Fresh Takes on the Caribbean

The ICA/Boston's exhibit offers views from the diaspora  

Large tapestry featuring colorful woven saris and metal bells

The multimedia exhibition “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through February 25, opens with a bold tapestry. From across the room, Suchitra Mattai’s 2022 An Ocean Cradle could be a textured map of land, clouds, or shifting migrants’ routes. But up close, viewers discover the intricately woven fabrics (pieces of handmade saris collected from friends and family) amid clusters of ghungroo bells worn in classical Indian dances. This artwork is a painstaking, strand-by-strand construction. And it speaks to a core theme of the show: expanding perceptions of this complex region of more than 700 islands. The works of 28 artists illustrate that “the Caribbean” is not bound by “geography, language, and ethnicity,” exhibit text explains, but is a diasporic entity engaged in “constant exchange, displacement, and movement” where “the past, the present, and the future meet.” It’s a region marked by oceanic tides of shifting colonial powers and struggles for independence amid waves of populations—just as Mattai’s ancestors traveled from India to what’s now Guyana to become indentured servants on sugarcane plantations.

Men swinging gas hoses
From Christopher Cozier’s 2014 video Gas Men/COURTESY OF CHRISTOPHER COZIER

Christopher Cozier’s 2014 video Gas Men features two businessmen whirling gas pump handles like cowboys gearing up for a rodeo. It evokes the multicultural influx and global economies, like oil extraction, and associated cultural hierarchies that have affected the Caribbean’s development. In his acrylic and wood carving Cursed Grounds: Cursed Borders (2021), Haitian-American Didier William highlights a bifurcated surrealist landscape—the uprooted, dying trees above ground, and the vitality of running, amorphous animals below—in the age of climate change and migratory movements. In Lorraine O’Grady’s photograph The Fir Palm (1991/2019), a slanting tree, a blend of a New England fir and Caribbean palm, grows from the back of a black woman, evoking the artist’s first-generation experience growing up in America with Jamaican immigrant parents. These shared Caribbean roots sprout trees and creativity across the globe. 

Read more articles by Nell Porter-Brown

You might also like

Concerts and Carols at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Tuning into one of Boston's best chamber music halls 

Shopping for New England-made gifts this Holiday Season

Ways to support regional artists, designers, and manufacturers 

Landscape Architect Julie Bargmann Transforming Forgotten Urban Sites

Julie Bargmann and her D.I.R.T. Studio give new life to abandoned mines, car plants, and more.

Most popular

What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

Harvard’s Class of 2029 Reflects Shifts in Racial Makeup After Affirmative Action Ends

International students continue to enroll amid political uncertainty; mandatory SATs lead to a drop in applications.

Harvard’s Endowment, Donations Rise—but the University Runs a Deficit

The annual financial report signals severe challenges to come.

Explore More From Current Issue

Map showing Uralic populations in Eurasia, highlighting regional distribution and historical sites.

The Origins of Europe’s Most Mysterious Languages

A small group of Siberian hunter-gatherers changed the way millions of Europeans speak today.

Wolfram Schlenker wearing a suit sitting outdoors, smiling, with trees and a building in the background.

Harvard Economist Wolfram Schlenker Is Tackling Climate Change

How extreme heat affects our land—and our food supply 

A person walks across a street lined with historic buildings and a clock tower in the background.

Harvard In the News

A legal victory against Trump, hazing in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and kicking off a Crimson football season with style