#wiadca

Although this year's West Indian American Day Carnival Association parade has been postponed until 2022, we're honoring the day through Dindga McCannon's painting West Indian Day Parade (1976) which captures the vibrancy and energy of the celebrations that have taken place in the streets surrounding the Brooklyn Museum since the mid-1960s. Rather than depict the locality of central Brooklyn, McCannon sets the parade (which she frequented in its earliest years) in a stylized landscape with patches of celestial blue sky and layers of earth that recall a pan-African heritage. Each elongated figure draws inspiration from the extravagant costumes and festivities that enliven Eastern Parkway.⁠

You can see this work on view in The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time through March 20, 2022.

"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean," said the poet Derek Walcott in his 1992 Nobel lecture. "It comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves." He wondered if his work, rather than evoking the past, could contain "celebrations of a real presence." This sentiment is embodied in the mission of the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA), organizers of the New York Caribbean Week and the annual Labor Day Parade. In anticipation of these (now virtual) events, this August we're highlighting artworks in the Museum's collection that explore the complexity of Caribbean identity and celebrate Caribbean culture and its diasporas. 

In anticipation of the (now virtual) New York Caribbean Week and the annual Labor Day Parade, this August we're highlighting artworks in the Museum's collection that celebrate the presence of Caribbean culture and its diasporas.

On her visit to the Maroon village of Accompong, Jamaica, Zora Neale Hurston remarked, “Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.” Today, August 6th, is Jamaican Independence Day. Inspired by Hurston’s work, New York artist Deana Lawson began to travel regularly to the Caribbean. This photograph, from a local beach in Jamaica, shows the traces of a woman who has just left the frame, her towel still damp. Lawson says, “A constant puzzle for me as a photographer is how to depict the visible and how it connects to the unseen.”  

The 50th annual Caribbean Carnival Weekend is underway! If you're planning a visit to the Museum, or to any of the WIADCA events, please note that there is limited parking Thursday through Labor Day weekend. Have a fun and safe one! 

For those of you unable to make it to Brooklyn for these festivities, you can tune in and vibe out with our 🔥  Caribbean-infused Spotify playlist.

🌴  Today's the day! Warm up for the WIADCA New York Caribbean Carnival Parade with our 🔥  Caribbean-infused Spotify playlist by Brooklyn-based DJ Sol Nova and meet us out on the Parkway!