Art As Caribbean Feminist Practice

as Caribbean Feminist Practice Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/21/1 (52)/34/504001/smx_52_03davis_fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Introduction: Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice Annalee Davis, Joscelyn Gardner, Erica Moiah James, and Jerry Philogene This special section focuses on the works of women whose artistic practices are grounded in a feminist ethos and engage multiple and nuanced meanings of the Caribbean and its diaspora across linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries. Through diverse written and visual contributions, it presents the Caribbean as a critical space that recognizes an existing foundation yet facilitates and expands conversations between artists and writers who have shaped and are shaping local and global art discourses using intertextual formal art practices. The section contrib- utes to the recent flourishing of critical writing, art exhibitions, conferences, colloquia, informal and formal artist-led initiatives, and online platforms that are being deployed across the Caribbean as exhibition venue, critical interface, and medium. It conceives of the Caribbean as a space created within and through local and global formations. It may seem retardataire to not only devote an entire section to the art of Caribbean women but also think through the concepts of feminism and art in relation to this work.1 Is feminism an applicable lens? And if so, surely feminist art practices and histories have done their work. Surely 1 Feminist art and art histories in an American context moved through several successive waves in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Here we can think about the work of Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Adrian Piper. Today feminism has waned as a critical approach bounded to the specificities of a movement as the work of women artists challenges dominant narratives of the art canon and attempts to make a place at the center of the contemporary art world. However, this does not mean that artists have ceased to assert a feminist platform for their work. Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sculpture, A Subtlety, was a powerful example of that in 2014. In the Caribbean, many women artists, particularly Cuban artists coming of age in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, rejected what many see as a Western logocentrism in the feminist label but understood the ways the work might speak to an ethos of gender equality/gender justice. See Norma Broude and Mary D. Gar- rard, Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s; History and Impact (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996); Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabriel Mark, WACK! Art and the Feminist Movement (Boston: MIT Press, 2007); Helene Reckitt small axe 52 • March 2017 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-3844046 © Small Axe, Inc. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/21/1 (52)/34/504001/smx_52_03davis_fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 SX52 [ 3.2017 ] 35 we have entered a new gender-neutral phase of criticality in relation to contemporary art. Surely we no longer need the lens of gender to productively analyze contemporary practices. While we work toward that perfect moment, recent events in the Caribbean, such as the defeat of the gender- equality referendum in The Bahamas, map a reality that suggests that in at least one aspect of the transnational feminist movement, gender equality and social justice remain elusive, to the detriment of us all. The art world is not immune to this reality.2 Even so, this special section seeks not to engage feminist artistic practice as politics (though it is inherently political) but to directly consider its power and potentialities as aesthetic and conceptual provocateur. By feminism and feminist, we refer to a history of revolution and struggle and a philosophy of being that recognizes what Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga calls “theory in the flesh,” one that values the literal space women occupy in critical artistic practices and lived realities.3 The artists assembled in this special section materialize particular critical frameworks by mobilizing symbolic and material forms. It is in this vein that Moraga’s “theory in the flesh” brings efficacy to the ways the figure of the body, both the epidermal and corporeal, is central to an -art ist’s work, exploring how the body can become a marker within a set of critical frameworks, which at its core yields emancipatory spaces. This special section’s point of departure is in conversation with the work of the late Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose body and bodily fluid earth sculptures resonated with dynamism and vitality, and also the work of Haitian artist Luce Turnier, whose abstract portraits of market women and men presented the complex and complicated nature/politics of class, color, and representation in Haiti during the 1950s and 1960s. This section presents new possibilities, both in the written and visual forms, of seeing and comprehending works in which the artist’s personal or presumed intentions may not have been read as “feminist” at the time of their creation but nevertheless marked a feminist ethos within formal aesthetics practices. This can be seen in Edna Manley’s pathos-driven Beadseller (1922) and more determined Market Women (1936), which are often overlooked for the more nationalistic Negro Aroused (1935). How- ever, it is through her astute observation of the women in the Mandeville marketplace that Negro Aroused took shape in her creative imagination.4 and Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism (London: Phaidon, 2012); and Pedro Pérez Sarduy, Afro-Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2000). 2 In an article for ARTnews in June 2015, Maura Reilly observes, “The more closely one examines art-world statistics, the more glaringly obvious it becomes that, despite decades of postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer activism and theorizing, the majority continues to be defined as white, Euro-American, heterosexual, privileged, and, above all, male. Sexism is still so insidiously woven into the institutional fabric, language, and logic of the mainstream art world that it often goes undetected” (“Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes,” 40). This inequality persists not only with artists but at the institutional level, where women directors are paid far less than their male counterparts. These represen- tational asymmetries appear in the Caribbean art world in similar, though not always directly translatable or easily legible, ways. Though women lead many arts institutions, as the vote in The Bahamas indicated, sexism has been so regularized in the Caribbean that it is often protected as tradition. At the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, despite a history of female leadership no female artist has received a full retrospective or mid-career exhibition in its thirteen-year history. We argue that this does not reflect the will of the directors and curators but instead speaks to the complexities of delivering such shows locally. The majority of professional Bahamian artists necessarily work abroad, and the exhibition of their work requires levels of funding the gallery is currently unable to harness. 3 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1981). 4 See David Boxer, Edna Manley: Sculpture (Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica and Edna Manley Foundation, 1990); and David Boxer and Veerle Poupeye, Modern Jamaican Art (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/small-axe/article-pdf/21/1 (52)/34/504001/smx_52_03davis_fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 36 [ Davis, Gardner, James & Philogene ] Introduction: Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice To that end, an essential element of the project seeks to expand on what is valued as an archive of the present. What is shared by the coeditors is a desire to stimulate a dialogue that is not simply about including a woman’s perspective but about visualizing an aesthetic language that has at its heart a reformulated cultural and political landscape. We did not conceive of this section as a corrective or to be the first or last word on contemporaneity in Caribbean art. Rather, it is the opening of a conversation that will critically attend to the work of Caribbean women artists working today, by assessing their art in relation to histories of artistic production and making plain their continuing role in the overall expansion of the visual arts—as artists, collectors, writers, leaders of educational and arts institutions, founders of artist collectives, editors, and curators. In each of these generative spheres, women have assumed major leadership roles in the Carib- bean. As artists with material, formal, aesthetic, and performance practices that possess nuanced and extensive conceptual depth; as the directors and chief curators of most national art and arts education institutions in the Caribbean; as founders and operators of innovative artist-run spaces; as cultivators and guardians of some of the largest art collections in the region; and as leading art scholars in the growing and significant field of Caribbean art, women have shaped and continue to fully participate in and play leading roles in cultivating contemporary Caribbean artistic, critical, and curatorial spaces, practices, and discourses inside and outside the geographical limits of the region. Women’s artistic vision and leadership have shaped the ways modernism in the Caribbean has been imagined and actualized. With this in mind, it is important to consider the ways women as cultural producers, cultural provocateurs, and cultural agents contribute to the development of art in the region as practicing artists and through the creation of public and private support systems. Early-twentieth-century art in the Spanish, English, and Dutch Caribbean generally emerged from colonial foundations with “pioneer” women artists, often upper middle class and white, working with landscape, portrait, and genre painting.

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