When Art Refuses to Look Away

Art does more than give us something beautiful to look at.

Across the Caribbean, artists have long used their work to question the realities surrounding them, from climate change and access to our coastlines to colonial histories, inequality, identity and cultural memory.

Their work asks us to look closer at the things we may have become accustomed to overlooking.

When climate change becomes personal

In Drawn Out to Sea, artist Wesley George, of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines descent, turns his attention to the realities of the climate crisis.

The work places a young girl within stylised storm imagery, challenging the distance with which climate catastrophe is often viewed. For Caribbean communities, the effects of a changing climate are not simply distant projections. They can mean displacement, destruction and profound disruption to everyday life.

George describes the work as a reflection on how catastrophe can become aestheticised and abstracted while the people living through it are overlooked.

The question becomes: when we look at images of climate catastrophe, whose experience are we actually seeing?

Who gets to enjoy the coastline?

Michael Elliott's No Man's Sand turns the focus towards Jamaica's coastline and the question of who gets access to the spaces that are often presented as belonging to everyone.

The Jamaican artist reflects on the experience of locals being excluded from some of the island's most desirable shorelines while visitors enjoy the beaches, resorts and landscapes marketed as paradise.

“We should all be included but inclusivity is not planned for us all,” Elliott writes.

The work raises an uncomfortable question about belonging. What does it mean to live in a place celebrated for its natural beauty when access to that beauty is not experienced equally?

Remembering emancipation

Laura Facey's Redemption Song has stood at Kingston's Emancipation Park since 2003. The bronze monument was created to mark the 165th anniversary of the emancipation of slavery in Jamaica.

The work has also generated debate since its unveiling, demonstrating how public monuments can become spaces where questions of history, representation and memory are negotiated.

For Facey, however, the sculpture was deeply personal. Speaking about the work, she said, “I wanted to feel released.” She connected its creation to her own process of confronting Jamaica's history of slavery and her continuing engagement with that history through her practice.

Here, art becomes more than a monument to the past. It becomes part of an ongoing conversation about what emancipation means and how a society carries its history forward.

Who gets to define the Caribbean?

Dominican artist Joiri Minaya examines another powerful force in the Caribbean: the image of paradise.

In Continuum II, Minaya juxtaposes a 

well-known painting by Canadian artist François Beaucourt, formerly known as Portrait of a Negro Slave (1786) and recently retitled Portrait of a Haitian Woman, with an image of a brochure of Bávaro, a touristic town in the east Dominican Republic.

The result challenges the seemingly harmless tropical imagery that has long been used to sell the Caribbean.

Minaya's work asks us to consider what happens when people, landscapes and cultures become part of an image created primarily for someone else's consumption.

What happens when a community is left behind?

Jamaican born artist Nari Ward has built much of his practice around objects that have been discarded or overlooked.

His landmark installation Amazing Grace, created in Harlem in 1993, brought together hundreds of abandoned baby strollers collected from the neighbourhood and fire hoses from an abandoned fire station. The work emerged during the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic of the early 1990s and reflected the conditions of the community around him.

Ward has described the strollers as coming from a community in crisis. Their transformation into an artwork creates space to think about vulnerability, marginalisation, loss, hope and the lives that can become invisible within a city.

Although the work was created in Harlem, Ward's Jamaican background remains an important part of understanding his broader interest in place, migration and community. Born in St Andrew, he moved to the United States at age 12.

What happens when culture becomes a commodity?

Bahamian artist Anina Major looks closely at the relationship between cultural tradition, place and identity.

Her practice draws from Bahamian craft traditions, particularly weaving, transforming materials and techniques associated with everyday life into permanent sculptural forms. Major's work considers how cultural knowledge, labour and traditions can be overlooked or commodified within the tourism economy.

In Water Tower (2024), glazed stoneware, melted sea glass and sand come together in a sculptural form that connects material, land and sea. The work is part of a broader practice concerned with memory, belonging and the relationship between self and place.

Major reminds us that the Caribbean is more than the image of paradise presented to visitors. It is also made up of traditions, labour, memories and knowledge that deserve to be recognised and valued.

Reclaiming history through memory and spirit

For Haitian artist Tessa Mars, history is deeply personal.

Her Untitled painting from 2022 explores the lasting effects of colonialism on the Afro Caribbean diaspora, particularly female vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on Haitian history, spirituality and ancestry, Mars creates an imagined space where people and land remain connected across time.

The work brings together autobiographical and historical elements, creating a meditation on survival, belonging and cultural memory.

Mars's wider practice is rooted in Haitian history and explores identity, ritual, patriotism, sovereignty, migration and the realities of everyday Haitian life.

Looking closer

These artists are not addressing the same issues, and their practices are shaped by very different experiences.

But each asks us to look beyond the surface.

Beyond the postcard image of paradise.

Beyond the coastline.

Beyond the monument.

Beyond the discarded object.

Beyond the landscape.

Beyond the historical record.

Because art can do more than reflect the world around us.

It can make visible what has been overlooked. It can preserve what is at risk of being forgotten. It can challenge the stories we have inherited and create space for new ones.

When art refuses to look away, perhaps it asks us to do the same.