“Queering Cane” Collages to Debut at Prizm 2017

Queering Cane: Almost There. Photo: Llanor Alleyne

I have been selected to participate in this year's Prizm Art Fair, which runs alongside Art Basel Miami this December. It is an honor to have my work included in a platform that continues to spotlight artists of the African Diaspora and global South, while also expanding the conversation around identity, belonging, and representation through contemporary visual language.

Prizm is now in its fifth year, and for the 2017 edition, the curatorial theme is "Universal Belonging." The exhibition brings together artists from across the globe, including the Caribbean, the United States, Africa, Europe, and parts of the Middle East. It offers an ambitious and necessary exploration of diasporic identities, postcolonial discourse, and transcultural connection. The theme resonates deeply with the direction my work has taken this year, and it has shaped the way I approached the pieces I am contributing to the show.

In anticipation of the exhibition, I began developing new collages during the summer while in New York. I returned to foundational materials—cut paper, ink, mylar, fragments of older works—to produce a series of preliminary studies that eventually evolved into the Queering Cane series. The earlier works, which I called the “Sugar Cane” sketch collages, were studies in silhouette, abstraction, and gesture. These forms became the scaffolding for something more pointed and personal: a visual investigation of same-sex love in the Caribbean, where queerness is too often silenced, criminalized, or forced into invisibility.

The Queering Cane series draws on the lush, vibrant, and often contradictory relationship between land and intimacy. Sugarcane itself is a recurring visual and conceptual motif throughout the work. In Caribbean history, sugarcane is tied to forced labor, colonial wealth, extraction, and suffering. Yet it also lives in our contemporary landscapes—as a crop, a symbol of sweetness, a familiar and enduring part of the terrain. In these collages, cane fields become sites of concealment and quiet contact. They are places of potential, of temporary safety, of watching and waiting.

I began working on “sketches” (preliminary collages) this summer in anticipation of making the Queering Cane series in the fall.

The silhouettes that appear throughout the Queering Cane works are often figures in motion or partial embrace. There is a recurring theme of holding and hiding, of offering and protecting. The figures are deliberately unidentifiable. They are not portraits in the traditional sense, but they suggest bodies that exist in relationship, in longing, in reflection. Their anonymity is not about erasure. Instead, it is a strategy of care and preservation. To protect is not to obscure, but to insist on complexity.

This body of work is personal, but it also belongs to a larger collective story. The Caribbean, as both place and concept, is not fixed. It is fluid, shifting, and deeply entangled with the effects of colonial legacy and present-day legislation. As a queer Caribbean woman, I know what it means to move through spaces where your existence is questioned, legislated, or rendered unspeakable. My response has been to make work that speaks back. The Queering Cane series is one way of doing that.

Creating this work in dialogue with the curatorial theme of "Universal Belonging" has helped me frame the series not just as protest or visibility, but as a language of care. Belonging is not only about being seen. It is also about being safe, being held, and being known without explanation. The cane field, in my work, becomes a metaphor for that possibility. It is not a utopia. It is not without danger. But it holds the potential for something softer, slower, and more intentional.

The invitation to participate in Prizm 2017 is meaningful in many ways. It is a space that brings together artists and ideas across continents and histories. It makes room for perspectives that are too often ignored or flattened in dominant art market narratives. I am proud to be contributing to a conversation that spans geographies but remains deeply rooted in personal and communal truths.