Caribbean Culture
The writer on her new novel, how Dominicans have shaped New York City’s culture, and creating artistic spaces that are truly liberating.
Layering histories and identity.
Summoning the spirits.
Concerned primarily with Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, where she lives and works, her works defy categorization or any simple read. Rather, they are rich entanglements of place, history, and time.
Ward’s Jamaican roots and home in Harlem have been recurring themes in his numerous installations. He speaks with Jaffe about three key works.
Amid recollections of a joint trip to Haiti, photographer Deana Lawson and painter Henry Taylor parse the art of portraiture in each of their different mediums.
Ryan Sheldon discusses the eclectic range of reggae films presented in BAMcinématek’s Do the Reggae series.
Artists Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen unpack the politics of the creative process.
The stories of Tiphanie Yanique’s debut collection How To Escape From A Leper Colony hold no fear. Centered on life in the US Virgin Islands, they seem ready for the generic lexicon of lazy reviewers. BOMBlog’s intrepid Jack Palmer spoke with Yanique about the fallacy of that vocabulary and the lessons available in literature.
The crucible of the Caribbean islands, where Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews coexist, is the primary setting of Tiphanie Yanique’s triumphant debut collection.
If Marvel Comics had gotten around to it, Oscar Wao would have been a hero. As it is, Junot Díaz stepped in and made him one first.
The stories the Cuban writer and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera collected in the legendary Afro-Cuban Tales take place “back in the days when animals could speak, when they were all good friends and when men and animals got along fine.”
Where sacred slams into secular, you’ll find the sequined banners of Haiti.
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
Born in Haiti and raised in the US, Vladimir Cybil juxtaposes culturally specific symbols and techniques to carve out an interstitial space. Scholar Jerry Philogene talks with Cybil about the visual bilingualism in her paintings and installations.
Damas “Fanfan” Louis is both master drummer and houngan asogwe, high priest of Vodou. The painter Michael Zwack, caught up with him in New York to discuss Haitian rhythms and Fanfan’s involvement in a cultural center for dance, drums and Vodou.
Haitian choreographer and drummer Peniel Guerrier was trained in traditional Haitian and African movement, and his choreographies acknowledge each tradition’s rhythms and rituals while fusing them in unexpected ways.