Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. proposes ways in engaging with the Caribbean that both complicate and broaden the ways the region is frequently understood in the West and beyond. The seven titles below—which touch on topics such as the history, geopolitical realities, climate, and art of the region—have informed not only the exhibition but the economies, culture, and politics of the world at large.
1. Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016) — Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Jelly-Schapiro’s decade-long odyssey threads Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad and beyond to show how the Caribbean—birthplace of plantation capitalism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade—shaped modern politics, music and culture. With wit and deep scholarship, he replaces tourist fantasy with a people-centred history of the 40-million-strong archipelago he calls “the place where globalisation began.”
2. Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography (2012) — eds. Melanie Archer & Mariel Brown
Featuring more than 200 images by 18 photographers, this volume moves past postcard beaches to reveal the English-speaking Caribbean’s layered social, racial and political realities. Anchored by O’Neil Lawrence’s critical essay, it reframes “paradise” as a site of contested memory—perfectly mirroring how Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt. unsettles the region’s idyllic veneer.
3. Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today (2023) — Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Gathering work by 28 artists who live in—or move through—the Caribbean, this exhibition catalogue treats the region less as a fixed geography than as a weather system of ideas. Using migration, hurricanes and the Haitian Revolution as through-lines, it shows how Caribbean forms forecast global questions of identity, colonial legacy and climate precarity.
4. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (2007) — Krista A. Thompson
Tracking the birth of Caribbean tourism in the 1880s, Thompson shows how colonial promoters staged Jamaica and the Bahamas as postcard “tropics,” hiring photographers to mint the palm-tree paradise that still circulates worldwide. Her 100-image study reveals how those pictures remade local landscapes—imported flora, segregated beaches—and scripted Black islanders as scenery, a colonial gaze today’s artists continue to unmask.
5. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015) — Krista A. Thompson
From Kingston dancehalls to roadside portrait booths, Thompson shows how performers chase the camera’s flash—bling, mirrors, even skin-bleaching—to be seen. She argues the real art lies in staging for light, not the finished photo, revealing “shine” as a currency of memory, modernity and status across Caribbean and U.S. Black visual culture.
6. Hurricane Season: Caribbean Art + Climate Change (2024) — Des Moines Art Center
With 58 works by Firelei Báez, Hew Locke and four fellow artists, this catalogue translates storm data and colonial aftershocks into vivid, human-scale narratives of loss and repair. Essays, poetry and mixed-media installations recast hurricanes as both climate emergency and legacy of extraction—an urgent echo of Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.’s meditation on environmental violence and Caribbean resilience.
7. Fragments of Epic Memory (2022) — Art Gallery of Ontario
Edited by Julie Crooks, this exhibition catalogue brings together 200+ prints, postcards, daguerreotypes and photo albums from the Montgomery Collection (1840-1940) with essays and contemporary artworks that revisit them. By setting post-emancipation images beside modern Caribbean practice, the book shows how photography carries “epic” memory forward, reshaping diasporic identities across time.
Happy reading!
Land. Sea. Sugar. Salt.: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean is on view in Remai Modern’s Feature Gallery until August 17, 2025.