Ah, the Caribbean: islands of pleasure with balmy weather, palm trees that sway in the breeze, and miles of pristine beaches fronting turquoise bays. “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today,” the stunningly atmospheric and intellectually lively group show filling the fourth-floor galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through the end of April, is not about that place.
The show is not really even about a place at all but about the movement of people, commodities, money, weather, culture, power, forms and ideas, all of it somehow tied to Guyana or Cuba or the Dominican Republic or Haiti or one of the other countries and territories that officially constitute the region.
Indeed, my great favorites in a show full of contenders deal explicitly with motion. Zilia Sánchez, the oldest living artist in “Forecast Form” at 97, presents two of the shaped, wryly erotic paintings she has been making since the 1960s: a breast-like diptych tattooed with meandering lines that trace her displacement, in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, from Havana to Madrid to New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and a pyramidal self-portrait-as-an-island, which she repeatedly tossed into the surf only to have it return again and again. (And again: it’s on display in the museum, looking very beat up.)
A trio of witty videos by Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, collaborators who live in Panama City, follows the unstoppable course of a mango rolling across an endless landscape of corrugated zinc roofing; a plastic water bottle (into which a secret message has been whispered) floating through flooded streams and streets; and a cascading line of colonial-era bricks, removed by the government during its repaving of the city’s fast-gentrifying historic district. Tropical fruit, garbage, environmental trouble and the domino effect of renewal projects, oh my. Thank goodness for the levity.
Many of the 38 included artists testify biographically to the flow of people that is migration, born and raised in Denmark or the United States, maybe having spent significant amounts of time in St. Maarten or Barbados, maybe not. Donald Rodney, birthed in Birmingham, England, to Jamaican immigrants, offers a heartbreaking photograph of his outstretched hand, cradling a tiny house constructed of pinned-together pieces of his own skin, created shortly before his premature death from sickle cell anemia, in London. Julien Creuzet, who will represent France at the next Venice Biennale, was born in the Paris suburbs and raised in Martinique; his video “Crossroads” animates dancing figures tumorously embedded with limes, feathers, USB cables and colonial-era ships. The Scottish painter Peter Doig moved to Trinidad in 2002; his lush picture of a tropical coastline at night is obscured by filmy white strokes, as if seen through a veil of curtains or some less tangible differentiation.
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The biggest stretch, geographically, might be the inclusion of a funky kinetic sculpture by David Medalla, a Filipino artist and political activist, connected to the Caribbean by way of a colonial history shared between Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, all former Spanish colonies. Medalla’s cluster of tall clear tubes continuously billows plumes of frothy bubbles, creating its own ever-changing cloudlike forms.
Some migration patterns were news to me, like the Middle East-Caribbean connection illustrated through Alia Farid’s “Mezquitas de Puerto Rico.” A genial prayer rug woven by artisans in Mashhad, Iran, of a cityscape of mosques, car traffic and mountains, it is based on photographs Farid, a native of Kuwait, took of Muslim places of worship found throughout Puerto Rico. A boisterous, oceanic tapestry by Suchitra Mattai, knotted together from old saris family and friends gave her, testifies to the waves of Indians, her ancestors included, who moved to British Guiana from the 1830s to early 1900s to work as indentured servants on sugar cane plantations after slavery was abolished.
The extraction of raw materials — sugar, but also natural gas, salt, pomegranates — informs many of the darkest works in “Forecast Form,” as does the infrastructure of international exchange, from tourism to industry. Christopher Cozier, a Trinidadian artist and co-director of the celebrated Port of Spain collective Alice Yard, presents “Gas Men,” a pair of cinematic videos in which two businessmen swing fuel lines as if they were cowboys with lassos, against a backdrop of a cloudy seascape that is actually Lake Michigan, making a noir comedy of the reckless petroleum sector that links Trinidad and Tobago with places like Chicago.
In each of her haunting portraits of enslaved Afro-Caribbean women, Joscelyn Gardner, a white Creole artist born in Barbados and living in Ontario, Canada, meticulously composites a head of intricately braided hair, seen respectfully from behind, a slave collar and a plant used to end unwanted pregnancies, the kind that resulted from sexual abuse on plantations, such as those committed by and detailed in the diaries of English plantation owner and amateur botanist Thomas Thistlewood, who lived in Jamaica in the 1700s.
A long U-shaped folded paper relief by the Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo, looking eerily like the Twin Towers, is actually a repository of pollution generated by the expansion of the Panama Canal and trapped in air and oil filters, like this one, gathered from adjacent auto repair shops and machinery.
“Forecast Form,” which was curated by the MCA’s Carla Acevedo-Yates, is as anti-essentializing about the Caribbean as an exhibition can be. And yet it is everywhere warm and colorful and lush — from the orange glow of Tavares Strachan’s monumental neon wall text in the entryway to the perfect blue sky and sea of Álvaro Barrios’ installation of hundreds of square prints from the ceiling of the atrium. Firelei Báez’s dozens of little paintings burst with magenta and ultramarine and yellow, brilliant even in the shadow of Teresita Fernández’s 16-foot-tall copper and wood palm tree.
But don’t be lulled by the beautiful view: the neon spells out “In broad daylight,” and it means violence, especially as committed against people of color, many of them from the Caribbean. The blue silk-screens, seen from the other side of the atrium, hang blood red and bear the title “El Mar de Cristóbal Colón.” Those little paintings are reproduction historical documents, bursting into flame and being devoured by female tricksters.
And that palm tree? Look carefully, it’s hanging from a noose.
“Forecast Form” runs through April 23 at the MCA Chicago, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; more information at 312-280-2660 and mcachicago.org
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.