https://kadist.org/work/retiro/

• CentroPR, artist biography — https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/artists/natalia-lassalle-morillo/

• AS/COA, In the Studio: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo — https://www.as-coa.org/events/studio-natalia-lassalle-morillo

• natalialassallemorillo.com — https://natalialassallemorillo.com/about

• Repeating Islands, March 2026 — https://repeatingislands.com/2026/03/01/la-biennale-di-venezia-2026-representation-from-the-caribbean-region/

• Abrons Arts Center, En Parábola — https://www.abronsartscenter.org/programs/enparabola

In Spanish, laguna names two things: the coastal lagoon, and the gap: a place in memory where something used to be. Both run parallel through her presentation at Venice. The lagoon: an ancient landscape, shaped by forces that predate any colonial archive. The lacuna: a site of missing history and, Gallisá Muriente has decided, the place where something new can still be made.

To let oneself stand in the gap is not a resignation; it is an inherently political position. In Puerto Rico, institutional archives have been shaped by weather and neglect as much as by deliberate erasure. Celluloid molds and power cuts interrupt what little preservation efforts exist. What survives does so unevenly and also by design. Gallisá Muriente has spent her career working in that unsettling terrain; not attempting to restore what colonial violence and tropical climate have taken, but inhabiting the space of its absence, where a different kind of knowledge becomes possible.

Among the films shown for this year’s presentation, Guaniquilla Luminosa (2023) begins before the colonial record exists. Super 8 images of an inlet in Cabo Rojo, a region whose Jurassic-era rocks are thought to be fragments of ancient oceanic crust, the kind of deep geological time that makes any archive look recent. The film stock was developed using water drawn from the lagoon itself, its minerals, algae, and suspended particles leaving unexpected color and opacity across the surface of the image. The environment and the image are no longer separable.

Últimas luces // Last Lights (2024) is more intimate and more devastating. Doubly exposed 16mm celluloid projected onto the walls of her deceased grandmother’s home; two layers of image, two layers of time, held briefly on the walls of a house no longer a home. The doubled exposure offers a statement on how memory actually functions: layered, unstable, shaped as much by omission and imagination as by what was preserved. The images that result are partially fictional, not because they misrepresent, but because memory always does.

Ciné Inútil // Useless Cinema I–IX (2023–2024) shifts the lens from the personal to the political. Here, nine stills have been extracted from surveillance footage shot by Puerto Rican police officers monitoring leftist and independence groups. The resulting images are overexposed and out of focus while the accompanying surveillance notes are either incomplete, fabricated, or filled with banalities. Where the state attempted to document dissent, it produced instead a record of its own incompetence. This failure, in Gallisá Muriente’s hands, is a small victory for the people whom a colonial apparatus tried to surveil and contain. The blurred image is the proof.

Although absent from the Venice presentation, Un montón de silencios, Gallisá Muriente’s documentary on the 1983 Wells Fargo heist carried out by Puerto Rican independence group Los Macheteros, casts its shadow across the room. The fighter who disappeared. The mother who held forty years of silence. The FBI file with more questions than answers. There is what the official record holds, and there is what it cannot. What has eluded capture, what survives only in the margins, in memory and as whispers. Observatorio de lagunas is built from that material.

Among the first Puerto Rican women to participate in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Muriente and co-director Natalia Lassalle Morillo arrive not to fill the gaps in the record but to show what lives inside them. The observatory is open. The lacuna is on view.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a Puerto Rican visual artist, filmmaker, and cultural organizer born in San Juan in 1986. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Design Triennial, MoCA Taipei, and internationally. She lives and works in Puerto Rico.

IG: @sofiagallisa

Next up: Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Sources:

• Sofía Gallisá Muriente official site — https://sofiagallisa.com

• La Biennale di Venezia — https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-arte-2026-invited-artists

• Phaidon, Prime Focus: Sofía Gallisá Muriente — https://www.phaidon.com/en-us/blogs/stories/prime-focus-sofia-gallisa-muriente

• Brooklyn Rail, Clara Maria Apostolatos, December 2024 — https://brooklynrail.org/2024/12/artseen/sofia-gallisa-muriente-unknown-unknowns/

• Momus, Alexandra Méndez García, February 2025 — https://momus.ca/on-weather-and-the-archive-sofia-gallisa-muriente-and-tony-cruz-pabon/

• PROXYCO Gallery, Unknown Unknowns — https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/ac931293349b039d1330cf/

• United States Artists, artist profile — https://www.unitedstatesartists.org/artists/sofia-gallisa-muriente

• Repeating Islands, April 2026 — https://repeatingislands.com/2026/04/14/puerto-rican-artists-bringing-work-in-minor-key-to-the-venice-biennale/

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Duval-Carrié was born in Port-au-Prince in 1954. As a child, his family left Haiti during a period of political upheaval, eventually moving through Puerto Rico, Montreal, Paris, and New York before he made Miami his home. Long central to that city’s Haitian cultural life, he has been closely associated with the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance and the Little Haiti Cultural Center’s gallery program, where his ongoing series Global Caribbean/Borderless Caribbean has run for over a decade.

Duval-Carrié’s mixed media works and installations present migrations and transformations, both human and spiritual, through dense iconography drawn from Caribbean history, politics, and religion. Rendered in glitter, glass, resin, bronze, and oil on canvas, the materials that are simultaneously luminous and weighted. He portrays what Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier called “marvelous reality”, the fantastic world of Haitian myth and legend folded directly into a critique of the prevailing social and political order. His lwas are not decorative. They are witnesses and survivors. Duval-Carrié's practice is a sustained argument that this cosmology did not stay in Haiti. It crossed the water and continues to make that crossing. The Iwas are, as he has asserted throughout his career, always already present; on the causeway in Miami, in the water between islands, and now, in Venice.

For this year’s Biennale, the spirits arrive in the form of a series of deities in bronze and oil on canvas, installed at the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. Duval-Carrié’s realized pantheon include Bawon Samdi, who reminds us of death and rebirth; and Ezili, dressed in her finest, surrounded by US Marines. These are the spirits who carry Haiti's counter-history, its refusals, its revolutionary imagination, placed unapologetically at the center of the world's most prominent art stage. The invitation to make that journey carried a weight of its own.

During an edition of Art Basel Miami, Koyo Kouoh had gone to Duval-Carrié’s building to personally hand him the catalogue of her exhibition When We See Us, for which she had borrowed, without his knowledge, one of his works held at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. It was in that conversation that she revealed lesser-known aspects of Haitian history before inviting him to join the Venice exhibition. When she died before the Biennale opened, her colleague Marie-Hélène Pereira found his name in Kouoh’s notes and carried the invitation through. He was always meant to be here.

For Duval-Carrié, this participation carries a dimension beyond artistic recognition, it is above all political, memorial, and spiritual: a chance to offer a voice from Haiti and the Caribbean, to address questions of history, diaspora, and cultural and spiritual legacies, notably those of Haitian Vodou and the trajectories of the lwa, in a framework where these dimensions can be perceived in all their complexity.

“Through these pieces,” he has said, “I continue a reflection on displacement, whether forced or voluntary, and on the way it shapes identities, beliefs, and collective memories, particularly in the Haitian and diasporic context.”

This series has been tracking a thread across every artist it profiles: the artifacts of our crossings and what is rendered from that which remains. Campos-Pons carried the Orishas in the shape of ironing boards and her grandmother’s priesthood. Davis carried the soil of a plantation, a herbarium grown in her own garden, the bones of an extinct bird. Caycedo carried the rivers her body swam and mapped. Barrington carried the layered textures of Trinidad, London, New York, held simultaneously in a single surface. Duval-Carrié carries the lwas. He has always been explicit that carrying them is not metaphor. They arrived in the Caribbean in chains. They survived a revolution against global powers. They crossed again in wooden boats in 1991. And in 2026, they walk into the Giardini.

The question this Biennale poses, curated under Koyo Kouoh’s title In Minor Keys, is about what has been suppressed, what has been played quietly, what has been waiting to be heard at full volume. Duval-Carrié’s central question at Venice is: what did Africa bring to the world? The lwas are the answer. And they have yet more travelling ahead.

Edouard Duval-Carrié is a Haitian-born painter, sculptor, and cultural organizer based in Miami, Florida. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1954, he has been a central figure in Miami’s Haitian cultural community for over three decades. His work is supported and amplified by the Tout-Monde Art Foundation, which connects Caribbean artists to international audiences. His work is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens in Paris, the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, and institutions across the Americas and Europe.

IG: @eduardoduvcarrie

Next up: Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Sources:

• La Biennale di Venezia, curatorial text by Anthony Bogues — https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/edouard-duval-carri%C3%A9

• Repeating Islands / Le Nouvelliste, Jonasson Odigène, April 5, 2026 — https://repeatingislands.com/2026/04/05/edouard-duval-carrie-to-represent-haiti-at-the-2026-venice-biennale/

• WLRN, April 23, 2026 — https://www.wlrn.org/arts-culture/2026-04-23/haitis-visionary-edouard-duval-carrie-previews-venice-bound-work-in-little-haiti

• The Haitian Times, May 13, 2026 — https://haitiantimes.com/2026/05/13/haiti-venice-biennale-duval-carre-little-haiti-miami/

• Fowler Museum UCLA, Divine Revolution — https://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/divine-revolution-the-art-of-edouard-duval-carrie/

• Duke University, Visionary Aponte — https://arts.duke.edu/projects/edouard-duval-carrie/

• duval-carrie.com — http://duval-carrie.com

• UNC Press, The Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié — https://janeway.uncpress.org/capstone/article/2943/galley/2997/download/

• Plunder and Play: Édouard Duval-Carrié’s Artistic Vision — https://submit.escholarship.org/dspace-preview/qt2kj26969

If you’ve been here a while, you already know what Salt & Aloes is trying to do…and what it’s pushing against.

Caribbean art is everywhere, if you know where to look. It’s in major collections, in biennials, in the work of artists who are shaping how the world understands color, land, memory, and the body. It’s dynamic. It’s contemporary. It is, plainly, some of the most urgent art being made right now.

And yet the writing about it too often falls into familiar grooves: framed through diaspora, through colonial history, through what the region has survived rather than what it’s actively building. The artists themselves don’t think that way. The work doesn’t live there exclusively. So why should the conversation?

That’s the gap Salt & Aloes exists to fill. Not Caribbean art as postcolonial case study. Caribbean art as a living, expanding, globally connected field on its own terms.

For the past 6 years, I’ve been experimenting with this work for free because I believed the conversation needed to exist. I still believe that. But to do it at the level it deserves: deeper reporting, artist interviews, access to art listings and sales, and sustained critical writing. More than anything, the work should be sustainable.

That’s why I’m launching a paid tier.

Here’s what it means for you as a reader:

Free subscribers will still receive artist and object spotlights. Selected reading lists will also still be available. The Salt & Aloes community isn’t going anywhere.

Beginning in June, paid subscribers will get access to our Caribbean contemporary artist database and calendar of exhibitions, the full archive of reading and resource lists, early access to art listings and sales through Salt & Aloes, and writing that treats Caribbean contemporary art with the full critical attention it’s owed.

If this project has given you something - a new artist, a new lens, a reason to pay closer attention - I’d love your support in taking it further.

Thank you for being here from the start.

Lauren B
Salt & Aloes

Davis engages with the plantation’s residue through the landscape it irrevocably altered and its continued impact on the contemporary environment, including this era of the plantationocene. That last word matters. The plantationocene names the devastating transformation of landscape into extractive plantation, reliant on exploitative, imported, and enslaved labor, as a primary driver of the ecological crisis we now inhabit. For Davis, that is not an abstraction..it is the actual soil under her feet.

Working from her studio on that operational dairy farm, Davis exposes the poly-vocal narratives buried beneath the land, proposing future strategies for repair and thriving, while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as ancestral sites of refusal, counter-knowledge, and healing. Her practice is not about mourning the plantation. It is about acknowledging what survived it, and what might grow in its place.

At Venice this year, that sensibility takes form in Let This Be My Cathedral (2026), installed in the Corderie dell’Arsenale. The multimedia installation delves into the legacies of Caribbean plantation economies, incorporating a herbarium sourced from plants gathered from her own garden and a replica of a now-extinct bird: the Eskimo Curlew. The work began, as so much of Davis’s practice does, with an act of listening. In conversation with her sister-in-law, the artist would hear the story of the Eskimo Curlew, driven nearly to extinction in North America, then shot by mistake in Barbados in 1963. From that single moment, Davis traced the bird’s migration routes, the wetland where it was killed, the local hunter who became a conservationist, the family archives. The Curlew became a figure for everything her practice has always circled: extinction, colonial disruption, the fragility of what remains, and the possibility of witness.

Olive Senior’s Birdshooting Season, included as part of the exhibition, arrives here not as decoration but as structural argument. Published in 1985, the poem maps the rituals of a hunting season through the eyes of a child: men arming themselves, women cooking and waiting, little girls at the doorstep whispering for the birds to escape. Senior gives perspective to both genders, tracing how the violence of the hunt organizes the entire household: who holds the gun, who tends the fire, who silently wills the hunted toward survival. Placed alongside Davis’s lead cast of the last Eskimo Curlew shot in Barbados in 1963, the poem becomes something more than elegy. It names the structure that made the loss possible: who gets to aim, and who whispers fly.

The installation itself takes the form of a secular sanctuary dedicated to ecological grief; fronds, seeds, embroidered textiles, and damask seating alongside that lead cast, recreated in collaboration with Factum Foundation. It is a memorial, an apothecary, and an altar…the same convergence of form Davis has developed across decades of working with community, land, and the long aftermath of extraction.

As the first Barbadian artist to be included in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, her presence is also historic. Barbados, the first British island given over entirely to sugar production, the laboratory of the plantation system that would define the Caribbean and the Atlantic economy for centuries, arrives at the world’s most prominent art stage through the work of an artist who has spent her entire career making that history visible, ecologically urgent, and insistently alive.

This series has been asking what it means for Caribbean artists to appear at Venice, what happens when work rooted in the particular textures of the region enters a stage built, largely, for other audiences and other conversations. Davis sharpens that question. Like Campos-Pons, she treats the land as living archive, the body as a site of historical inscription. Like Carolina Caycedo, she works at the intersection of ecology and colonial violence, refusing to separate the environmental crisis from the economic and racial structures that produced it. But her practice is also distinctly, insistently grounded in Barbados, in that specific farm, those specific plants, that specific bird. The work does not travel to Venice to become universal. It arrives, rooted, and asks Venice to meet it there.

Annalee Davis is a Barbadian visual artist, cultural instigator, and writer whose practice spans drawing, installation, video, embroidery, and living apothecaries. Born in 1963 in St. Michael, Barbados, she lives and works at Walker’s Dairy in St. George — a former 17th-century sugarcane plantation — where land, history, and ecology are the ground of everything she makes. IG: @annaleedavis

Next up: Edouard Duval-Carrié

Sources:

• annaleedavis.com press kit https://annaleedavis.com/press-kit

• Il Giornale dell’Arte — Alessia De Michelis, May 12, 2026 https://www.ilgiornaledellarte.com/Mostre/Annalee-Davis-e-la-prima-artista-di-Barbados-inclusa-nella-mostra-centrale-della-Biennale-di-Venezia

• Artribune interview, May 2026 https://www.artribune.com/professioni-e-professionisti/who-is-who/2026/05/intervista-annalee-davis-padiglione-barbados-biennale-venezia-2026/

• The Art Newspaper, May 21, 2026 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/20/boats-and-trains-not-planes-reflections-on-a-greenerbut-sometimes-greenwashedvenice-biennale

• Radical Ecology / Powerhouse Arts program notes https://www.radicalecology.earth/programme/annalee-davis-plotting-against-the-plantations/ https://powerhousearts.org/conductor-special-projects/annalee-davis-represented-by-awl

• La Biennale di Venezia — official artist listing https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/biennale-arte-2026-invited-artists

  In the Sugar Gardens — annaleedavis.com https://annaleedavis.com/archive/in-the-sugar-gardens

Memory, for María Magdalena Campos-Pons, is not something to be tucked and stored away. It is something tended.

Campos-Pons’ practice moves across photography, performance, installation, and sound, but the animating logic is consistent: Afro-Cuban and diasporic experience, the body, family archive, ritual, and spirituality as sites where history is not fixed but continually reactivated. Return, in her work, is never simple nostalgia. It is a way of sensing what survives, what is transformed, and what must be gathered again.

At Venice this year, that sensibility takes form in Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Koyo Kouoh and Toni Morrison (2026), an installation on view in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini. The title is worth pausing on: a work dedicated simultaneously to the late Adrienne Kouoh, the visionary curator whose program animates this Biennale, and to Toni Morrison, whose own practice was rooted in the recovery of what was suppressed, fragmented, or refused. Produced with collaborator Kamaal Malak, and described by Grace Aneiza Ali as a “monument in floral form,” the piece participates in one of the exhibition’s guiding conceptual threads: the creole garden and the courtyard as sites of imaginative freedom, self-reliance, and collective nourishment.

Campos-Pons’s contribution to this framework is not incidental. Her practice has long treated the archive not as storage but as living relation; something cultivated, tended, shared. That is precisely what Kouoh’s vision for this Biennale asks of its artists, and Campos-Pons answers it from a place of deep structural alignment.

This series has been asking what it means for Caribbean artists to appear at Venice, and what happens when their work enters one of the art world’s most visible and tightly framed stages. Campos-Pons sharpens that question. Like Alvaro Barrington, she thinks carefully about framing, not only how a work is shown, but how context shapes its meaning. Like Carolina Caycedo, she works with water as a force of memory, passage, and vulnerability, while attending to the ecological and political conditions that surround it. And like both artists, she refuses to separate material form from historical pressure. Her presence at Venice makes that refusal visible and it is urgent, poetic, and deeply grounded.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is also part of the more intimate architecture of this year’s Biennale. Her participation in the Giardini poet procession, inspired by Kouoh’s Poetry Caravan, underscores one of the deeper commitments of this series: Caribbean and diasporic practice at Venice is not only about inclusion. It is about relation. About how artists gather memory, build worlds, and make room for forms of speech that are collective rather than singular.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, performance, installation, sculpture, film, and video. Born in 1959 in Matanzas, Cuba, she draws deeply on Afro-Cuban, Chinese, and Hispanic ancestry, exploring memory, spirituality, gender, and diaspora through richly layered, autobiographical work.
IG: @maria_magdalena_campos_pons

Next up: Annalee Davis

Sources
Gallery Wendi Norris announcement on Campos-Pons at the 61st Venice Biennale
La Biennale / performance programme PDF
Hyperallergic coverage of the Poetry Caravan at Venice
Vanderbilt news on Campos-Pons and Kamaal Malak at Venice
ArtLogic / Wendi Norris page on Resonance
ArtCollecting preview on Venice Biennale activities

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For this series on Venice, including Caycedo feels essential. Her practice doesn’t simply appear within the Biennale, it actively reframes what it means to be present there. Artists like her, whose work bridges Colombia’s Caribbean coast with the broader histories of island colonial plunder, do more than occupy space on a global stage; they demand a reckoning with the extractive histories (ecological, political, and human) that make that stage possible in the first place.

Beyond the Biennale’s polished spectacle, Caycedo’s work, Nañay Kculli ~ S’oam Bawi Wenag ~ Kiik K’úum, foregrounds a Caribbean-inflected sensibility, one that treats the seed as both material and metaphorical kernel, an embodied archive through which fragility, preservation, and futurity come into view. Here, the question is not simply who is seen, but how knowledge is carried and sustained. Her work points to relational ways of knowing shaped by ecological exposure, where storytelling, stewardship, and survival are inseparable, and where the realities of the climate crisis are lived, inherited, and continually negotiated.

Caycedo’s presence at Venice lands with special resonance amid the city’s own environmental peril, a place literally fighting against submersion, against the slow loss of ground beneath its feet. Her rivers meet Venice’s lagoons in a shared grammar of struggle: water as both lifeline and threat, as archive of extractive violence and quiet insistence on survival. Caribbean waterways carry histories of colonial plunder just as Venetian tides carry the weight of tourism, commerce, and rising seas. In this overlap, her work becomes a way of reading Venice itself not as eternal monument, but as a site of collective vulnerability; but at our best, a shared reimagining of what comes next.

Carolina Caycedo (b. London, UK) is a Colombian artist based between Los Angeles and Cali. Working across performance, sculpture, video, drawing, and artists’ books, she collaborates with communities affected by dams, water privatization, and resource extraction—most notably along Colombia’s Magdalena River and in hemispheric projects addressing debt and tourism economies. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, the Whitney Biennial, and institutions including Tate Modern, ICA Boston, and Hammer Museum. Recent projects include Cosmotarrayas (2023, ICA Boston) and Be Dammed (ongoing).
IG: @lacaycedo

Next up: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

Sources
https://warholfoundation.org/grants/archive/seeds-containers-of-a-world-to-come/
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5659
https://kadist.org/people/carolina-caycedo/

Over the next couple of months, this series will trace the presence, poetics, and politics of Caribbean artists within and around Venice’s orbit; artists whose practices stretch across geographies, histories, and material languages, while remaining tethered to the region’s ongoing negotiations with coloniality, migration, ecology, and imagination. These posts are not intended as comprehensive surveys, but as close, intentional readings: moments to sit with specific works, gestures, and ideas as they surface on one of the art world’s most visible stages. They are also not separate from the current climate; they sit within the same cosmos and conversation as the controversies unfolding around the Biennale itself.

More specifically, these spotlights ask, what does it mean for Caribbean artists to appear in Venice, whether through national pavilions, collateral exhibitions, or quieter, less sanctioned spaces? What kinds of visibility are made available, and at what cost? I’ll be thinking alongside artists whose work resists easy framing, offering instead fragments, reflections, and critical encounters that move between the Caribbean, Venice and beyond.

Alvaro Barrington works across painting, textiles, installation, and sound, but painting remains the center of gravity in his practice. What makes his work compelling is not only his expansive use of burlap, concrete, yarn, and other found or unconventional materials, but the way he thinks about the frame as part of the work itself: as architecture, structure, and a way of holding experience rather than simply containing it. In that sense, Barrington’s practice begins from the instinct to treat painting as a flexible social form that can carry image, memory, intimacy, and lived relation at once.

Barrington’s work is shaped by Caribbean visual culture, migration, and the textures of diasporic life, moving between abstraction and figuration to build compositions that feel both intimate and communal. His own language around making suggests that the personal and political are inseparable: stories of home, kinship, music, and care are not references added onto the work, but the conditions from which it emerges. That brings the idea of framing in particular to the forefront, not just in the visual sense, but in the critical sense of how his work is interpreted, positioned, and historicized.

I am also struck by the way framing also matters in the way that Barrington has been written about by critics. Instances where comparisons to 1980s neo-expressionism have been used to explore his work can be useful, but they start to feel limiting when they place him too neatly into a familiar lineage through figures like David Salle or Julian Schnabel while overlooking Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist Barrington has explicitly named as an influence. For me, the issue is not only one of art-historical accuracy, but of recognition: whose references are made visible, and whose cultural location gets flattened in the process. That becomes part of what I want this Venice series to hold onto. I’m not only interested in what Caribbean artists show, but in how they are seen, framed, and read within one of the art world’s most visible stages.

Barrington (b. 1983, Caracas, Venezuela) lives in London and was raised within a Caribbean diasporic family context, with Grenadian and Haitian roots reflected in widely available biographical sources. For the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, he has been invited as one of 110 participants in Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial project, which centers resonance, affinity, and subtle forms of relation across artists and geographies.
IG: @alvarobarrington

Next up: Carolina Caycedo. I’ll be following her contribution to the Venice conversation and continuing this series with a close look at how her work expands the questions of ecology, extraction, and collective life that shape this moment.

Sources
https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/art/Alvaro-Barrington-with-Alex-Bacon/
https://www.artforum.com/events/alvaro-barrington-
https://elephant.art/gravity-and-grace-the-colourful-world-of-alvaro-barringtons-tate-commission/

At a press conference today in Venice, Kouoh’s team described her exhibition as guided by several “conceptual motifs,” among them “shrines,” “rest,” “procession,” and “schools.” The “procession” motif, in particular, inspired by carnivals in the Afro-Atlantic world, features artists like Alvaro Barrington, Nick Cave, Big Chief Demond Melancon, Godfried Donkor, Pio Abad, and Ebony G. Patterson. Kouoh aimed, where possible, “to refuse solid walls,” proposing instead new processional ways of journeying through an exhibition.

List of participating Caribbean artists:

Alvaro Barrington
Grenadian-Jamaican artist born in Venezuela (1983), raised in Brooklyn. Known for paintings and installations evoking Caribbean carnivals and communal rituals, blending abstraction with cultural memory.

Carolina Caycedo
Colombian artist (1978) based between Los Angeles and Caguas, Puerto Rico. Explores rivers, ecology, and Indigenous resistance through sculptures and performance, tying into Caribbean environmental justice

Annalee Davis
Barbadian visual artist (b. 1963, St. Michael). Hybrid practice in drawing, installation, and video examines post-plantation economies on a former sugarcane site; founded Fresh Milk arts platform.

Edouard Duval-Carrié
Haitian painter and sculptor (1959, Port-au-Prince), Miami-based. Creates allegorical works on Vodou mythology, Haitian history, and diaspora using mixed media like plexiglass and sequins.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Puerto Rican multimedia artist (San Juan). Focuses on colonial legacies, ecology, and decolonization through video, performance, and archives, often addressing Caribbean extractivism.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Puerto Rican artist (b. San Juan). Works collaboratively (with Gloria Morillo) in digital media, animation, and sculpture on climate fragility, sound, and island ecologies.

Daniel Lind-Ramos
Puerto Rican sculptor (b. Loíza). Assembles found materials into assemblages critiquing colonialism, hurricanes, and Afro-Puerto Rican resilience; gained prominence post-Hurricane Maria.

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Cuban artist (b. 1959, Matanzas), Nashville-based. Photographic installations and videos explore Afro-Cuban heritage, migration, and spirituality, blending Yoruba traditions with personal narrative.

Manuel Mathieu
Haitian multidisciplinary artist (b. 1986, Port-au-Prince), now based between Montreal and Paris. His abstract paintings, ceramics, and installations merge figuration and abstraction to probe historical violence, spiritual hybridity and diasporic resilience.

Ebony G. Patterson
Jamaican artist (1981, Kingston), Chicago/Kingston-based. Elaborate tapestries, sculptures, and videos honor dancehall culture, funerals, and Black visibility in floral excess.

​

Woody De Othello is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing. Known for his glazed ceramics and bronzes that interrogate the genre of “still life,” Othello creates animistic vessels based on domestic objects. The artist’s deep engagement with clay and its connection to homelands is integral to his practice. From the nkisi of Central Africa to the Indigenous Dagara cosmology of sub-Saharan Africa, Othello embraces the regenerative power of the material.

Art Basel’s Meet the artists: Woody De Othello

Othello (b. 1991, Miami, FL) holds an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco and BFA from Florida Atlantic University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; SFMOMA, San Francisco; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Seattle Art Museum; LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Baltimore Museum of Modern Art, MD; ICA, Miami; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; San José Museum of Art, CA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; and MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy, and many more. His first major solo museum exhibition is currently running at Pérez Art Museum Miami until June 2026.

IG: @woodyothello

There has been a long and insistent tension between what is hidden and what is revealed throughout Tulloch’s work. I first met the artist across this breach through a series of deeply saturated photographs, and again as he continued to develop his dark, lush portraiture work. For all the potency of Tulloch’s images, there has always been a sense of controlled impenetrability. Disembodied limbs thrust boldly into frame; a copious bounty of tropical flora; the artist himself aching upwards out of a grain mass as in The Harvest (2018).

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE

For centuries, the Caribbean’s landscapes—mangroves, mountains, caves, and waterways—were sanctuaries for maroon communities seeking freedom beyond colonial rule. Today, Caribbean women artists reimagine these spaces as sites of fugitivity and possibility, engaging shifting ecologies as grounds for autonomy, memory, and speculative futures.

Across Indigenous and Afro-diasporic societies, women have long served as key guardians of sustainable agriculture, medicinal plant knowledge, and resource management, skills vital to community resilience. Despite colonization and patriarchy, this expertise has been preserved and passed down through oral traditions, casual apprenticeships, and sacred ritual. Juana Valdés is a Cuban-born and U.S.-raised artist who explores migration, race, and colonial legacies through materiality, centering women as ecological knowledge keepers and stewards. Her sculptural installation The Journey Within (2003) features roughly 100 delicate, white porcelain boats shaped like folded paper hats. Arranged in clusters to resemble a flotilla, the boats evoked a collective displacement, their fragile forms mirroring thevulnerable state of those undertaking perilous journeys across oceans and seas. The work’stitle, however, posits migration as not only a physical crossing but also a profound internal transformation.

LINK TO FULL ARTICLE

Before being halted by the flu, my year began with its usual set of rituals and performances. Things were lit, things were shouted, things were released; small gestures intended to coax something new into being. With all its potential, each turning year seems to bring us into a familiar repetition; the same scripts, the same stage, the same will to order time.

It’s a similar cycle and drive that animates Christopher Cozier’s Gas Men (2014), a staged spectacle in which two suited figures stand on an anonymous shoreline, swinging fuel hoses above their heads like lassos. The unreadable faces and mechanical movements suggest bodies fully absorbed in enterprise; the effect is part Spaghetti Western cowboy act, part whip‑slinging bravado of a Carnival Jab. On repeat, the motion reveals a choreography of oil less about resolution than about keeping bodies moving, eyes distracted, questions deferred. The performance is a distraction; a promise of economic development while the deeper struggles over sovereignty, territory, and control unfold elsewhere.

This is old theatre.

Since the early twentieth century, oil exploration in Trinidad and Venezuela has been driven by foreign companies and imperial governments seeking fuel for their navies and factories. British and American firms carved up concessions, drilled wells along the Gulf of Paria, and used legal and military pressure to secure favorable terms, treating the region as a strategic frontier rather than a set of sovereign societies. In the 1990s, disputes over drilling rights and fishing grounds in the same Gulf saw Venezuelan patrols confronting Trinidadian boats while U.S. corporations operated on both sides of the maritime line, underscoring how local livelihoods and national boundaries could be sacrificed to the demands of offshore fields.

Today, under President Trump, the United States’ aggressive posture toward Venezuela extends this history of intervention under the familiar guise of stabilization and freedom. Sanctions, threats of force, and direct management arrangements over Venezuelan crude and natural gas are packaged as efforts to restore democracy and curb regional disorder, yet their practical effect is to re‑center U.S. and allied corporate access to reserves. Public discourse foregrounds pipelines, LNG corridors, and the promise of cheap, clean natural gas, while the underlying project is a complete takeover of decision‑making power: who controls the oil, who signs the contracts, who dictates the terms.

In this historical and present day context, Cozier’s Gas Men merely play their part in a long‑running regional drama, avatars for a contemporary U.S. energy policy that uses spectacle (press conferences, military parades, live‑streamed signing ceremonies) as cover for the reordering of sovereignty in the hemisphere. ​ Their movements, a rehearsal of crisis management, obscures the erosion of regional autonomy and the hardening of militarized borders. These are the cycles in which Caribbean and Latin American societies are drawn into projects of extraction, disciplined by sanctions and gunboats, and then offered tenuous relief in the form of new contracts and conditional aid played on a loop for all to see.

Poignantly, Gas Men offers a visual language for reading this moment, a view into how power operates in the Americas: through distraction, repetition, and a carefully staged confusion between motion and change. By slowing down and highlighting the gestures that usually flash by in political theatre, Cozier makes it possible to see where the real quest lies; not in the gleam of the gas pumps, but in the steady consolidation of control over land, water, and the future.​

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Christopher Cozier is an artist living and working in Trinidad, and co-director of Alice Yard, Port of Spain. Through his art, ranging from notebook drawings to installations derived from recorded staged actions, Cozier investigates how Caribbean historical and current experiences can inform understandings of the wider contemporary world.

Through his drawings, prints, sound art and video work, Cozier explores the dubious space of multinational companies and their role in global politics. Gas Men was filmed on Lake Michigan, a site that in recent years has witnessed repeated crude oil spills, care of British Petroleum’s Whiting, Indiana plant. Thematically intrigued by the role of geography, Cozier created Gas Men to interrogate the specifics of site and movement of bodies. The beach in the scene could be Venezuela, Mexico, Trinidad, or Lake Michigan. Adopting a methodology akin to the aforementioned multinationals, Cozier situates his practice in many different locales; creating site-specific work while identifying gestures and elucidating concerns that are part of the larger Diaspora.

IG: @ccozier50

Widline Cadet often blends archival family photographs with staged portraits, placing them within shaped frames that function as both windows and portals—views into a life or passages into an imagined elsewhere. In Shifting Skies (2025), groupings of half-moon frames adapt the decorative designs of breeze blocks, cement bricks used to construct walls that can offer privacy while allowing a view, which Cadet associates with her childhood in Haiti. The spiraling arrangements suggest pinwheels, flowers, or compass roses—symbols of play, beauty, and migration. Within these frames Cadet has cropped and isolated details from family photographs: a domestic table arrangement, a glimpse outside a curtained window. In doing so, she has constructed an archive—one shaped by memory, longing, and loss as much as by historical record. Just as important as what is shown is what is missing: the voids left by displacement and the unrecorded histories of migration. These images then become linked by associations, gestures, memories, and feelings, coalescing into an archive that preserves what history has overlooked and envisions what the future might remember.

Currently on view at The Hammer Museum, Made in L.A. Oct 5- March 1st, 2026

https://www.widlinecadet.com/new-gallery

Jamilah Sabur (b. 1987, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. Based in Miami, she explores the entanglements of geology, labor, language, and memory, often drawing on Caribbean histories, Black Atlantic geographies, and the lived experience of migration and displacement.​

Sabur received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her work frequently engages archival research and embodied performance to consider how colonialism, capitalism, and climate shape landscapes and subjectivities, and she has developed projects that reflect an ongoing interest in climate resilience and the politics of place.​

I write about Jamilah Sabur alongside Juana Valdés and Deborah Jack as artists who reinterpret the Caribbean as a site of ecological memory and resistance in a recent article on Contemporary& Latina HERE

@copperfield_london