Caribbean Artists Eroding Sandcastles at Wave Hill
Kevin Quiles Bonilla, A tropic squall blew in, while you dried in the sand, 2022, (3) custom printed beach towels, 2 custom printed sling chairs, beach paraphernalia, Hurricane warning flags, vinyl, sand, sound, Dimensions variable. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill. Image courtesy the artist.
When people from the Caribbean share their lived experiences, we invariably find common ground in the remnants of coloniality: a past that history refuses to fully acknowledge and the commodification of this geography as a tourist paradise. Visualizing the effects of this problem has been the center of the decolonial turn that orients a new generation of artists like Puerto Rican Kevin Quiles Bonilla and Bahamian Anina Major. Each is currently presenting their respective first solo shows occupying joint rooms in the Glyndor House at Wave Hill in the Bronx. The areas of contact that emerge form a dialogue between these site-specific installations and potentiate each other’s impact.
In a space that brands itself as “a garden of wonders,” Wave Hill’s curatorial team have addressed environmental issues through art exhibitions during the last years. Centering on these pressing issues, they couldn’t avoid touching on imperialistic politics, which also seem appropriate given the estate’s history––reflected in the architectural style of the house that serves as gallery. Both Caribbean artists were selected by curator Eileen Jeng Lynch for this summer’s iteration of the Sunroom Project Space, and their respective works—as different as they are—came together to highlight the intersection between coloniality and human agency in climate change.
Kevin Quiles Bonilla, While you dried in the sand (palm trees, ocean breeze), 2022, custom print on beach towel, 38.5 x 77 in. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill. Image courtesy the artist.
Kevin Quiles Bonilla titled his exhibition with tragicomical description: A tropic squall blew in, while you dried in the sand. Trained as a photographer and performance artist, Quiles Bonilla combines both in an installation that turned the whole room into a beach-day setting, including towels and foldable chairs, sandcastles, and a portable radio. But there is nothing ordinary about this beach day. While palm trees in the background resist furious winds and the radio plays salsa songs that the artist’s mother and grandmother listened to when he was young,the sound of an alarm from the National Weather Service interrupts every five minutes. Most notably, the typical kitsch-paradise designs of the beach towels are replaced by images of Hurricane María (2017), the summer protests that erupted in 2019, and rubble produced by the series of earthquakes in 2020. All of this is framed within the interior of a federal-style mansion in the suburban neighborhood of Riverdale, close to a big Latin community who are not exactly the demographics that frequent the beautiful estate.
In the neocolonial context of Puerto Rico—a U.S. territory that can’t vote for the Congress that has plenary powers over its destiny—a leisure space like the beach is not exempt from political dispute. Quiles Bonilla’s piece is especially relevant in the wake of a series of conflicts that have highlighted the illegal practice of privatizing beaches by hotels and other wealthy elites from the U.S. who benefit from tax exemptions that do not apply to the locals. Thus, bringing the beach to a fine gallery space, along with the real conditions that Puerto Ricans live day to day, problematizes the ecological phenomena in their political and economic contexts. Climatic events are not inherently catastrophic, but the power structure ensures a disaster.
Kevin Quiles Bonilla, Tanning performance, 2022, Performance, custom printed sling chair, blue tarp mask, sunscreen bottle, sound. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill. Image courtesy the artist and Wave Hill. Photo by Stefan Hagen.
Perhaps the most striking part of Quiles Bonilla’s exhibition is a performance that consists in the simple act of taking in the sun while wearing a mask made from the blue FEMA tarps that still cover the roofs of some houses in Puerto Rico following several natural disasters. Of course, the political structures behind these unequal political relationships are nothing new. Nor are they limited to Puerto Rico. This reality is what Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid conveys as: “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that…” (A Small Place, 1988).
Anina Major’s exhibition Garden Hill: Reflections in Memory Yard focuses on the erased ancestral practices of the African diaspora, one of the groups most affected by colonialism, neo-colonialism, and coloniality. If the myth of the extinction of the aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean was disseminated throughout the Caribbean, nobody could ever deny the presence of Black people in the American continent, but their contributions to the cultures of the so-called New World have been systematically buried. This is why, following Alice Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Major digs into the past of the Bahamas—the first archipelago the Spaniards came across in 1492—to turn the Sun Porch into the Afro-Caribbean section of Wave Hill’s gardens.
Anina Major, Installation view of “Garden Hills: Reflections in Memory Yard”, 2022. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
The fragmented nature of Major’s multimedia installation echoes the book from which the artist drew her inspiration, which is composed of articles, essays, and other individual pieces. The composition privileges a series of ceramic pots, some with house plants, made through a braiding technique known in the Bahamas as plaiting, which was used by her grandmother to create souvenirs for tourists. Other significant elements are bottle-trees–garden ornaments rooted in African folklore traditions–and a wooden platform with the house plan drawn on top of it. This platform includes a pond-like aperture in which a video presents moments the artist shared with her mother in the garden, and the voice of Jamaica Kincaid addressing the intimacy of gardening, among other related content. The domestic reference seems to be another “quote” from Walker’s feminism, as women were relegated to the home for centuries, their domestic work not considered by some as real labor, both then and now.
Major’s work rescues from oblivion the ancestral home in which the Afro-Caribbean traditions of Bahamian culture were developed. The materials seem carefully selected to place the piece: clay (a type of soil), crystal (made from sand) and tropical houseplants mixed with human-made trees “growing” from a unique type of “soil” made from hundreds of fragments of previous ceramic work, crushed clam, and oyster shells. Major describes it as “a poetic gesture that speaks to fragility and unknown remnants.” “We are all capable of becoming our own edens,”she explains, Major created a garden for and from her genealogical tree.
Anina Major, Installation view of “Garden Hills: Reflections in Memory Yard”, 2022. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
Anina Major, Installation view of “Garden Hills: Reflections in Memory Yard”, 2022. Commissioned for the Sunroom Project Space. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
In his essay “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-Continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn” Nelson Maldonado Torres stipulates that “The topology of the Caribbean is archipelagic, and, together with its genealogy, the Caribbean may be considered the oldest archipelago of colonialities and decolonialities in the modern/colonial world.” The Caribbean witnessed the arrival of the first colonizers, meaning it is also the place in the hemisphere where colonialism has been fought for the longest time, which has taken a toll on both the people and the environment. Translating struggle into art in a New York garden, Kevin Quiles Bonilla and Anina Major prove that the Caribbean has always bloomed after each natural or human-made disaster and will continue to do so.
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A tropic squall blew in, while you dried in the sand, by Kevin Quiles Bonilla and Garden Hill: Reflections in Memory Yard by Anina Major are open through the 4th of July at the Glyndor House of Wave Hill, Bronx, NY.
Carlos Ortiz Burgos, (Carolina, Puerto Rico, b. 1991) having started studying visual arts at the “Escuela de Bellas Artes de Carolina” at the age of twelve, then studied Architectural Drawing at the Carlos F. Daniels Vocational School. Later, he obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Art History Program at the University of Puerto Rico, with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Art. He has presented his work at symposiums held by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and the Museo de Arte de Ponce and the University of Costa Rica. He has also collaborated with galleries, curators, and private collectors, and has been a tour guide at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and Chief Coordinator of the arte_FITS.FOUNDATION. As a curator, he has presented exhibitions and curatorial essays for shows in and out of the island. He’s a member of the International Association of Art Critics and has published essays, reviews, and art critics in several outlets. He’s currently a graduate student at Florida State University.