Junkanoo Processional
Junkanoo Processional
Essays and in-depth interviews by Digital Junkanoo masqueraders with artists alongside, creative writing, literature, photo essays, and portfolios.
Managing Editor: Tatyana Tandapolie
: a book containing litanies and hymns for use in religious processions, especially at the beginning of a service.
: a musical composition (such as a hymn) designed for a procession
: a ceremonial procession
On the Brink: Nadia Huggins’ “Coral & Ash” Exhibition
In her New York solo exhibition debut, Vincentian artist Nadia Huggins invites viewers to the brink of climate disaster in the Caribbean to show them how people of the region adapt with it.
“Coral & Ash” opened to the New York University community and almost 200 RSVP’d guests on April 25. Photo credit to Manuel Molina Martagón unless otherwise stated.
When a strong wind blows through the lush, earthen bush of an island in the Caribbean, exposing the whitened undersides of broad-leafed plants like the heart-shaped dasheen, elders say that it’s about to rain.
The leaves, when upturned in anticipation of the impending rainfall, represent something about to happen, a kernel of Indigenous knowledge passed down through generations of Caribbean people turned metaphor in the everyday.
Such is the scene that Vincentian visual artist Nadia Huggins encountered while documenting environmental differences in the wilderness of Greiggs, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the sentiment encapsulated in the central image of her latest solo exhibition, “Coral & Ash,” in New York City.
“That's really something that I find is important for me to relate in my work,” Huggins said of the sense of prescience the leaves project. “It's like, ‘How do I translate this idea of film sequence into an image? What is that moment – the essential moment – that really tells that story of when something shifts, when there's a change in the environment?’”
The image of overturned dasheen leaves, from Huggins’ ongoing body of work, “Bush,” adds a pop of green to an otherwise blue-and-gray-toned exhibition, separating two sides of art photography that cover the two-story walls of New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s atrium in Washington Square. The exhibition, presented by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, opened last month and runs until Dec. 20.
Agency That Lives and Breathes
Having grown up in St. Vincent and lived in St. Lucia, the Trinidad-born, conceptual and documentary photographer considers herself Caribbean in an expansive sense. She endeavors in the show not to represent the Antilles but to paint a holistic picture of the region from the inside out to tell viewers that what they see “belongs to us,” she said.
“Coral & Ash” showcases work peppered with “visual signifiers,” like coconut trees, breeze blocks and shared body language, meant to remind any Caribbean viewer of home. Images from Huggins’ 2014 “Circa no future” climb the KJCC’s walls as they chronicle the erosion of Black Vincentian boys’ performances of masculinity during their familiar activity of diving beneath the sea’s surface.
Lead curator Dantaé Elliott, a PhD candidate in NYU’s Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature department, speaks with guests in front of the main exhibition wall during the “Coral & Ash” opening.
The gradual degradation of a coral reef, represented by the vivid turquoise pictures speckled with pinks and oranges of the Caribbean Sea from her coral surveys and acclaimed body of diptychs “Transformations,” cover the wall to the right of the overturned dasheen. To the left, the grand, billowing plumes of grays and dry-earth browns of the ashfall following the 2021 eruption of the La Soufrière volcano in St. Vincent, documented and compiled into Huggins’ “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” draw onlookers’ eyes.
Through the perspective of her images, the exhibition becomes at-once an ecological archive and an almanac of Caribbean people as they exist in their space, a point-of-view often omitted in traditional imagery of the Caribbean.
“Nadia's work refuses what I've called the ‘photographic capture’ of places and subjects that conform to the visual regimes of empire and tourism,” exhibition curator and Hemispheric Institute Director Dr. Ana Dopico said. “They affirm relation, intimacy, interiority, complicated memory, and experience. The images are not made to please, though they are stunning, they are made, it seems to me, to reveal a deep political relation to place, to self, to race, to climate.”
Hemispheric Institute Director and NYU Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese Ana Dopico speaks during the opening reception.
And they do.
Images of coral throughout the exhibition are tagged with coordinates of their approximate location, a call back to Huggins’ nine years of documenting the changes in the reefs. But the identifiers also became crucial when the wealthy investors behind the La Vue Hotel & Beach Club proposed to remove a living reef in St. Vincent’s Indian Bay, import additional sand for the beach and install an artificial reef in its place near the shoreline in 2021.
Huggins used the labeled images as evidence that the reef, presumed dead in the developer’s environmental assessment, was still alive. She built an online campaign displaying the coral at various stages in proper coloring, galvanizing her community to write letters of disapproval to the country’s planning board and helping to bring the development’s promise of upheaval to a halt.
“There's a kind of environmental prejudice that happens beyond just people; it expands as well to these multi species [of marine organisms], ultimately,” Huggins said of the ways imagery of the Caribbean invisibilizes those living in the region, adding, “Unless something is aesthetically pleasing to people, they don't quite understand it has a role in the environment.”
The photos of ash-covered leaves and thick plumes of smoke in the wake of La Soufrière’s eruption in northern St. Vincent also serve a political purpose, monitoring the explosion’s impact on the natural environment.
Huggins documented the fallout on the island, which was split into green, yellow and red zones based on the severity of the damage, intentionally excluding people from her shoots to subvert the photography that often exploits those affected by climate disaster.
Though the green zone in the southern part of the island where Huggins lives has almost completely recovered from the explosion, the Indigenous Garifuna and Kalinago communities in the north’s red zones are still navigating the impacts of the ashfall, facing displacement, changes to their river routes and a loss of access to the rest of the island when the Rabbaca River floods during the rainy season.
In the process of creating the body of work now known as “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” Huggins isolated her scope to her zone — opting instead to develop programs to help people in the north document their experiences — because she felt they weren’t hers to relate.
Her images propose a “kind of subtle insertion of agency that lives and breathes around our space,” according to lead curator of “Coral & Ash” Dantaé Elliott, who is Jamaican.
“She and the other people that are in the images know what's going on in and around the water there, or in the landscapes as it's changing, and they're learning to live with these changes as they’re happening because they’re evolving with it,” she said, speaking broadly of Huggins’ artwork.
The Art of Catastrophe
The exhibition was born from a guest lecture Huggins did on the La Soufrière eruption in 2021 — per Ph.D. student Elliott’s recommendation — in Dopico’s NYU seminar “Huracán,” which interrogated the hurricane and other environmental disasters’ impact on the Caribbean and the ways its people evolved with the catastrophes.
The course drew on the late Bajan cultural theorist, poet and former NYU professor Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that “art must come out of catastrophe,” inspiring Huggins to merge, for the first time, her latest work documenting the eruption and previous work capturing environmental issues during the class, Elliott said.
Shortly after the lecture, Elliott successfully recommended Huggins for the Hemispheric Institute’s Mellon Foundation-funded artist residency. Over the next two years, they developed the concept that became “Coral & Ash” through conversations centering their experiences as people from similar environments plagued by similar disasters.
“I always felt that I had never seen the Jamaica or the Caribbean that I knew when I was growing up. So I've always had that sensation of, ‘Okay, everything that I see about the space that I interact with comes from a gaze that's not what I connect with,” Elliott said of her reasons for admiring Huggins’ work.
“But especially with “Circa no future” and the other images…she is documenting a life that a lot of Caribbean people can connect with because it could be anywhere in the Caribbean,” she added.
Spoken-word poet Yaissa Jiménez performed a piece from her new poetry series, “Poemas de Protección.”
“Coral & Ash” invites viewers from other parts of the world to meditate on and deepen their knowledge of the region and its history, too. It creates an intentionally immersive experience enhanced by the transformation of an adjoining conference room into a reflective space where videos of Huggins’ nature walks and regular swims loop.
Its April 25 opening reception saw an expansive audience of NYU community members and nearly 200 RSVP’d guests, welcomed by what Elliot called the “ancestral power” brought forth in Afro-Dominican poet Yaissa Jiménez’s provocative performance of “Poemas de Protección” (Protection Poems) at the start of the event.
“[The reception] was great because a lot of different people from the diaspora came out — so from Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent, Haiti to Jamaica — so I still felt like I had a bit of a Caribbean community there,” Huggins said. “And people really connected to the work, even people who weren't necessarily from the Caribbean.
“I think it gave them an access point into the region to see us in a different way, and I think that was really, really, really special,” she continued, reflecting on the event and the exhibition from her home in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Clad in navy-blue, Huggins sat just off center, sipping tea from a vermilion mug labeled “hotter” in front of a wall littered with artwork blurred by her background filter.
Huggins welcomes the attendees and introduces the exhibition during the “Coral & Ash” opening reception.
She explained that the exhibition was the first time she’d ever been able to synthesize her work, especially that of the last four years, through an ecological theme. The show breaks down the perceived dichotomy between coral and ash — sea and land — instead offering a pointed reflection on their roles in the very fabric of the environment.
“Coral broken down turns into white sand, and ash is ultimately black sand,” she said. Both are geological formations that make up the island.
True, too, is that Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people in the Caribbean compose the island themselves, as evidenced through Huggins’ work. They live and evolve with the island, and the land lives and evolves with its people. Both tell fraught, yet sentimental stories of a cherished home residing on the brink of disaster amidst the rapidly progressing climate crisis.
With her recent trove of global acclaim, Huggins aims to direct her increased access to once-rare resources toward her calling: making work in and about the Caribbean to develop the photographic practice of the region and build communities to sustain it.
“I feel connected to this. I know it's important, not just from a personal point of view,” she said. “I feel a deep sense of responsibility to make images about here. It doesn’t necessarily have to be specifically about [St. Vincent and the Grenadines], but I've already kind of developed a language — a visual language — from the images that I'm encountering here.”
Nadia Huggins is one of Digital Junkanoo’s inaugural Art x Tech Fellows for 2022-23. To learn more about her work and practice, visit nadiahuggins.com. For more information about how to view the “Coral & Ash” exhibition, which is free and open to the public, head to the Hemispheric Institute’s website.
bibliography
Gugolati, Maica. “Landscaping with Nadia Huggins and Richard Fung.” Faire Monde(s), January 16, 2021.
Huggins, Nadia. “Nadia Huggins.” Accessed May 2023.
Huggins, Nadia. “nadiahuggins.” Instagram, 2011.
Muffson, Beckett. “Split-Screen Coral Photos Free This Artist from Her Body.” VICE, October 12, 2016.
Performance Artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Future Memory Masquerade
Performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow explores the rich African-derived tradition of junkanoo by reflecting on her Jamaican-American identity and immigration story in an August 2022 exhibition.
Performance artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow stands in front of a wall displaying the name of the exhibition. Photo credit to Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe unless otherwise stated.
When visitors entered Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow’s exhibit at FiveMyles art and performance space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York, they first saw the contrast.
The gallery opened at ground level welcoming passersby to peek inside. Colorful costumes added bursts of color to the gray room, hanging from the ceiling to evoke their invisible wearers: a bright red dress with a white bustle rested its hem on the floor, its back turned. Another crowned, gray-faced figure stood squarely, its bodice covered in strips of green and linen. The black cloaked member with rainbow-colored tresses followed just behind them, and the hand-drawn face engulfed by a rainbow of flowing fabric pieces dangled in-between.
Two sheer, white tapestries screen printed with the Jamaican and New York state coats of arms hung side-by-side in the back, acting as the imagined stage curtains from which the sculptures came.
The Jamaican and New York State Coats of Arms appear on two tapestries at the back of the exhibition.
The exhibition, “Junkanooacome,” began on Aug. 6, 2022 and ran until Sept. 4, bookended by the 60th anniversary of the performance artist’s home country, Jamaica’s, independence from British colonial rule and the return of the West Indian Day Parade. It’s the most recent installment of her four-year-old, ongoing and multi-media project of the same name, and a party-inspired ode to an African-derived tradition she holds as a forgotten remnant of her complex heritage.
“I wanted the audience to feel like they’re a part of this [street masquerade] – they're witnessing the ‘ghosts’ of this party,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said over the phone. “There are no figures physically in this space besides the viewer, but the costumes represent the ghosts of these junkanoo revelers from the past.”
Reveling in Resistance
A video projected on the wall to the right of the entrance showed Lyn-Kee-Chow dressed in black and white masquerade, a wide-brimmed hat featuring a miniature replica of the White House on her head. Just across the room, the White House sat on a pedestal beneath her character sketches, inviting viewers to interrogate the blueprints of the United States as a nation.
Save the use of the American landmark instead of a Jamaican plantation house, the costume resembled that of the 1837 lithograph "Jaw-Bone, or House John Canoe" by Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario, who’s 19th century Sketches of Character series captured Afro-Jamaican life and culture prior to emancipation.
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s Jack(ie) in the Green Character dangles in front of a series of character sketches from the early stages of the “Junkanooacome” project.
“Junkanooacome” draws on the “John Canoe” or junkanoo parade, a satire-laden masquerade and ceremony akin to carnival that’s held after Christmas throughout the Caribbean. The tradition began in the region as early as the 17th century when enslaved African participants gathered in costume to celebrate a rare day off and mock their enslavers.
Lyn-Kee-Chow derives her project’s title – meaning in Jamaican patwa “Junkanoo is coming” – from the chant of onlookers announcing the arrival of the masqueraders, who pose, dance and play the roles of regional characters like Devil, Pitchy Patchy and House Head. While junkanoo shares African-inspired costumes and a history of rebellion with carnival, the traditions differ in their popularity.
Carnival, though heavily commercialized compared to its early Afro-Indigenous influences, boasts parades from Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil to offshoots in the U.S, the UK, Canada and Japan. Junkanoo, on the other hand, is lesser known and less celebrated in the Caribbean outside of The Bahamas’ acclaimed, yearly festivities.
The red dress represents the Red, Set-Girls characters in Jamaican junkanoo. Lyn-Kee-Chow based the assemblage on Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837 lithograph “Red, Set-Girls and Jack-in-the-Green.”
“It’s a side effect of being colonized because even my parents didn’t grow up seeing junkanoo,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said of junkanoo’s relative obscurity in Jamaica. “It [was] a certain class of people that would hang onto this tradition and celebrate it, and it's the most Afrocentric in its form of celebration.”
Through an “Americanized” imagining of Jamaican junkanoo characters, she harnesses the festival’s foundation of resistance through revelry to highlight the afterlife of enslavement alongside the vibrant Afro-descendant histories born from it. The project’s handful of performances and workshops have called viewers to create costumes from scrapped materials, parade in mas bands down New York City streets and confront the remnants of slavery found throughout the city’s historical landmarks.
She seeks to revive the tradition and instill in her audience the value of the ritual for contemporary masqueraders. For them, junkanoo is a celebration of freedom, an homage to ancestors and a remembrance of their rich African lineage. For her, junkanoo is also a vessel through which she makes sense of the complex histories coloring her heritage and immigration story.
“I want people to have an understanding of [junkanoo] in some sense coming from someone who identifies as Jamaican but is also other things, other identities,” Lyn-Kee-Chow said.
Frozen in Time and Living a Life of Its Own
Born in Manchester, Jamaica, in 1975, Lyn-Kee-Chow spent her first 11 years on the island soaking in her cultures as best she could. Her grandmother’s mismatched home decor and her favorite Jamaican TV shows fill her childhood memories prior to her family’s migration to Atlanta, Georgia in 1986.
Their international move changed everything – her lifestyle, her sense of belonging, her family’s middle-class status. She recalls replacing the Jamaican pantomimes, Bruce Lee movies and Westerns she grew up on with American soaps and MTV in an effort to assimilate to her new surroundings, to gain a semblance of home in an unfamiliar place.
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s reimaginings of three Jamaican junkanoo characters — Horse Head, Pitchy Patchy and Wild Indian — stand in the center of the exhibition.
“To make that move for me was sad,” she said. “Of course, as a child I felt uprooted and just felt like a complete outsider, out of place, not able to relate to being completely African American obviously, not able to relate culturally.”
Though those early efforts to acclimate fell short, the sense of errancy migrating left her with became a comfort as she aged.
She recognized in it the synchronicity of her new life with those of the enslaved African ancestors who survived the trauma of the Middle Passage and centuries of forced labor during the enslavement era. And again, it appeared in the lives of her Chinese ancestors whose harrowing journeys to replace newly emancipated Africans as indentured laborers brought them to the island in the 19th century. Both were forced to settle in the unknown land she called home.
From that realization and the family histories that undergird it she draws the inspiration for the art and performances she’s created throughout her nearly 20-year career.
"Jaw Bone, or House John Canoe" is a lithograph from Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario’s 1837-38 series “Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica.” Photo from the Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora database.
“As an immigrant, my memory of my country of origin is both frozen in time and lives a life of its own, where it perhaps comes to represent something else entirely,” she writes on her website. “My goal is to pinpoint that ephemeral fleeting image of a once perfect landscape, and to celebrate Jamaica’s proud society.”
Lyn-Kee-Chow, now based in Queens, New York, makes critiquing first-world capitalism – from consumerism and hyper-tourism to colonial behaviors – the focal point of her work. She pulls on nostalgic memories of Jamaica, Caribbean folklore, feminism, environmentalism and globalism in her artistic process and incorporates wearable sculpture, drawings and readymade objects into her pieces.
Her most notable works – “Gypsies' Picnic: The veins of Oya was always here,” “8 years to Freedom,” “The Widow” and “Crop Killa Soca Social” – each follow that blueprint while investigating a different part of her identity.
And the School of Visual Arts faculty member has seen a plethora of acclaim over the course of her career. Since graduating from New World School of the Arts with a BFA in 1996 and from Hunter College with a MFA in 2006, she’s received five art awards and a handful of residencies, including her most recent with Wave Hill Winter Workspace in the Bronx.
Reworked Histories and Converging Identities
Since the installation’s closing in early September, Lyn-Kee-Chow has redirected her focus to newer projects. She’s playing three characters in the “Living Histories of Sugar” performance project, which seeks to challenge established historical narratives about sugar work and enslavement through the self-exploration of Caribbean and Scottish performance artists.
The first show of three debuted in Kingston, Jamaica, on Oct. 20, and the remaining performances, free and open to the public, took place in Greenock and Edinburgh, Scotland, on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28, respectively.
“I'm excited about it – it’s my acting debut, yes – and I'm making costumes for it and props and visuals,” she said.
But “Junkanooacome” will always occupy an invaluable space in her personal and professional journey.
A minimalist recreation of a ship carrying enslaved Africans saved from a previous “Junkanooacome” performance at Asbury Park in New Jersey sits on a ledge.
As just one part of the project, the exhibit stood at the convergence of her lived experience and her life’s work, an intersection represented by the less noticeable artwork on the outskirts of the space: the star of butterflies made from commemorative Jamaican $100 notes for a 2012 conference celebrating the island’s 50th anniversary of independence. The minimalist recreation of a ship made of nothing more than a white sail and a thin floorplan bearing silhouettes of the enslaved people packed tightly in its interior – a memento she saved from a previous performance. The coats of arms of her two homes hanging at the back of the room.
As a whole, while “Junkanooacome” honors Afro-Jamaican traditions of resistance and celebrations of freedom, it also stands as a ponderance of her identities, lineages and histories, a rumination on home and belonging as she makes sense of the Jamaicanness her migration made her leave behind and the Americanness it forced her to adopt.
“It's a way to reclaim agency and space when it comes to freedom, basically,” she said. “And, at the same time, it’s a way to honor my heritage and these traditions through the exploration of these characters.”
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s “ghost revelers” of junkanoos’ past reiterate a quotidian truth of our global community: everyone wears a mask. But in doing so, “Junkanooacome” also emphasizes the histories that brought the mask to the fore, reaching behind it to unearth the linkages that influenced its decoration.
Her work holds an architectural power that does not take space for granted. It channels what a delicate and sacred dance it is to create a space for ceremony in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. While so much was stolen, what was retained in gestures spurs new works of art and creative worlds celebrating Black life.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, in conversation with Digital Junkanoo Director Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, discussed “Junkanooacome” and her creative process in Digital Junkanoo’s first event on May 15, 2023. A transcript of the IG Live talk is coming soon. To learn more about Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work, visit jodielynkeechow.com.
bibliography
“2nd Day of Christmas – Jonkonnu.” Jamaica Information Service. Accessed October 18, 2022.
About Jamaica. “John Canoe (Jonkonnu/Junkanoo): The Whole Story.” About Jamaica, November 3, 2017.
Curina. “Meet Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow.” Curina. Accessed October 18, 2022.
FiveMyles. “Junkanooacome.” FiveMyles. FiveMyles, Inc, 2022.
Koster Walton, Chelle. “Jonkonnu, An Island Tradition.” Islands 7, no. 6, 1987.
Lambourn, Nicholas. “Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795-1849).” Christies.com. Christie's, 2020.
Lyn-Kee-Chow, Jodie. “Home.” jodielynkeechow, 2022.
Lyn-Kee-Chow, Jodie. “Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow.” Vimeo, 2009.
Lyn-Kee-Chow, Jodie. “Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow.” YouTube. YouTube, October 31, 2006.
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Tortello, Rebecca. “Christmas A Come.” Pieces of the Past. The Jamaica Gleaner, December 10, 2001.
Thompson, Krista. “Junkanoo Rush.” Caribbean Beat Magazine, May 19, 2020.
Yaniv, Etty. “Daughters of Lam at Fivemyles.” Art Spiel, May 13, 2021.