Announcing Caribbean Linked V

June 21, 2018May 11, 2021Leave a comment

Ateliers ’89, Oranjestad, Aruba in collaboration with Fresh Milk, Barbados and ARC Magazine is pleased to announce that the regional artist residency Caribbean Linked V will be taking place at Ateliers ‘89 from August 6^th through 28^th, 2018. The official opening event will be held on Wednesday, August 8^th from 8pm – 12am.

Thanks to generous support from this year’s core sponsors BankGiro Loterij Fonds, Mondriaan Fonds, The Tourism Product Enhancement Fund (TPEF), UNOCA and Aruba Bank, as well as number of local sponsors in Aruba, creatives from around the French, Spanish, English and Dutch Caribbean will convene to produce work, meet cultural activists in the Aruban art community, participate in public talks, blog about their experience and present a closing showcase of works during this three week period. The final event will be held on Sunday, August 26^th.

Caribbean Linked is a space for building awareness across disparate creative communities of the Caribbean. It has created viable opportunities for young artists, writers, critics and creative activists from over twenty countries to foster new relationships with a larger community, contributing to the holistic development of the creative industries. In addition, it provides the opportunity to link with industry professionals who facilitate access to wider global conversations for the region’s practitioners, while allowing the artists to create work, exchange ideas and broaden cross-cultural understanding.

Participants in Caribbean Linked V (L-R): Sharelly Emanuelson, Velvet Zoe Ramos, Raily Yance, Ada M. Patterson, Miguel Lopez, Irvin Aguilar, Gwladys Gambie, Franz Caba, Alex Martínez Suárez, Kriston Chen, Averia Wright, Marina Reyes Franco

Artists this year include Irvin Aguilar (Mexico/Aruba), Franz Caba (Dominican Republic), Kriston Chen (Trinidad and Tobago), Sharelly Emanuelson (Curaçao), Gwladys Gambie (Martinique), Ada M. Patterson (Barbados), Velvet Zoe Ramos (Aruba), Averia Wright (The Bahamas) and Raily Stiven Yance (Venezuela).

The writer in residence will be art historian and independent curator Marina Reyes Franco (Puerto Rico). Visiting artists who will be lending support to Ateliers ’89 during the residency will be Laura de Vogel (Aruba) and Katherine Kennedy (Barbados). This year’s specially invited curators will be Alex Martínez Suárez, independent curator and general coordinator and museographer at the Museo Fernando Peña Defilló, a private museum in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Miguel A. Lopez, co-director and chief curator of TEOR/éTica in San José, Costa Rica.

For more information, call Ateliers ’89 at (+297) 565 4613, email caribbeanlinked@gmail.com or visit the Caribbean Linked website at caribbeanlinked.com, and follow the Caribbean Linked Facebook page for regular updates on the residency!

Tilting Axis 4 – Caribbean Cultural Ecologies: Connecting Pasts, Presents and Futures

June 19, 2018June 19, 2018Leave a comment

Tilting Axis 4 – Caribbean Cultural Ecologies: Connecting Pasts, Presents and Futures was hosted from May 31st – June 2nd, 2018, by Centro León and Centro Cultural de España in Santo Domingo, in collaboration with Curando Caribe, Santiago and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

The fourth convening of Tilting Axis aimed to shift its location and context to the Hispanophone Caribbean with the theme ‘Caribbean Cultural Ecologies: Connecting Pasts, Presents and Futures’. Artists, curators, stakeholders, instigators and activists gathered to debate ideas about the Caribbean’s interdependent future in relation to culture, the nature, technology and the role of institutions while sharing creative ways which reimagine our collective futures in relationship with our particular environment and with each other.

View the full programme for Tilting Axis 4 here

See below for video documentation of the conference, courtesy of the
Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes Youtube Channel:

Nicole Smythe-Johnson announced as curator for the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship 2016

September 23, 2016September 26, 2016Leave a comment

Kingston-based curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson has been selected for this year’s Tilting Axis curatorial fellowship. Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, who has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.

Congratulations, Nicole!

The curatorial fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados and in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Scotland based cultural partners CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery, Hospitalfield and curatorial collective Mother Tongue produced a structural long-term fellowship for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean.

This new fellowship opportunity focuses on the development of pragmatic and critical curatorial development hailing from the Caribbean region, and is research and practice-led, and mentor-based. Designed as a year-long programme between the Caribbean region and Scotland, it offers support for critical development of curatorial practice and gives a practical base in the partner institutions with visits to Scotland and throughout the Caribbean.

During the fellowship, Nicole Smythe-Johnson will travel to Scotland in November, and will also undertake research visits to Suriname, Barbados, Cuba and Grenada. Smythe-Johnson said: “I am very excited about the fellowship. I attended the Tilting Axis conference this year in Miami and really savoured the opportunity to meet other arts professionals and hear about other institutions in the Caribbean region. I love my island, but island life can be isolating and there is a real temptation toward the insular. This fellowship then, is the perfect opportunity to build on the connections I made at TA 2016, and get some answers to the questions that came out of that experience. I can’t wait to jump in with both feet, starting with Glasgow.”

David Codling, Director of Arts for the Americas, British Council said: “In so many ways which are often overlooked, the Caribbean is the epicentre of the Americas: for better or worse Europe’s involvement with what it called the “New World” began in the Caribbean and for many European countries, including the four nations of the UK, our relationship with the Caribbean is deep, intense and complex. The British Council is proud to support and to be associated with the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship which offers an opportunity to explore and understand that relationship and to promote new conversations.”

Holly Bynoe, co-founder, Tilting Axis said: “In keeping with the notion of tilting the axis which refers to the re-focusing of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make the visual arts sector more sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean, the introduction of the Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship is one example of how this might happen. Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks and extend the reach of the arts throughout the Caribbean, with its partners in the Global North. I am delighted that the inaugural fellow is Nicole Smythe-Johnson and eagerly anticipate what will come of her research across the Dutch, Spanish, and Anglophone Caribbean, concluding in what I am sure will be a rich and stimulating experience in Scotland.”

The fellowship is in partnership with CCA Glasgow, David Dale Gallery and Studios, Hospitalfield, Mother Tongue and Tilting Axis. Supported by the British Council.

For more information, images or interviews, please contact Julie Cathcart, Communications Manager, CCA – julie@cca-glasgow.com / 0141 352 4911.

About Nicole Smythe-Johnson:

Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, living in Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection.

About CCA:

The Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow’s hub for the arts. The building is steeped in history and the organisation has played a key role in the cultural life of the city for decades. CCA’s year-round programme includes cutting-edge exhibitions, film, music, literature, spoken word, festivals, Gaelic language events and performance. CCA also provides residencies for artists in the on-site Creative Lab space, as well as working internationally on residencies with Palestine, the Caribbean and Quebec. CCA curates six major exhibitions a year, presenting national and international contemporary artists, and is home to Intermedia Gallery showcasing emerging artists.

About Hospitalfield:

Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas, Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, learn, visit and enjoy. Hospitalfield is an artist’s house in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, with a captivating cultural and social history that spans many hundreds of years. The contemporary arts programme is anchored in the visual art yet encourages interdisciplinarity, supporting the production of new work and providing space for debate and learning through residencies, a summer school and four public projects with new commissions each year. The organisation maintains strong national and international working partnerships with the aim of making Hospitalfield a meeting place and cultural catalyst in the working lives of artists, students and creative professionals in Scotland and far beyond.

About Mother Tongue:

Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Since 2009, they have produced exhibitions, screening programmes, discursive events, essays and texts, working in partnership with galleries, museums, festivals, and publishers. Mother Tongue’s practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, identities, indigenousness, migration, and movement. They are currently researching the presence, work and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland, working towards a future ‘AfroScots’ exhibition project.

About Tilting Axis:

Tilting Axis is a roving project conceptualised by ARC Magazine and the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. The first iteration was hosted at Fresh Milk in Barbados in February 2015 under the banner Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean | Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity. Tilting Axis 2.0 was hosted by the Pérez Art Museum Miami in February 2016. This meeting explored the current state of cultural work in the Caribbean, and aimed to fortify networks, increase administrative and programming capacities, as well as transfer knowledge and funding opportunities to those working in the region. The Tilting Axis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship developed out of the second iteration and the next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in April 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI).

About The British Council:

The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations. The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations. We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories.

Announcing Caribbean Linked IV

May 30, 2016June 9, 2016Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce that the regional residency Caribbean Linked IV will be taking place at Ateliers ’89 in Oranjestad, Aruba from August 1 through 23, 2016. Thanks to generous support from the Mondriaan Fund, Stichting DOEN and the Prince Claus Fund, eleven creatives from around the French, Spanish, English and Dutch Caribbean will convene to produce work and mount an exhibition during this three week period.

This annual residency will again allow the participants to be exposed to the practices of other emerging Caribbean artists, providing an opportunity to strengthen regional connections and cultural understanding.

Artists this year include Frances Gallardo (Puerto Rico), Travis Geertruida (Curacao), Charlie Godet Thomas (Bermuda), Nowé Harris-Smith (The Bahamas), Dominique Hunter (Guyana), Tessa Mars (Haïti), Oneika Russell (Jamaica), Simon Tatum (The Cayman Islands), Laura de Vogel (Aruba) and visiting master artist Humberto Diaz (Cuba).

The writer in residence will be David Knight Jr. (US Virgin Islands), co-founder of Moko Magazine. Visiting artists who will be lending support to Ateliers ’89 during the residency will be Robin de Vogel (Aruba) and Katherine Kennedy (Barbados). This year’s specially invited curators will be María Elena Ortiz, associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and Pablo León de la Barra, curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for the Latin American phase of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative.

Stay tuned for more information!

Caribbean Linked is an initiative by ARC Magazine, The Fresh Milk Art Platform and Ateliers ’89.

Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies held at the Pérez Art Museum Miami

April 19, 20161 Comment

The inaugural edition of the Caribbean-driven visual arts conference Tilting Axis took place last year at The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. in Barbados. This initial encounter saw thirty-two arts professionals spanning the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch Caribbean convene for the first time on Caribbean soil alongside a number of international participants. Building on this, Tilting Axis 2 took place at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) on February 19 and 20, 2016, with more than double the previous number of attendees coming together to discuss this year’s topic ‘Caribbean Strategies’.

Tilting Axis was originally conceived by Fresh Milk and ARC Magazine, who have continued to collaborate with core partners Res Artis and PAMM for the second iteration in Miami. As a city that not only aspires to be a vital art centre in the 21st century, but that also acts as a hub between the Caribbean and the global North with a large diasporic population and, in many ways, a shared history, Miami was a strategic location for the conference to travel to.

The participants of Tilting Axis 2

In her introductory remarks, Annalee Davis, Founding Director of Fresh Milk, emphasized the value of the first meeting having taken place within the region: “This notion of ‘tilting the axis’ refers to shifting the focus of our gaze and harnessing our collective power to make this sector more visible and sustainable in ways that resonate with our lived realities in the Caribbean.”

Although this concurrent gathering happened physically in the USA, it is critical that the heart of Tilting Axis and the commitments made by all those in attendance continue to act “as a counterpoint to many decisions often made about the region from external locations.”

Holly Bynoe, Director and Editor-in-Chief of ARC, reiterated these sentiments, and expressed thanks to the team at PAMM for facilitating a larger conference and making the museum’s network and resources available to the region: “As we work to make new connections with individuals and entities who want to work with the creative Caribbean, figure out our best practices and become more regionally conscious, projects like Tilting Axis can become one of the fertile seeds of this transformation.”

Introductory remarks at Tilting Axis 2

Tilting Axis 2 was anchored by three modules that emerged from the first meeting: exhibitions and programming, artists’ movement and mobility, and education. Table 1 on Exhibitions and Programming was moderated by Holly Bynoe, and looked at curatorial projects that reimagine tropes of the Caribbean. The three presenters were Veerle Poupeye, Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ); Art Historian at Northwestern University Krista Thompson; and Johanna Auguiac-Célénice, Director of the Biennale Internationale d’Art Contemporain Martinique (BIAC-Martinique).

Poupeye highlighted the shift in the NGJ’s approach to curating from “teaching a lesson to encouraging conversations,” giving examples of exhibitions the gallery has held in recent years. Thompson spoke about the increasing interest in Caribbean art over the last decade, and how her curatorial projects seek to counter the often monolithic view of the region. Through her work at the BIAC, Auguiac-Célénice expressed the need for us to think about Caribbean culture differently, embracing our differences and favouring a rhizomatic system over hierarchy.

Veerle Poupeye’s presentation about the National Gallery of Jamaica

Table 2 addressed Artists’ Movement and Mobility, and was moderated by Tobias Ostrander, Chief Curator of PAMM. Presentations were given by Joëlle Ferly, Director of L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe and Marcel Pinas, Founder of Tembe Art Studio in Suriname about their respective platforms, experimental approaches to residencies and issues in the mobility of artists working in and from the Caribbean. Both speakers see their organizations as fulfilling a necessary role in their countries, with Pinas’ sharing his strong stance on using the arts as a way to generate “awareness and value of ourselves and our culture,” and give back to the community.

Donette Francis, Rene Morales and Gean Moreno in a group discussion at Tilting Axis 2.

Moderated by Annalee Davis, Table 3 looked at alternate models of arts education. Panelists included Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs at ICA, Miami; Pablo Guardiola, Co-director of Beta Local in Puerto Rico; and Paulo Miyada, Director of the Entropic School at Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Brazil.

Moreno discussed the alternate education programming of research.art.dialogue (r.a.d.) in terms of mapping a variety of learning structures and advocating for non-traditional methodologies of knowledge exchange. Guardiola spoke about the importance of alternate education in the arts co-existing alongside cultural institutions and schools to ensure a breadth of experience for students. Beginning his presentation by giving a background in Brazilian art, Miyada went on to outline the Entropic School’s vision of being a space of experimentation and addressed the gap between formal art education and professional placement in Brazil.

Group discussions at Tilting Axis 2

Deborah Anzinger, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Tumelo Mosaka, Deb Dormody and Blue Curry in a group discussion at Tilting Axis 2

Open clinics were held to determine how attendees could realistically use the range of skills and knowledge at the conference to commit to a series of actions around the three target areas. Some of these included co-creating educational programmes; the potential of forming an advocacy group to liaise with governments on behalf of artists; initiating residencies and exchanges between a broad spectrum of cultural professionals; and designing an exhibition programme which could happen simultaneously in a number of territories, while having scholarship on the exhibitions written from within the region and disseminated widely.

Also built into the two-day conference were three ‘artist intermissions’, featuring short presentations by Haitian-born, Miami based artist Adler Guerrier, Bahamian-born, London-based artist Blue Curry and St. Martin-born, Martinique based artist David Gumbs. Interspersing the dialogues with opportunities to see what a few artists connected to the region are producing created a space for rejuvenation and inspiration. Along this same vein, a group visit was organized to Cannonball Studios, where Blue Curry and ARC Magazine’s Senior Arts Writer Marsha Pearce had been taking part in a residency leading up to the meeting.

Adler Guerrier presenting about his art practice at Tilting Axis 2

Blue Curry’s studio at Cannonball studios, Miami. Photo courtesy of the artist

The closing event of the conference was a public talk given by Pablo León de la Barra, a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for the Latin American phase of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. His presentation examined the structure and function of museums in contemporary society. León de la Barra discussed some of his curatorial work which explores different ways of creating agency and visibility for cultures that are often erased from the established canon of art history.

Overall, Tilting Axis 2: Caribbean Strategies made significant strides in its aims to fortify networks through knowledge transfer, provide avenues for critical conversation and form action plans to extend the reach of arts and culture throughout the Caribbean. The next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in early 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI).

To find out more about the organising institutions and funders visit the ARC, Fresh Milk, PAMM and Res Artis websites.

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Tag: Arc Magazine