Dictatorships, Exile, and Recovery: Caribbean Artists, 1960–1980; Trujillo, Duvalier, and Castro Dictatorships and the Narrative of 10 Contemporary Artists

“Columbus brought in ‘the machine’ of colonialism and conquest, which became the machine of slavery and the plantation, which became the machine of independence and frustration . . . and of apocalypses and chaos, of carnival and voices, of tyrants and exiles . . . in reality all this history of the Caribbean is entangled with, is a principal string in the history of capitalism.” —Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite, 1989

My research project during my two-month fellowship began as a modest one. I was going to transcribe and translate interviews with 10 contemporary artists with Caribbean roots, write a brief introductory essay, and develop the material into an exhibition. For the first week and a half of my fellowship, I transcribed and translated, making time to think through the words of these artists and to look attentively at their work. By the second week of my fellowship, the material revealed to me that these interviews were going to be part of a book-length manuscript, one that I had to write.

The earliest interviews date back to 1989. Many of them began as background research for exhibitions when I was a curator at the Montclair Art Museum and the Jersey City Museum; a second group of interviews, as well as questionnaires, were for an exhibition project that never came to fruition. In the meantime, we lost several members of the original group of artists: Paul Gardère died in 2011, and Freddy Rodríguez passed away in October 2022 after a four-year struggle with ALS. The other artists, ranging in age from their 50s to 80s, are alive and working in Amherst, Brooklyn, Long Island, Miami, and New Orleans. Socially, most of them came from a struggling middle class, one working class, and one from the elite—yet exile was the social leveler: in the United States, they all became working class and had to learn English.

The artists’ work reflects a diversity of visual languages found in contemporary art, as well as a particular narrative that reflects and critiques Caribbean-rooted histories of dictatorship and exile. Also represented is the artist’s “recovery” through art education, artmaking, and experiencing an imperfect yet functioning democracy in the United States. Stylistically, the artists’ practices could not be more varied, having been influenced by different strands of expressionism and social realism, by both gestural and minimal abstraction, by Renaissance-derived painting and sculpture, Caribbean folk art, and contemporary developments in ceramics and installation.

The luxury of time to think and discern allowed me to discard my self-imposed limitations; I realized the project was meant to be a book. It was also clear that there was a missing artist—Nuyorican painter, printmaker, and video artist Juan Sánchez. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sánchez added the presence of Puerto Rico to this narrative. If not an obvious blunt experience of dictatorship, it is one of neocolonial dysfunction and of an internal sense of exile for the artist. Significantly, these 11 artists are members of an informal community of “comrades in arms”—visiting each other’s studios, seeing exhibitions together, nominating each other for fellowships, and the like. In the case of Rodríguez and Luis Cruz Azaceta, they were even compadres.

This community or tribu—to borrow Rodríguez’s word, meaning a support system of artists who have been consistently excluded from the art world—has been vital. At the heart of my project is respect for the artists’ voices, in and of themselves, as well as their original intent.

Several themes have appeared throughout these conversations that will define my developing manuscript:

1. All of these artists reflect, mediate, and meditate on the legacies of colonialism. They are endowed with a deep understanding that, as we say in Cuba, “el que no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabali”—that is, the Africa-ness of the Caribbean.
2. All were raised in the Roman Catholic Church. To cite Eleanor Heartney, this endows their art with an “incarnational” understanding of the body and its place in the world, as well as the brutal and salvific qualities of the religion. Catholicism informs a substantial amount of their iconography.
   
3. The figure of the dictator, who is either ignored, canceled, or represented in a critical manner, can be found in their paintings, drawings, and installations.
   
4. There is a shared iconography, though expressed in different styles and visions. It includes the sea, maps, ships, boats, race, class, fleeing figures, falling figures, violence, evocations of crucifixions, stations of the cross, and images of the tourist industry, among other subjects.
   
5. These artists have, throughout the years, formed a community of mutual support to navigate relationships with an art world that fluctuates between ignorance, neglect, and outright exclusion. They share conflicted relationships with museums and ideas about their work in museums.
   
6. The centrality of their art education in the United States is integral to their “recovery” and identity formation as contemporary US artists. They have deep connections with certain traditions of painting and sculpture, specifically other kinds of modernisms that extend beyond Paris and New York (e.g., Mexican murals, German expressionism, American social realism, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Whitten, Melvin Edwards, and Caribbean folk art).
   
7. All of the artists have wrestled with big political questions: Can a work of art serve an effective political purpose? Can contemporary artists paint an equivalent to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or the murals of José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros?
   
8. Their experiences of US democracy are both positive and negative.
   

I completed the transcriptions and translations on October 30, just as my residency was coming to a close. I was also able to write a rough outline for my manuscript and come up with a working title: “States of Loss/Acts of Resistance.” 

William Paterson University (emeritus)
Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2023

In the next few months and year, Alejandro Anreus will continue to live with and learn from these artists’ works and words, process them, and construct a manuscript that will contain a substantial text by him as well as the interviews with the artists.

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