At the ICA, Caribbean Artists Provide Portals to Other Worlds, But Who Enters?

Growing up in Boston as a Black person, and the daughter of a Caribbean parent, was surreal. In many hubs of the city, like the Seaport and Back Bay, Black Bostonians, and Caribbeans in particular, are found often in service positions or not at all. Boston’s nationalistic histories are showcased in many public forums, and like many histories of colonized peoples, those of Caribbeans are invisibilized in the public sphere.

Boston’s Caribbean community has been targeted by redlining, environmental racism, school segregation, and other systematic structures. How our bodies engage with the landscape was and continues to be defined by these fabrications, with our communities localized in neighborhoods like Dorchester, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and Roxbury. Blue Hill Avenue, in particular, is a hub for Caribbean culture, lined with some of my most-frequented restaurants and hosting a yearly Carnival. The street and surrounding neighborhoods became popular with Caribbean immigrants in the late ’60s, after mortgages were made available to Black residents in only those areas.¹ While Caribbean immigrants are often associated with cities like Miami, New York, Toronto, or London, Boston is home to many of us. As children, surrounded by peers of Haitian, Dominican, and Jamaican ancestry, we created our own narratives.

Over the past three years, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) / Boston has hosted seven major exhibitions featuring Caribbean artists. These exhibitions align with a larger trend across the Western art world of Caribbean art shows in the past three years, including “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which later toured to the ICA (2022–2023, 2023–2024); “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2024); and “Life Between Islands” at the Tate Modern (2021–2022). During a recent visit to my homeplace, Boston, the ICA was hosting three simultaneous exhibitions of Caribbean-descended artists: “Tau Lewis: Spirit Level,” a body of new work Lewis created for her first museum solo show in the US; “Firelei Báez,” a mid-career survey spanning almost twenty years of Báez’s work; and “Hew Locke: The Procession,” a traveling installation commissioned by the Tate Britain. For just four days, these exhibitions were all open, and during this time, parallelling my relationship to my own Caribbean community in Mattapan, I found spiritual kinships between the artists, their geographies, the temporary location they were placed in, and myself. A temple, a tomb, and a vessel for the sacred, respectively, these shows mapped a constellation of Afro-Surrealism and Afro-Futurism, inviting us to consider how our current realities juxtapose forgotten and fantastical histories, and to contemplate new ways of understanding our own geographies and histories.

As articulated by the Martinican writer Suzanne Césaire, Afro-Surrealism offers artists a way of looking beneath the surface, suggesting that there are concepts made visible by artists and writers that can call us out of oppressed realities.² Through splicing and patching together images and artifacts from colonial empires with materials and spirits from obscured histories, the Locke, Báez, and Lewis exhibitions center the imagina tion and the surreal amid the complex terrain of Boston’s topography. Using painting, sculpture, and assemblage, these artists create gestures of adoration and geographic yearning that revere skillsets and folklore that have historically been undervalued within the arts, expressing a longing for countries they don’t live in but are devoted to. Locke has noted that a core tenet of his work is hope. Césaire notably described surrealism as “the tightrope of our hope.”³

At a time when we live alongside ongoing political tensions in the Caribbean, ecological crisis, and the continued remnants of colonialism, Afro-Futurism offers artists and audiences alike a technology for moving forward. In conversation with a surrealist imagination, it looks for alternative realities beyond what is in front of us to enact change, providing hope for those flushed with despair. Throughout my visits to the Seaport institution, I remained curious about how the “patchiness” of Boston’s Caribbean community—an assemblage of cultures, backgrounds, and geographies—entangled itself with representations of patched-together histories and spirits in these Caribbean artists’ works.

The three shows share language within their introductory text that references colonialism, gathered figures, and varying ecological encounters. When I interviewed the curators of the exhibitions, I learned that all three came to exist, in some ways, through spirit. Jeffrey De Blois, curator of “Tau Lewis: Spirit Level” and Mannion Family Curator, looked to exhibit Lewis’s work at the ICA for ten years, having followed her practice and believing she was deserving of a solo museum show. Ruth Erickson, the Barbara Lee Chief Curator and a curator for “Hew Locke: The Procession,” saw the exhibition in London and wanted to bring Locke’s interrogation of migration to the Watershed. Former Barbara Lee Chief Curator Eva Respini elected to exhibit a mid-career survey of Báez’s work following her 2021 installation at the Watershed. While these shows emerged from distinct perspectives and locales, the exhibitions—visually, culturally, and viscerally—had deeply embedded linkages to each other.

Taking in Báez’s site-specific mural, Truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory healing) (2024), from the Seaport’s waterfront, I could clearly observe a large-scale ciguapa situated in a crouch start, facing a high tide. Báez, a Dominican-born artist raised and based in New York, exhibited forty works in the survey, encompassing two decades of her practice. Bringing painting, sculpture, installation, and this site-specific mural together, the survey reflected her ongoing interventions into colonial archives through folklore, color, and parables like the ciguapa. Within her practice, the artist often returns to this mythologized ciguapa, as it originates in Hispaniola, the place of Báez’s origins, and where almost three-fourths of Boston’s Caribbean immigrants hail from.

The ciguapa is a female trickster known for luring men to their deaths, utilized in the Dominican Republic as a haunting tale to enforce morality among young girls. Báez reimagines this figure as an independent and self-possessed feminine being and sits her atop an archival map of the Boston coastline from 1700.⁴ Waves mount the map and obscure it. The ciguapa is framed in motion, almost climbing the crashing shoreline. Here, Báez calls attention to the Harbor’s contentious histories. At a site from which ships sailed, financed by Boston’s elite, to move enslaved peoples and cargo across the Atlantic and Caribbean, this ciguapa emerges marbled and feathered, and unlike the traditional mythology of the ciguapa where her feet face backward, this ciguapa’s feet face forward, prepared to walk the wave.⁵ Though Boston’s ties to slavery are more invisibilized than in the Caribbean and the South, Báez reveals that those histories are embedded in its shores. Cloaking the map in a surreal re-envisioning of space, she suggests a potential for re-worlding these spaces and ideologies with new mythologies.

Situated at the end of the exhibition, Báez’s A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019) centers the ongoing ecological crisis in the Caribbean. Utilizing a stark blue tarp, like those used for temporary shelter during crises, Báez drapes the room in protection, inserting symbols from resistance movements like the Black Panthers, hair picks and chains, and physical objects like bottles around the vessel. Upon entering that deep space, I felt as if I had stepped into a portal to another world. Báez created a room for “Drexcyen” beings, mythologized in the 1990s by the Detroit techno duo Drexciya as the unborn children of African women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage who now populate an underwater world. A map of the stars the night the Haitian Revolution was birthed floats on the ceiling. Within this realm, it felt as though there are versions of submersion that can alter our way of being.

In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick outlines the ways in which space, particularly in the Caribbean, is underscored by Black geographies—histories and spirits that have been demonized and held contentious.⁶ She says, “Geography is also a terrain through which blackness makes itself known.”⁷ And indeed, through maps and figures, Báez makes Blackness known. Working in the “material and metaphorical space” that references the Black Atlantic outlined by McKittrick, and evoking spirits that emerge from the aquatic, Báez safeguards her figures within a Black feminist lineage.⁸

At the Watershed, Locke presents 140 figures gathered in an assemblage of processions resembling Carnival combined with funerals, protests, and more. Born in the UK in 1959, Locke grew up in Guyana before relocating to London. The installation references his own Guyanese culture, as well as Beninese objects and gatherings that take place across the Caribbean and in Caribbean-descended communities, like Boston’s Carnival on Blue Hill Ave. Carnival began as what historians believe was a rebellion in late-eighteenth-century Trinidad and Tobago before spreading to other Caribbean islands where West and Central Africans were enslaved. Through ritualistic music and dress originated in French tradition, enslaved Africans were able to disturb the placid nature of the islands constructed by colonizers. Their music disrupted the flow of capital and proved to be a space to commune.⁹

Surrounded by the harbor and the wake of its racial histories, Locke’s figures, for me, reflected a disturbance. David Pires, the ICA’s manager of visitor experience, noted that when walking through Locke’s Procession, we as visitors become part of the procession. We find ourselves walking alongside figures of our own scale, adult- and child-sized and beyond, processing between mythology, the present, and our future.

Afro-Futurism becomes entangled with Afro-Surrealism here, and craft becomes entangled with the contemporary. This emerges distinctly in Locke’s attention to material, utilizing cardboard, fabric, and papier-mâché alongside several other sourced materials to investigate the ways that colonialism has been embedded into Black people’s imaginations. Literally embedding maps into the figures and the instruments they carry, and placing them next to images of Guyana, Locke invites us to consider forgotten materials, tools, histories, and techniques for resistance. Locke utilizes assemblage to merge mourning, resistance, and disruption with hope and spirit.

Lewis’s works are in kinship with this legacy; although they do not explicitly reference cultural traditions like Carnival, they do make use of Caribbean material traditions. The Jamaican-descended and Toronto-based artist created the works for “Spirit Level” while grieving the loss of her mother. Amid that grief, she returned to the mythologies of her large-scale sculptural assemblages. In “Spirit Level,” five giant deities form a locus around a central transmission. The Doula, an oceanic spirit of Lewis’s, greets visitors upon their entrance. As opposed to turning toward the other spirit figures, curator De Blois chose to direct it outward, inviting visitors into this constellation. Stingrays float up the back of this aquatic spirit, finding a home at the head, a direct reference to the concept of rebirth. On its sides, waves of cut and hand-dyed fabric find their shoreline on the floor. The Doula (2024) returns to the Drexcyen underwater mythology once more and considers both birthing doulas and death doulas, figures that greet you at the beginning and end of life.

An ode to the deep sea, The Last Transmission (2024), a floor-bound quilt in the center of the room, once again references Drexciya, taking its title from their 1997 track. The piece utilizes a canvas from the artist’s mother, who passed during the making of these works. Repeated sequences of beads, found metal, seashells—materials discarded in this realm but potentially employed in others—transmit and transmute messages between the materials, the figures, and the visitors. As an homage to the Detroit duo, one of whom has passed as well, the quilt seemingly transmits messages from other realms, including ones that hold those who have departed this terrain.

Lewis’s practice brings together materials sourced from her family home in Negril, Jamaica, the streets of New York, and other sites of discarded materials. Born in Toronto in 1993, the artist constructs figures as maps of her own geographies, a literal cartography of her life. For this exhibition, Lewis aimed to empty her library of materials, which she drew from for the majority of her previous projects. In that way, these figures also functioned as a birth, death, and rebirth: birthing spirits, releasing material, and inviting space for renewal.

Locke, Báez, and Lewis reflect three different generations and three different geographies that venerate ancestral spirits and folklore and invite them into an institutional space within a complex geography. During my childhood in Boston, the Harbor’s nationalistic histories were prioritized in my education, and a plethora of monuments continue to mark those events across the city. Much of my own knowledge of my peoples’ histories and relation to the Harbor surfaced years later in college and through personal research, including encountering artworks like Báez’s mural.

Despite my own marvel at these artists, systemic barriers to the ICA for Boston’s Caribbean community are still reflected in the space, even with programming and events that coincided with each show. During my second visit to the show on Labor Day, a free day at the museum distinct from their usual twenty-dollar admission, I was eager to see a broader range of visitors—those whose histories are reflected in the exhibition and who might find questions, solace, or portals into new terrains of their own.

Locke noted during a tour that “it wasn’t lost on [him] the difficult poetry in once again putting these figures in boxes and shipping them across the Atlantic.”¹⁰ As I traveled back from the Watershed, the only Black person on my water taxi, I couldn’t help but reflect on how the presence of these figures in this historically and geographically fraught area raises questions about who these exhibitions are truly for and what role they play in Boston’s cultural landscape. I recall the conversations during the Watershed’s opening in 2019, when I interned in the education department. Despite the Watershed’s location at the edge of East Boston, the Seaport, through its infrastructure, class, and racial history, serves a different population than the communities reflected in the exhibitions. The ICA’s glass building in the Seaport, built in 2006, has since been joined by a slew of glass towers: buildings for finance bros, white yogis, accountants, and other upper-echelon individuals and businesses. Situated on the Silver Line, lined with exorbitantly pricy parking and expensive condos, the Seaport was created entirely within the past eighteen years, and yet, in line with Boston’s systemically racist structures, lenders have issued only three residential mortgages to Black buyers in the area.¹¹ The neighborhood had the potential to be nurtured into anything, but it became another inaccessible and predominately white space in Boston.

Caribbean artists find themselves at the crossroads of two large-scale art market trends—Black figurative work and migration—that offer both opportunities and risks. Attention to the Black figure within the art world is cyclical, appearing in the late ’90s, again around 2016, and mounting once more recently, particularly in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. That locus often coincides with the surrounding world’s racial tensions, situating Black artists as purveyors of liberatory thought without engaging the real mobilizing potential of their work. Báez, for example, was involved in movements like the Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter in 2016, which she calls attention to through visual motifs in several of the works featured in her survey. The group was shaped by Caribbean American artist Simone Leigh, who also had a recent ICA survey. While art trends present new possibilities for communion and visibility within galleries and museums, they also risk de-centering the personal and political connections these artists have painstakingly built with their communities and histories, potentially flattening these artists and their freedom dreams into transient symbols in the art world.

And yet, amid these tensions, I remain curious. Perhaps the poetry of these exhibitions lies in their ability to bridge these distances, to create new spaces of reflection and connection, even in unlikely places. Perhaps these artists submerge us in an oceanic current, creating histories and transmitting messages across time—to the institution, Boston’s community, and beyond. The surreal and futuristic visions of these Caribbean artists hold the potential to reimagine not only the past but also the future, both for themselves and for the communities they engage. Whether or not these exhibitions succeed in fully connecting with the Caribbean diaspora in Boston, they challenge us to keep asking: How can art create new possibilities for kinship, healing, and reimagining? And in the future, how might these Caribbean figures surface in the communities they lay claim to?

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—1 Marilynn S. Johnson, “Revitalizing the Suburbs: Immigrants in Greater Boston Since the 1980s,” in Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States, ed. Domenic Vitiello and Thomas J. Sugrue (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
—2 Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), ed. Daniel Maximin (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).
—3 Ibid.
—4 “Artist Firelei Báez: I Consider Myself a Filter,” YouTube video, produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and edited by Sean Hanley, copyright 2023 by Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, posted by Louisiana Channel, January 19, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht5o3mfMsDw.
—5 Equal Justice Initiative, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade” (2022).
—6 Katherine McKittrick. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
—7 Ibid.
—8 Ibid.
—9 Jerome S. Handler and Charlotte J. Frisbie, “Aspects of Slave Life in Barbados: Music and Its Cultural Context,” Caribbean Studies 11, no. 4 (1972): 5–46. —10 Hew Locke in conversation with curator Ruth Erickson.
—11 Andrew Ryan, Nicole Dungca, Akilah Johnson, Liz Kowalczyk, Adrian Walker, Todd Wallack, and Patricia Wen, “A Brand New Boston, Even Whiter Than the Old.” Boston Globe Spotlight: Boston. Racism. Image. Reality, December 11, 2017. https://apps.bostonglobe.com/spotlight/boston-racism-image-reality/series/seaport/.

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“Firelei Baez” and “Hew Locke: The Procession” were on view at the ICA / Boston and Watershed through September 2, 2024. “Tau Lewis: Spirit Level” is on view at the ICA / Boston through January 20, 2025.