Artists, Aesthetics, and Migrations: Contemporary Visual Arts and Caribbean Diaspora in Miami, Florida.

Artists, Aesthetics, and Migrations: Contemporary Visual Arts and Caribbean Diaspora in Miami, Florida, is an ethnographic study about Miami-based visual artists, and the relationship between Miami and the Caribbean as it is realized visually. Miami is a diasporic city that has been built on the labor and visual culture of the Caribbean, and shaped into a transnational city by its role as a hub of Latin American and Caribbean migration and trade. However, a Caribbean presence is made to be invisible in much of the contemporary visual arts scene. In the political economy of cultural production, artists are rendered in different degrees of visibility based on their social location (e.g. race, gender, class) and suppositions about Caribbean art practice including expectations for “craft” artwork or subject matter (e.g. tropical landscapes). I argue that artists counter these practices by crafting their work to enact performances in the archive; making visible what is often made to seem invisible. While most studies of immigration attend to farm labor, domestic work, and familial relationships, this project turns attention to the field of artistic production. With attention to artists’ work and the socio-geographic terrain of the city, I detail the historic and contemporary relationship between Miami and the Caribbean, and show how artists’ works reflect and produce this experience in several ways: engaging the landscape; rethinking migrations; building practices based on diasporic legacies; and intervening in archives. Although tropes of tropicality attempt to silence the full range of visual realities, the works artists produce are not resigned to be exotic items in collections akin to the cabinets of curiosities of early scientists and explorers. Instead, artists act to render themselves visible. The very existence of the artwork changes the possibilities for how we understand migration and visuality, not only in Miami, but globally.PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100080/1/lspardo_1.pd