Intermittent Islands: Four Caribbean Women Artists

Intermittent Islands: Four Caribbean Women Artists features work by Belkis Ayón (Cuban, 1967-1999), Yanira Collado (Dominican, born 1975 in Brooklyn, NY; lives and works in Miami, FL), Marielle Plaisir (French and Guadeloupean, born 1978 in Le Havre, France; lives and works in Miami, FL), and Lisa C Soto (Jamaican and Puerto Rican, born 1969 in Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Ghana and Puerto Rico).

Together, their works intertwine the local and the global, combining history and autobiography. Confronting the experiences of displacement and diaspora, they celebrate the Caribbean's complex past. Their respective practices speak to conditions of the contemporary world at large, allegorizing timely themes relating to identity, justice, disintegration, and wholeness that resonate widely today.

Ayón, Collado, Plaisir, and Soto are heirs to multiple traditions: Afro-Caribbean culture and religion, everyday life in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, France, Ghana, New York, and Miami; and the heroes and heroines of Black America. They construct stories of identity in ink and glue, textiles and construction materials, colors and textures. Ayón and Plaisir’s work is figurative; Collado and Soto’s is abstract. Practices of layering and intertwining – through collage, sewing, and crochet – play significant roles in their respective work. The Caribbean is an essential point of reference for all four artists—stimulating meditations upon place and displacement, memory and oblivion, while enacting rituals of synthesis and recovery.