Art of the Caribbean

Object 1: Untitled (1988,) Malika Cosme

As I strolled through the galleries of EL Museo del Barrio, I found many of the art objects compelling – but not in a way that I could capture in words. Their colors, rhythms, and symbols possessed an abundant and moving character.  They spoke of a living culture and history that I could behold and appreciate, but not one  capture and define – I who was looking in from the outside, a suburban New Yorker, little familiar Caribbean history and life . It was an untitled photograph by Malika Cosme that first elicited deeper reflection, whose wordless compulsion gave rise to words. Cosme was raised in  a small, rural village on the Island of Puerto Rico.  As a young girl, she taught herself photography,  later emigrating to New York City and beginning a career as an experimental photographer.   This work in particular was a chromogenic photograph from a series called  “Dreams”.    I felt that there was something significant to be understood, not only about Caribbean culture, but also about the human condition , in the “dream” that Cosme presents .   Taken in Puerto Rico, in a place of her childhood, its  double-exposure technique  presents the dark, indistinct outline of some country woods contrasted with the bright white figure of a dog.  The dog’s face is turned away, with features obscure, but its coat glows hauntingly in the pale moonlight.    For Cosme, this photograph must have said something about the Puerto Rico of her childhood.   For me its faint, resonant shapes spoke of no particular  location, but of a condition of memory that we all share as human beings. The countryside is a remembered landscape, viewed through the prism of Cosme’s decades in New York City and a new language, culture, and pace of life.   It is, in this, very much the like the countrysides that we all must carry somewhere in the dim and cavernous vaults of our memory.   In the landscape there is the unmistakable quality of the dream, of the transient and insubstantial.   In the featureless dog, there is a sense of moving away, of perpetual, unremitted loss.    But in the radiance of the coat, in the persistence of the wood as contrast, there remains something indelibly moving.  We see, in the simple outlines of the photograph, the way in which memories fade, yet persist, the paradox of memory that eludes all attempts to recapture the past, yet constantly animates the present.  The work is a remarkable example of the personal in art becoming universal.

Object 2: Crop Time (Version 2, 1955), Albert Huie

Albert Huie, born to a poor family during Jamaica’s colonial period and raised in the town of Falmouth, Trelawny, was considered the “father of Jamaican painting”.  Much his work celebrated the land and the people of Jamaica. Crop Time, which spoke clearly to me from across the room,  presents a sharp contrast between artistic subject and artistic vision.

The subject of the painting is industrial degradation of the landscape and agriculture. Faceless laborers toil in the mud, stooped over, enervated, dejected .    The bare fields are overshadowed by a complex of industrial buildings.  A smokestack rises toward the cloudless sky, spewing dark clouds into the atmosphere .   One sees a native people broken and bowed  by industrial imposition, a landscape ravaged, a culture suffocated and nearly extinguished.

Yet, this is only the subject of the painting, and not its animating principle.  The coloring of the work transforms and creates the possibility of redemption.  The delicate greens of the landscape, the old spirit of land and people, radiate outward from the tree-lined mountaintops, infusing the bleak scene with a new visual life, permeating and transfiguring even the industrial smoke that mars the horizon.  Pinks and blues brighten the tattered garments of the field workers, bringing out the subtle power of their gestures.  The sky becomes a sensuous mixture of earthy green, ethereal blue, faint, tantalizing pink.  The whole image is alive in light, deep, natural colors that do not obscure the the brutal subject matter of the panting, but reanimate it in the substance of a new vision.  The scene is transformed, not by some starry-eyed hope or insubstantial vision of the past, but by the living culture preserved and nourished in the hearts of Jamaicans. Through the spiritual vision of this culture, any physical degradation can be redeemed. There is still dignity in work, beauty in nature.  There is still unity, joy, and tradition, even as the weight of industrial servitude crushes the physical body – in the coloring of one’s vision, in the archetypal motions of the harvest.