Caribbean art – Art Spiel

October 22, 2025October 28, 2025, by Jessica Aguilar

Art Spiel Picks: Philadelphia Exhibitions in October 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Clay as Care Installation view. Photo by The Clay Studio

Just as a solitary action can cause a ripple effect, the sharing of unique ideas can inspire and transform existing systems to include and support different communities. The exhibitions this month demonstrate genuine curiosity and meaningful activation, leading to a trend of revisionist histories in art, institutional displays, or familial archives. Curators Jennifer Zwilling and Nicole Pollard reinvent how gallery exhibitions should be interacted with and ask the question of how clay can assist in caring for mental health at The Clay Studio. Artists Mahsa Attaran, Monica Hamilton, Hanieh Kashani, and Anna Schwartz create a language to describe the power of memory as they mine through personal photographs and materials at Automat Collective. Calero Rodríguez establishes her own History of Art, incorporating Latino, Afro, and Carribean imagery in masterly assembled collages at Taller Puertoriqueño.

December 7, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Another Fumble at the Whitney: no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

Opinion

A group of people in a room with posters on the wall

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view. Photo courtesy of the writer.

The exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, though it includes 50 works by 20 artists, seems overwhelmed given it has been installed in an enormous space. With the exception of two lounge-like areas in which billboard-sized video projections are installed, most of the works, modest in scale, seem to be scattered through the space, or enigmatically clustered together. Ironically, where the Wake of Maria is sparsely installed and attended, the Edward Hopper NY exhibition, given its scale and popularity, would definitely benefit from more space than the half floor it has been jammed into. Another oddity is the disparity in the number and scale of works each artist is represented by. I can only suspect the budget of this show was insufficient to achieve its stated ambition of “presenting artworks made over the last five years by an inter-generational group of artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora.”

October 10, 2021November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Simonette Quamina – Canboulay at Smack Mellon

Featured Artist

The artist and her work, photo courtesy of Camille Thomas

Canboulay, Simonette Quamina’s solo exhibition at Smack Mellon, features a series of immersive wall-sized visual horizons which borrow the methodological framework of a caesura, a break in a poem. The notion of “break” exists within each work through cuts and rips as well as overall, separating elements of her continuous visual story into vignettes of individual works. Through her use of sophisticated variety of collage and printmaking techniques, Quamina integrates narratives referencing histories such as socioeconomic ramifications of sugarcane and familial subjugation, into complex, dark surfaces.

May 17, 2021July 22, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Scherezade Garcia: Navigating Histories

Las Meninas and War, from the series Tales of Freedom,1997,Acrylic, charcoal, and ink on camouflage fabric, 58 x 39 inches.

For New York based artist Scherezade Garcia drawing gives rise to visual codes, which lead her to spontaneous compositions and meanings at the same time. Scherezade Garcia loves stories. The books she grew up with still provoke her imagination, words inspire a continuous production of images – “from The Arabian Nights to Greek Mythology, to Hans Christian Andersen to Crusade tragedies, to El Cid, Don Quijote, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, to Alejo Carpentier, Allan Poe, Garcia Marquez to so many others, I cannot imagine life without it,” she says. Through a variety of media, Scherezade Garcia evokes in her artworks the physicality of art making while alluding to layered narratives of history.