Within the scope of Art Week Miami, Caribbean Links presents new initiatives and strategies for Caribbean art and artists based regionally and the diaspora. This program includes María Elena Ortiz (Pérez Art Museum Miami), Susanna Temkin (El Museo del Barrio), Amanda Coulson (TERN Gallery, Bahamas), Amy Galpin (Frost Art Museum, FIU) and Luis Graham Castillo ( independent curator), Dominican Republic. This conversation explores the relationship between the Caribbean and its diasporic artists, along with the insecurity and vulnerability of these connections as seen from both sides of the Atlantic. Each presenter will share their experiences in developing initiatives to strengthen diasporic creative circuits. In considering how Caribbean networks and creative relationships can improve, this program explores how artists, institutions, and galleries can work together to support both the artists in the region and the artists in the diaspora.
Some questions that would be addressed are: How do current initiatives change pre-existing dynamics? How do we create greater connections between the diaspora and the Caribbean countries?
What should a creative industry look like that seeks answers to pressing issues we are facing today? How can we build stronger networks? How can art and culture contribute to the fragile ecosystem in which we live?
CURATORS
SUSANNA TEMKIN
Susanna Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she recently co-curated the museum's inaugural Trienal exhibition, ESTAMOS BIEN (2020-2021). At El Museo, she also co-curated the recently opened exhibitions EN FOCO: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974 (2021-2022); Popular Painters & Other Visionaries (2021-2022); as well as the museum's fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People (2019). Temkin earned her master's and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin has published essays and reviews in exhibition catalogues and magazines including the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Alice Neel: People Come First; the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and is the author of the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.
LUIS GRAHAM CASTILLO
Luis Graham Castillo, Dominican Republic communicator, cultural manager and curator of Dominican contemporary art. His practice in cultural and curatorial management seeks to create spaces of conversation and to make visible counter hegemonic ways of addressing subjectivities. He has produced curatorial and cultural projects for various institutions, such as the Network of Cultural Centers of Spain, Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Center, Casa Who, MECA Art Fair (PR), ARTEBA (Buenos Aires) and other spaces. His publications appear in media such as Terremoto (Mexico), La Buchaça de TeoR/éTica (Costa Rica) and Artishock. Currently, he resides and works in Santo Domingo, where he concludes a Certification in Afro-Latin American Studies (Harvard), is a teacher at the Escuela de Diseño Altos de Chavon and maintains an independent curatorial practice.
AMY GALPIN
Amy Galpin, Ph.D., is the Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami. She is formerly the Curator at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum of Rollins College and Associate Curator, Art of the Americas at the San Diego Museum of Art. In addition to exhibitions at these institutions she has also curated exhibitions for Oolite Arts, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; Pasadena Museum of California Art; and the Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando. Her exhibitions include solo projects with artists Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Patrick Martinez, Hugo Crosthwaite, Robert Andy Coombs, Jess T. Dugan, and Liu Shiyuan, among others.
AMANDA COULSON
Amanda Coulson has worked for three decades as a scholar, critic, curator and cultural producer on both sides of the Atlantic, having collaborated with artists and institutions, private and corporate colleagues, in the US, Europe, and various sites in the Caribbean. As an art critic and curator, she noted a lack of platforms for galleries representing emerging art and, in 2005, co-founded the VOLTA art fairs, which takes place annually in New York and Basel. In 2011, she returned to her home in The Bahamas to take up the position of Executive Director at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB), where her focus was on increasing international awareness of the contemporary Caribbean art scene and on expanding the capacity and reach of the NAGB through a rigorous combination of capital works, collaborative projects and the building of strong inter-island and international networks. She served on the Davidoff Art Initiative (now the Caribbean Art Initiative) Board from 2012-2018, and served on the Board of the Museums Association of the Caribbean (MAC) until she stepped down from the NAGB, after a decade at the helm. She is the founding partner at TERN, a new Nassau-based gallery operated by three Caribbean women whose aim is to support Bahamian and Caribbean artists in telling their own.
MARIA ELENA ORTIZ
María Elena Ortiz is a Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she is spearheading the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI). At PAMM, Ortiz has organized several projects including Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection (2020); The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019); Latinx Art Sessions (2019); William cordova: now's the time (2018); Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2016); Ulla von Brandenburg: It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2017); Carlos Motta: Histories for the Future (2016); and Firelei Báez: Bloodlines (2015). Ortiz has contributed to writing platforms such as the Davidoff Art Initiative, Terremoto Magazine, and others. A recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and Independent Curators International (ICI) Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean, Ortiz's curatorial practice is informed by the connections between Latinx, Latin American, and Black communities in the US and the Caribbean.