Bahamian art historian speaks on Caribbean Art

Bahamian art historian Dr. Erica M. James

The Americas Society on Park Avenue in New York in collaboration with the exhibition "For Rent: Marc Latamie" hosted a panel discussion on Tuesday, May 29, 2012 on Caribbean Art and the African Diaspora. The panelists included Bahamian art historian and scholar Dr. Erica M. James, Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies Department at Yale University; artist Marc Latamie; Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator of the Museum of Arts and Design and Gabriela Rangel, Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator of the Americas Society.

The Caribbean is a vast region resulting from the encounters that occurred on foreign soil of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Amerindian communities. It exemplifies a cross fertilization of cultures as well as the traumatic chapters of colonization and slavery. Since their settlement, the multilingual nations of the Caribbean have been faced with a challenge of cultural development which rests firmly on the difficult process of simultaneously negating and affirming, demolishing and constructing, rejecting and reshaping the varying influences and constraints of their colonizers.

The panel discussion addressed matters of cultural hybridity as a means to explore transversal paths and the creolization of Caribbean contemporary artistic practices.