Latin American and Caribbean Art

Published by the Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana. This publication has 199 pages full of color illustrations covering art in Central America.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica, 1996

This is an art/object book saturated with words + images transmitting graphic sparks - works from over 100 young visual artists, writers and cultural thinkers. it was developed and produced over the past four years as a 21st century scan of the hurricane zone [HZ] via many actions, thoughts, writings, provocations and encounters. It is the aftermath of two key projects: ZERO + Landings. it embodies a spirit of freedom in its coherent challenge to the mass-mental enslavement of a post-colonial art zoo. Mostly written in english -well over but also in spanish, chinese, haitian creole, maya tz'utujil, catalan, french, and some maya yucatec.

In the years following Nicaragua's 1979 Sandinista Revolution, more than three hundred murals were created by Nicaraguan and international artist brigades. David Kunzle was profoundly moved by the aesthetic and political power of these murals, and when he saw that they were being destroyed after the Sandinistas were voted out in 1990, he resolved to document them. This visually exciting, emotionally compelling book is the result of his efforts. Today many of Nicaragua's murals have been obliterated, and Kunzle's book may be the only record of these works. Approximately eighty percent of the murals are reproduced here, many with extensive commentary. Artistic styles from the primitivist to the highly sophisticated are represented, showing themes of literacy, health, family, and always the Revolution. Kunzle outlines the historical conditions in Nicaragua--including U.S. interference--that gave rise to the Revolution and to the murals. He chronicles the politically vindictive destruction of many of the best murals and the rise and fall of Managua's Mural School. Kunzle also refers to other Nicaraguan public media such as billboards and graffiti, the great mural precedent in Mexico, and the more recent attempts at socialist art in Cuba and Chile. Nicaraguan murals became blackboards of the people, a forum for self-image, self-education, and popular autobiography. Kunzle pleads for the restoration of the surviving murals and for the revival of the mural movement, for it is, he says, "art that belongs to and benefits us all."

Book that profiles 33 multi-talented sculptors, painters, photographers and cartoonists working in Belize highlighting what they have in common. U.S. art history student Maggie Turner spent several summers traveling throughout the country to interview the featured artists.

This book studies three types of Guatemalan art that represent imagines of community. The particular techniques and structure of each set of works project an imagining of community that is unique to those pieces. Studying the pieces together lays the groundwork for re-imagining the relation of arts and society. This book contains nineteen color photographs.

Prólogo / Ricardo Lindo -- Introducción -- Capítulo 1. Precedentes decimonónicos (1821-1900) -- Capítulo 2. Inicios del siglo XX (1900-1921) -- Capítulo 3. En búsqueda de identidad (Los aos 20) -- Capítulo 4. La impronta mexicana -- Capítulo 5. La primera vanguardia salvadoreña de siglo XX -- Capítulo 6. Atmósfera y contexto sociocultural de los aos 30 -- Capítulo 7. Primera generación de la Academia de Dibujo y Pintura de Valero Lecha -- Capítulo 8. La institucionalización del arte -- Capítulo 9. Los independientes y la función social del arte -- Capítulo 10. Autoconocimiento psíquico y ancestral -- Capítulo 11. El simbolismo y el surrealismo de las décadas de los años 60 y 70 -- Capítulo 12. Reforma educativa del siglo XX -- Capítulo 13. Guerra civil de los años 80 (1980-1992) -- Capítulo 14. Contexto cultural de la década de los 90 -- Epílogo. Arte Salvadoreño contemporáneo.

Essays by: Eduardo Sanchez and Marilyn A. Zeitlin

Covering the exhibition produced by Marilyn Zeitlin who traveled to El Salvador in 1994, where she located, documented, organized and ultimately arranged to have exhibited in the United States work by dozens of Salvadoran artists. Many with formal art school training, and many more without. Wes Sandel was her co-director for a video documentary of this project. Staff from the Arizona State University Museum were also deeply involved and responsible for the enormous amount of work and organization required to make the project a reality. The catalog accompanying the exhibition includes a chronology of El Salvador from its domination in 1525 by conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, through to the December 1994 redefinition of the FMLN (Farabundo Marti Liberation Front). Most of the text and all the essays are presented in Spanish and English (translated by Beatriz Cortez)

Conceptualism played a different role in Latin American art during the 1960s and 1970s than in Europe and the United States, where conceptualist artists predominantly sought to challenge the primacy of the art object and art institutions, as well as the commercialization of art. Latin American artists turned to conceptualism as a vehicle for radically questioning the very nature of art itself, as well as art's role in responding to societal needs and crises in conjunction with politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Because of this distinctive agenda, Latin American conceptualism must be viewed and understood in its own right, not as a derivative of Euroamerican models. In this book, one of Latin America's foremost conceptualist artists, Luis Camnitzer, offers a firsthand account of conceptualism in Latin American art. Placing the evolution of conceptualism within the history Latin America, he explores conceptualism as a strategy, rather than a style, in Latin American culture. He shows how the roots of conceptualism reach back to the early nineteenth century. Camnitzer then follows conceptualism to the point where art crossed into politics, as with the Argentinian group Tucum in 1968, and where politics crossed into art, as with the Tupamaro movement in Uruguay during the 1960s and early 1970s. Camnitzer concludes by investigating how, after 1970, conceptualist manifestations returned to the fold of more conventional art and describes some of the consequences that followed when art evolved from being a political tool to become what is known as political art.

SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication In this volume, Olga Herrera tells the story of how the United States used modern art as a cultural defense strategy in South America during World War II. Organized by figures such as Nelson A. Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, and Lincoln Kirstein as part of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's war preparedness program, the Art Section of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CI-AA) linked art and national security. In the process, modern art came to symbolize American values of social progress, peace, and democracy. The Art Section, a crucial yet rarely acknowledged arm of the CIA's temporary wartime agency, supported traveling exhibitions of American paintings, furniture, and poster design competitions for artists across the Western Hemisphere, as well as widespread distribution of films with South American themes and circulation of Latin American art within the United States. These exchanges of art and ideas were meant to counter negative views of U.S. culture spread by Nazi and totalitarian sympathizers. Modern art became a tool to visually project U.S. culture and was used to unify the hemisphere against Axis influence in a cultural battlefield.Herrera illustrates how the program was an unprecedented public-private model of support for the arts, a driving force in the emergence of a Latin American art market in the United States, and a foundation for global art networks still in place today. A volume in the series Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The first survey of Pan-American geometric abstraction between the 1920s and 1950s, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s provides a fresh and innovative look at this dynamic and cosmopolitan period of Modernism in the Americas. In the first half of the twentieth century, South American and US artists infused the hard-edge lines and geometric shapes of abstract art with new perspectives. This richly illustrated book examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media. It begins with the arrival of Torres-García in New York City in 1920, and culminates in the 1950s, as North and South American abstract artists converged in the international arena in such exhibition venues as the Bienal de São Paulo. Released in conjunction with the traveling exhibition organized by the Newark Museum, Constructive Spirit presents more than ninety rarely seen paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, and films, from private and public collections across both continents. The sixty-eight featured artists include the renowned-Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Arshile Gorky, for example-as well as those who deserve much wider recognition, such as Charmion von Wiegand, Geraldo de Barros, Alfredo Hlito, and many others. Essayists Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O'Hare, and Cecilia de Torres offer new insights as they investigate the ideas and influences that informed South and North American artists' transformation of abstraction into a language of their own.

"Fills a void in the genre. . . . Excellent descriptions and interpretations." --Latin American Antiquity This wide-ranging survey has established itself as the best single-volume introduction to Andean art and architecture and is an essential guide to pre-Columbian Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia for the general reader, student, traveler, and artist alike. Describing the strikingly varied artistic achievements of the Chavín, Paracas, Moche, Nasca, Chimu, and Inca cultures, among others, RebeccaStone has rewritten and expanded the text throughout, touching on many of the recent discoveries and advances in the field. Throughout this fully revised third edition, Stone demonstrates how the Andean peoples adapted and refined their aesthetic response to a formidable and demanding environment and explored the interface between the terrestrial and the otherworldly according to the value they placed on shamanic religious experience.

The Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2008 to examine the arts of South America during the culturally complex period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the early modern era. Specialists in the arts and history of Latin America traveled from Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, and the United States to present recent research. The topics ranged from architecture, painting, and sculpture to furniture and the decorative arts. Edited by Denver Art Museum curator Donna Pierce, this volume presents revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the symposium. Thomas B. F. Cummins (Harvard University) opens the volume with a discussion of the reception and reinterpretation of American motifs by European artists in the centuries after contact. Through a detailed analysis of the architecture of Franciscan churches in Brazil, Nuno Senos (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) discerns political alliances and posits a structural timeline. Susan Verdi Webster (College of William and Mary) uses new evidence from Ecuadorian archive documents to recover the names and works of native artists in colonial Quito. Sabine MacCormack (University of Notre Dame) analyzes a series of mural paintings in the church of St. Augustine in colonial Lima and traces their graphic and theological sources. Luisa Elena Alcala (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) examines the treatise of one of the earliest documented Indian artists in Peru, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, and his famous carving of the Virgin of Copacabana. Through a detailed analysis of manuscipt drawings of furniture and architecture by native artist Guaman Poma of Cuzco, Jorge Rivas Pérez (Colección Cisneros, Venezuela) assesses their accuracy and relationship to actual examples of the early colonial era. Michael Brown (Denver Art Museum) concludes the volume with an essay on Daniel Casey Stapleton and the collection of Spanish colonial art now housed at the Denver Art Museum, acquired while he was working and traveling in South America at the turn of the century. An interdisciplinary study bringing together new research on an understudied era and area, this illustrated volume will be an important resource for scholars and enthusiasts of Latin American art and history.

Rock art in South America is as diverse as the continent itself. In this vast territory, different peoples produced engravings, paintings, and massive earthworks, from the Atacama to the Amazon. These marks on the landscape were made by all different kinds of peoples, from some of the earliest hunter-gatherers in the continent, to the very complex societies within the Inca Empire. This book brings together the work of specialists from throughout the continent, addressing this diversity, as well as the variety of approaches that the Archaeology of rock art has taken in South America. Constructed of eleven thought-provoking chapters and arranged in three thematic sections, the book presents different theoretical approaches that are currently being used to understand the roles rock art played in prehistoric communities. The editors have skillfully crafted a book that presents the contribution the study of South American rock art can offer to the global research of this materiality, both theoretically and methodologically. This book will interest a broad range of scholars researching in archaeology, anthropology, history of art, heritage and conservation, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students who will find interesting case studies showcasing the diverse ways in which rock art can be approached. Despite its focus on South America, the book is intended as a contribution towards the global study of rock art.

This book examines the contemporary art world in Latin America from an anthropological and historical perspective, and recognises the recent reconfiguration of Lima's art scene. Giuliana Borea traces the practices of artists, curators, collectors, art dealers and museums in order to identify three key factors in this reconfiguration of contemporary art in Lima: artistic explorations and new curatorial narratives; museum reinforcement and the strengthening of Latin American art networks; and of the rise of the art market. In so doing, Borea highlights the different actors that come into play in activating and de-activating, directions and imaginations. The book exposes the practices of the local, global, indigeneity and politics in the arts, and reveals that the strengthening of the Lima art scene has fostered the expansion of dominant art views and formats mobilized by transnational elite actors. Featuring analytical chapters interspersed with personal stories, Borea's book presents an in-depth analysis of a specific art scene to open up a new way of understanding contemporary art practices in relation to globalization.

In recent writings and exhibitions on postwar art, the avant-garde of 1960s Argentina has emerged as one of the most vital and original of that extraordinarily dynamic period. Although these artists were as radical as any in the world, especially in their thinking on conceptual art and the dematerialization of the art object, very few of them have enjoyed much international exposure. Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art in the 1960s is the first book to explore the intense, internationally significant developments in Argentine art of the 1960s through English translations of the original documents of the time. An anthology of invaluable primary source material on the development of performance art, media art and political art in Argentina, it includes key essays by two of the most brilliant Argentine art critics of the period, Jorge Romero Brest and Oscar Masotta, and many texts by artists: manifestos, letters, lectures and project notes. Well-known Latin American scholars contribute chapter introductions placing the ideas and arguments of these documents in context for foreign audiences. A comprehensive appendix of biographical and bibliographical data completes the book.

From currency and maps to heavily censored newspapers and television programming, Art Systems explores visual forms of critique and subversion during the height of Brazilian dictatorship, drawing sometimes surprising connections between artistic production and broader processes of social exchange during a period of authoritarian modernization. Positioning the works beyond the prism of politics, Elena Shtromberg reveals subtle forms of subversion and critique that reinvented the artists' political terrain. Analyzing key examples from Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, Anna Bella Geiger, Sonia Andrade, Geraldo Mello, and others, the book offers a new framework for theorizing artistic practice. By focusing on the core economic, media, technological, and geographic conditions that circumscribed artistic production during this pivotal era, Shtromberg excavates an array of art systems that played a role in the everyday lives of Brazilians. An examination of the specific historical details of the social systems that were integrated into artistic production, this unique study showcases works that were accessed by audiences far outside the confines of artistic institutions. Proliferating during one of Brazil's most socially and politically fraught decades, the works--spanning cartography to video art--do not conform to an easily identifiable style, form, material use, or medium. As a result of this breadth, Art Systems gives voice to the multifaceted forces at play in a unique chapter of Latin American cultural history.

Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America's imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomás Maldonado, author María Amalia García rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil. This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

León Ferrari and Mira Schendel are among the most significant Latin American artists of the 20th century. Active during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the neighbouring countries of Argentina and Brazil, they found inspiration in the written word and in the eloquence of spoken language. Their striking visual production coincided with a period of significant focus on language by philosophers and artists. León Ferrari & Mira Schendel is published to accompany the first comprehensive exhibition of the work of these two artists in the United States, presenting new insights on the artists' deconstruction of language through a visual repertoire and examining the connections and collisions between the visual arts, the written form, politics and religion.

Cantos/Cuentos Colombianos is the most comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Colombian art ever shown in Europe. Ten widely recognized Colombian artists present a previously unknown world of images and experience worthy of international attention. With great formal and substantive rigor, the artists deal with their country and its troubled past and present through installation, video, photography, objects, performance and sound works. The book includes extensive photo-documentation of the artists' studios as well as in-depth interviews. Four prominent Colombian thinkers of varying political persuasions discuss political, social and cultural issues facing their country in enlightening and thought-provoking essays.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. Challenging these forces and representations, Carlos Garrido Castellano argues that something more must be added to the discussion in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art arises from several years of field research and curatorial activity in museums, universities, and cultural institutions of Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the United States. This book explores the ways in which Caribbean individuals and communities have recurred to art and visual creativity to create and sustain public spaces of discussion and social interaction. The book analyzes contemporary Caribbean art in relation to broader discussions of citizenship, cultural agency, critical geography, migration, and social justice. Covering a broad range of artistic projects, including curatorial practice, socially engaged art, institutional politics, public art, and performance, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they inhabit and share. 

In the wake of 500 years of colonialism, the Caribbean archipelago remains to this day one of the world's most profoundly fractured regions of the world. Spain, Germany, England, the Netherlands, and the United States claimed various parts of the island group, primarily to assert their economic interests. The resulting mosaic concealed the region's own, non-Eurocentric culture and art. But, now, the social, political, and cultural dynamics are shifting. In partnership with the Basel H. Geiger Cultural Foundation, The Caribbean Art Initiative, which was founded in 2019 to raise international awareness of the rich Caribbean art scene, will present the first large-scale exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art by Caribbean curators in Basel, Switzerland. This companion publication showcases artists from all over the region and its diaspora, making their works broadly accessible and initiating a much-needed conversation about an otherwise overlooked facet of the international community.

'Timed out' is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art.This is an essential addition to the growing field of 'world art studies', bringing concerns around temporality together with cross-cultural issues and debates. It shows how art and artists of the Caribbean have encountered and challenged the charges of belatedness, anachronism, provincialism and marginalisation that are fundamental to the time-space logic of art history.

Relational Undercurrents accompanies an exhibition curated by Tatiana Flores for the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, which forms part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. This initiative examines the artistic legacy of Latin America and U.S. Latinos through a series of exhibitions and related programs. This exhibition catalog and volume edited by Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens calls attention to the artistic production of the Caribbean islands and their diasporas, challenging the conventional geographic and conceptual boundaries of Latin America. The editors offer an "archipelagic model," which proposes a mapping of the Caribbean from the perspective of its islands as distinct from its continental coasts. The exhibition, organized around the four themes of Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies, and Representational Acts, highlights thematic continuities in the art of the insular Caribbean, placing Hispanophone artists in visual conversation with those from Anglophone, Francophone, Dutch, and Danish backgrounds. It includes over eighty artists, among them Tania Bruguera, Allora & Calzadilla, Christopher Cozier, Jorge Pineda, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Ebony G. Patterson. In accompanying essays, curators, critics, and scholars discuss particular artistic traditions in Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Haitian art and theorize the broader decolonial and archipelagic conceptual frameworks within which such works are produced. Relational Undercurrents will be on display that the Museum of Latin American Art from September 2017 through January 2018. Publication by the Museum of Latin American Art in collaboration with Fresco Books / SF Design, LLC. Distributed by Duke University Press.

Infinite island: contemporary Caribbean art / Tumelo Mosaka -- Visualizing art in the Caribbean / Annie Paul -- The plates / commentaries by Nicollette Ramirez
Notes
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum from August 31, 2007, through January 27, 2008
Originally published: London : Philip Wilson Publishers, 2007
Includes bibliographical references (p. 222-223)

Centres on a virtual gallery of art made in the region from the 1940's to the 2000s. Work featured is contextualized within its historical background from the Pre-Columbian times to the present day, through narrative text and timeline

Cuba has changed significantly in recent years, from seemingly minor allowances (such as the introduction of cell phones) to large-scale economic revisions. At the same time, many other changes unrelated to the political leadership of the island have changed everyday life in Cuba, from environmental challenges to new forms of consumption. Planet/Cuba examines how art and literature have responded to a new moment at once more globalized and less exceptional, more concerned with local quotidian worries than international alliances; more threatened by the devastations of planetary capitalism and climate change than by the vagaries of the nation's government.

Caribbean art is strong, passionate and filled with contradictions, as are the lives of the three men profiled inThree Caribbean Artists. A rare glimpse is offered into the lives of three different artists, their upbringing, their work and how they became established and well-known artists. Their stories are integrally related to their home on the island of Curaçao, where folklore, magic, and reality happily co-exist. The lives of Jose-Maria Capricorne, Nelson Carrilho, and Philippe Zanolino reflect the impact of slavery, racism, and immigration, common to the history of the Caribbean. Equipped with their cultural background, skills derived from being craftsmen, and ample creativity and grit, they each conquered significant challenges encountered in their lives. The artist?s stories gravitate around the importance of their respective skills, some obtained through teachings and others self-taught. All three artists passionately contribute to educating people on the importance and benefits of art in their own respective ways. In addition, an overview is provided of art developments in the Caribbean, an area whose artworks have proven challenging to capture and denominate.

A panoramic exploration of Cuba's extraordinary art world, including exclusive interviews with thirty-five of the island's most influential artists and photography by Camillo Guevara. Retracing the vibrant history of Cuban art from 1900 onwards, this book provides an overview of Cuban cultural and artistic development across a number of mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installations, and the visual arts. Together, long-time friends and authors Gilbert Brownstone and Camillo Guevara visited and interviewed Cuba's thirty-five most important and internationally acclaimed visual artists, who talk openly about their education, influences, and the role of art in Cuba. Art has always been at the heart of the Cuban cultural identity, and the island is home to major artists across the spectrum of artistic disciplines. Yet while culture thrived both in the provinces and in Havana throughout the twentieth century, it was with the advent of the revolution and rise of Fidel Castro that free education and widespread access to the arts became top priorities, giving the underprivileged access to the artistic realm that had once been a domain of the elite. Both an invitation into the world of the dynamic Caribbean island and an overview of the Cuban artistic heritage, this book is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in contemporary art and culture.

Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation?s commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism. In three sections, it highlights the many converging factors, which have pushed this avant-garde to the forefront of the region?s contemporary scene, and places it all in the context of growing dissatisfaction with the post-colonial state and its cultural policies. This generational transition has manifested itself not only in a departure from ?traditional? in favor of ?new? media (i.e., installation, performance, and video rather than painting and sculpture), but also in the advancement of a ?postnationalist postmodernism,? which reaches for diasporic and cosmopolitan frames of reference. Section one outlines the features of a preceding ?Creole modernism? and explains the different guises of postnationalism in the region?s contemporary art. In section two, its [PKM1] momentum is connected to the proliferation of independent art spaces and transnational networks, which connect artists across and beyond the region and open up possibilities unavailable to earlier generations. Section three demonstrates the impact of this conceptual and organizational evolution on the selection and exhibition of Caribbean art in the metropole. [PKM1]AU: clarify ?its.? The contemporary art scene?

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, Cura ao, 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 Cond , 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.