The following excerpts are from PREE magazine:
Kingston, Jamaica, March 21, 2025 — Today should have marked the opening of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition over three years in the making, at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, D.C. But on Feb. 14, just weeks before installation was set to begin, AMA officially cancelled the show, as directed by the Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), which administers the museum. PREE would like to take the opportunity to publish an interview with Andil Gosine by Aliyah Khan discussing the background and circumstances of the cancelled exhibition.
Aliyah Khan
On February 5, 2025, Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition of artwork by the Trinidadian artist with collaborators, and a second show featuring Black artists, were cancelled by the Washington, D.C. Art Museum of the Americas (AMA), an arm of the Organization of American States (OAS). Guyana and Trinidad, like many other Caribbean countries, are members of the OAS. Gosine talks to Aliyah Khan about the cancellation.
KHAN: Where did you grow up in Trinidad? How does the Caribbean influence your art and curation?
GOSINE: I grew up in George Village, Tableland, in South Central Trinidad. Those formative years influenced everything. I like to say I was taken to Canada at fourteen, because it was an involuntary migration. Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up to turning fifteen. The very last piece made for the exhibition is in part about the longer-term impact of migration at that age.
KHAN: What was your Nature’s Wild exhibition for the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) about? What is its connection to your book?
GOSINE: Nature’s Wild grew out of the book of the same name and addressed the same tensions: human-animal relations and histories of animalization and race in the Caribbean — how colonists, then postcolonial elites, put the onus on marginalized people to prove themselves human and “not-animal,” for example through dress codes, laws about sexuality, and definitions of citizenship.
KHAN: You curated a show with Trinbagonian artist Wendy Nanan at the OAS’s Art Museum of the Americas in 2020-21. Why did you choose to work with the AMA and OAS again?
GOSINE: The Wendy Nanan show was the Museum’s first show by a Caribbean woman and a Trinidadian. We worked well together on that show. I aspire to work primarily with public institutions, and this museum represents the people of the Americas. I also liked the space. The space is the basis of my imagination of the project. [. . .]
KHAN: Why was the Nature’s Wild exhibition cancelled? Who cancelled it?
GOSINE: There was no explanation given for the cancellation, not when the director called me at 9am on February 5, not in the letter the museum sent on February 14, nor in the response to my follow-up letter to the Permanent Mission of Canada to the OAS. I wrote to the Canadian Mission because of Canada’s membership in the OAS and their previously expressed enthusiastic support. [. . .]
For full interview, visit PREE, at https://preelit.com/2025/03/21/censoring-caribbean-artists-at-the-oass-museum-an-interview-with-andil-gosine/
[Shown above: “Magna Carta” (2025) by Andil Gosine, the signature image of the Nature’s Wild show.]
The following excerpts are from PREE magazine: Kingston, Jamaica, March 21, 2025 — Today should have marked the opening of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition over three years in the making, at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, D.C. But on Feb. 14, just weeks before installation was set to begin,
