"Moonlight: Pool" Collage Featured on the Cover of The Journal of West Indian Literature
My Moonlight collage, Pool graces the cover the November 2022 cover of The Journal of West Indian Literature edited by Dr. Ronald Cummings, Associate Professor of English Cultural Studies at MacMaster University, Canada.
I’m honored that my collage Pool is featured on the cover of the January 2024 issue of The Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL).
In his editorial preface, Dr. Cummings notes of Pool and my wider art practice:
“Like the discussions in this issue, Alleyne’s work also inhabits and reimagines a genealogy of representations of the Caribbean. In her discussion of Agostino Brunias’s well-known painting Three Caribbean Washerwomen, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley attends to how the women at the waterside, with their 'water-soaked women’s poses evoke a brown female sexual availability'... Alleyne’s work resists and responds to this view of both the landscape and Caribbean women’s bodies. Pool can also be seen as responding to Romare Bearden’s Caribbean collage paintings... Alleyne’s work reminds us that such representations have a history. It also reminds us that collage has history.”
Pool is part of my ongoing “Moonlight Blues” series and continues my commitment to centering Black women in moments of self-possession, play, and interiority. Unlike Brunias’s colonial “field studies,” which framed the bodies of enslaved Black people for the consumption of European audiences, Pool refuses the gaze entirely. Instead, it offers a composition in which Black women are not looked upon, but are simply being.
The comparison to Romare Bearden’s Caribbean collages, featured in the excellent art book, Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension By Richard Price & Sally Price, is one I deeply embrace. Bearden is a foundational influence on my practice; his tactile, improvisational approach inspired me to begin making collage using materials crafted by my own hands.
As a Barbadian and a creative writer, I’ve long admired The Journal of West Indian Literature, and I’m proud that Pool was chosen for the cover of this issue.
Read the full issue here.
