Patchwork: Essays & Interviews on Caribbean Visual Culture

Key discussions on environmental sustainability and global justice specific to Caribbean concerns.

The patchwork is an apt metaphor for the Caribbean, foregrounding the process of Caribbean societies forging identity and identities out of the plural and sometimes conflicting groups that call the region home. Within the metaphor of the patchwork, however, a question arises: where are the vernacular needlework artists within the visual art tradition of the Caribbean? 

This book’s introduction sets out to answer this question, and several common themes flow through the ensuing essays and in-depth interviews. Topics explored include issues of land and colonization, long-held perceptions of what the Caribbean is thought to be, and open-ended art-making as opposed to expressing fidelity to a particular medium. The book further explores ecological concerns and questions of sustainability, how the practices of the artists and their art defy the easy categorization of the region, and the placement of women in the visual art ecology of the Caribbean. The latter is one of the most contested areas of the book. Readers will come away with the sense that questions of race, color, and class loom large within questions of gender, particularly in the Jamaican art scene. The book aims to insert vernacular needleworkers into the visual art scene in both Jamaica and the larger Caribbean.

Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist, and scholar. From Jamaica, she now lives in the United States, where she is professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University.