Mayas’ “Big ghosts in a cloud”, her “loud, barking dogs” and the hair-pulling, teasing school-girls that she speaks of are represented by Jean-Michel’s crude ‘scribbles’: the message is clear and simple. It is a tough world out there but no one should shy away from it.
To this end, the one thing all 150 pieces in the exhibition have in common is the unwavering belief that somehow their existence would bring black people out of the cultural, political and social quagmire they were trapped in, and in doing so move them closer to the promise of equality.
What I have seen now is a couple of bad exhibitions (the reginal presentations and the Pop-Up show), but more importantly, a number of solid, interesting and sometimes great exhibitions. They showed works that were invisible for many years, they showed new works of promising artists, they showed a fruitful mixture of young and old, they made comparisons possible with artists from the region, on the whole they created an inspiring picture of the Caribbean.
Part of my family history is about deportation, we were taken from our land and brought to a new one that we built; we created new cultures.
I like to talk about this topic and others such as immigration and institutional discrimination in my work because they affected my family and ancestors
In a way, if the U.S. had (had) a Black Chief Photographer photographing President Obama along with the 1st Black Family, this would have been a perquisite for the future of the United States & with the racial issues in the United States being on an uneven foundation, politically as well as societal, knowing that a Black photographer witnessed & photographically recorded such a milestone in U.S. politics, would have been a visual freedom, worth looking forward to.