Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 2020 Vol. 4, No. 2, 10-39 Considering the Impact of Indians in Trinidad on Visual Culture Patricia Mohammed Professor Emerita, Gender and Cultural Studies University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad
[email protected] This paper proposes that a multivaried Indo-Trinidadian aesthetic contribution drawn from ritual, domestic, and imaginary space continues to remain historically and culturally submerged in both the definition of artistic practice and in the national consciousness of Trinidad society. The art works and artists analyzed here were selected from an exhibition held at the National Museum and Gallery in Port of Spain on the occasion of Indian Arrival Day 2017, which is celebrated as a public holiday annually. While there are reasons for the continuously delayed entry of Indo-Caribbean motifs and symbols into the nationalist aesthetic imagination, by the second decade of the twentieth century, there is no excuse of claiming fear of imposing on religious rituals. The intersection between the secular and the religious have been fundamentally important to innovations in other art movements in Europe and elsewhere. Nor can we assume an exclusivity or separateness on the part of Indian art and cultural practitioners, as there is sufficient evidence from the works of a desire to enter the public marketplace of ideas on visual culture. Leaving the space still open to interpretations this essay raises the important question that must be considered: beyond the acceptance