Caribbean Beat — March/April 2020 (#162)

need to know
Above The Bounce (2012;
papier-mâché, oil paint; 37 x
27 x 23 inches)
On View
Wendy Nanan at the
AMA
Over four decades, Trinidadian artist Wendy Nanan
has created a quietly subversive body of work, tackling
issues of cultural hybridity, gender, and sexuality —
letting her visually arresting work speak for itself, and
rarely venturing into the spotlight. A new retrospective
show at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in
Washington, DC, running from 19 March to 14 June,
assembles key works from all the stages of her career
and offers an overdue survey of her oeuvre — and its
implications for the unstable canon of contemporary
Caribbean art.
The eponymously titled Wendy Nanan includes
one of the provocative, gaudily painted papier-mâché
works from her Idyllic Marriage series of the early 1990s,
depicting an uneasy union between the Hindu god Vishnu
and the Roman Catholic Madonna — “an interrogation
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