Overlooked in the history of artistic endeavors are the contributions of female writers, painters, and crafters of the Caribbean. The creative works by women from the Caribbean proves to be as remarkable as the women themselves. In Caribbean Women and Their Art: An Encyclopedia, Mary Ellen Snodgrass explores the rich history of women’s creative expression by examining the crafts and skill of over 70 female originators in the West Indies, from the familiar islands—Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico—to the obscurity of Roatan, Curaçao, Guanaja, and Indian Key. Focusing particularly on artistic style during the arrival of Europeans among the West Indies, the importance of cultural exchange, and the preservation of history, this book captures a wide variety of artistic accomplishment, including Folk music, acting, and dance Herbalism and food writing Sculpture, pottery, and adobe construction Travel writing, translations, and storytelling Individual talents highlighted in this volume include dancer Katherine Dunham, storyteller Louise Bennett-Coverley, paleontologist Sue Hendrickson, dramatist Maryse Condé, herbalist and memoirist Mary Jane Seacole, ballerina and choreographer Alicia Alonso, and athor Elsie Clews Parsons. Each entry includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as further readings on the female artists and their respective crafts. This text also defines and provides examples of technical terms such as ramada, slip, hematite, patois, and mola. With its informative entries and extensive examinations of artistic talent, Caribbean Women and Their Art: An Encyclopedia is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning about some of the most influential and talented women in the arts.

This volume initiates a gender-based framework for analyzing the folk art of Latin America and the Caribbean. Defined here broadly as the "art of the people" and as having a primarily decorative, rather than utilitarian, purpose, folk art is not solely the province of women, but folk art by women in Latin America has received little sustained attention. Crafting Gender begins to redress this gap in scholarship. From a feminist perspective, the contributors examine not only twentieth-century and contemporary art by women, but also its production, distribution, and consumption. Exploring the roles of women as artists and consumers in specific cultural contexts, they look at a range of artistic forms across Latin America, including Panamanian molas (blouses), Andean weavings, Mexican ceramics, and Mayan hipiles (dresses). Art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States discuss artwork from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Suriname, and Puerto Rico, and many of their essays focus on indigenous artists. They highlight the complex webs of social relations from which folk art emerges. For instance, while several pieces describe the similar creative and technical processes of indigenous pottery-making communities of the Amazon and of mestiza potters in Mexico and Colombia, they also reveal the widely varying functions of the ceramics and meanings of the iconography. Integrating the social, historical, political, geographical, and economic factors that shape folk art in Latin America and the Caribbean, Crafting Gender sheds much-needed light on a rich body of art and the women who create it. Contributors Eli Bartra Ronald J. Duncan Dolores Juliano Betty LaDuke Lourdes Rejón Patrón Sally Price María de Jesús Rodríguez-Shadow Mari Lyn Salvador Norma Valle Dorothea Scott Whitten

Volume 9 of "WomanSpeak Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women" is a collection of new creative work by nineteen women writers and artists in and of the Caribbean. This is a slim volume of poetry, short stories, fairy tales, essays and art that every island woman writer should have on her book shelf. This anthology includes writing by internationally recognized authors, rising stars, award winners, and new voices publishing for the first time. The writers conjure myths and fairy tales for our generation, evoke ancient goddesses, sing praises for our grandmothers and island women who've survived the hurricanes; as if to say to another in turn, I will tell you a story, I will tell you what happened, I will tell you what I dreamed, I will tell you what I remember, I will tell you what I imagine.

An updated and expanded edition of this classic, illustrated survey of Caribbean art, featuring the work of over 100 artists from the period of colonialism to the present day. The Caribbean is made up of more than twenty countries, each with its own identity. Yet fascinatingly, there are significant cultural commonalities despite geographic, ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity. A mixture of African, Amerindian, Asian, and European origins define the remarkable Caribbean culture, which, from the period of colonialism to the present, has also witnessed a massive diaspora. Caribbean Art examines the diverse and highly accomplished work of Caribbean artists, whether indigenous or from the diaspora, popular or “high” culture, rural or urban based, politically radical or religious. This expanded edition with a new preface has been updated to reflect and address fundamental challenges to traditional art-historical practice and its foundational connections to histories of colonialism, Eurocentricity, and race. This is explored further in two new chapters focused on public monuments linked to the history of the Caribbean, and the intersections between art and tourism, raising important questions about cultural representation. Caribbean Art features the work of internationally recognized artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sonia Boyce, Christopher Cozier, Wifredo Lam, Ana Mendieta, Ebony G. Patterson, Hervé Télémaque, and more than one hundred others, working across a variety of media including performance, photography, and film. This new edition makes an important contribution to the understanding of Caribbean and postcolonial art and its context, in ways that invite productive conversation and encourage further explorations on the subject.

Odious Caribbean Women and the Palpable Aesthetics of Transgression examines the methods through which the works of French Caribbean women resist hedonistic conceptions of pleasure, “art for art’s sake” aestheticism, and commodification through representations of “uglified” spaces, transgressive “deglamorified” women’s bodies in pain and explicit corporeal and sexual behaviors. Gladys M. Francis offers an original approach through her reading together of the literary, visual, and performing arts (as well as traditional Caribbean dance, music, and oral practices) to arrive at a transregional (trans-Caribbean and transatlantic), trans-genre (with regard to forms of text), and transdisciplinary conversation in Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies. This interweaving is illustrated through the artistic engagements of artists such as Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Sylvaine Dampierre, Fabienne Kanor, Lénablou, Béatrice Mélina, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Miriam Warner-Vieyra. How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, the aesthetically unpleasing found in depictions of odious female protagonists or female performers? What is the aesthetic value of transgressional women’s bodies? This book presents novel tools to understand how these women artists mark and re-instate embodied trauma, survival, and resistance into history. It posits that cultural performances can disrupt a culture-as-text ethnocentrism, for, these works provide the means to expose the tangible aesthetics through which the body becomes an archive that bears the psychological, physical and structural suffering. This project also demonstrates the ways through which the corporeal realm offered by these transgressive works (through explicit female perspectives on sex, love, and gender) challenges our moral sensibilities, works to sabotage the voyeuristic gaze, and stimulates a new methodology for reading the women’s body. It focuses on the complex layers of identity formation and bodily representations with respect to issues of sex, consumerism, commodification, violence, gender and women studies, and ethics and moral issues.

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias’s intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour – so called ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race – made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias’s paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias’s work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.