“Intermittent Islands: Four Caribbean Women Artists”— featuring work by Belkis Ayón (Cuban), Yanira Collado (Dominican), Marielle Plaisir (France/Guadeloupe), and Lisa C. Soto (Jamaican and Puerto Rican)— opens on October 18, 2026, from 5:00pm until 7:00pm, at the Katonah Museum of Art (located at 134 Jay Street, Katonah, New York). This fascinating exhibition will be on view through January 24, 2027. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
Description: Intermittent Islands: Four Caribbean Women Artists features work by Belkis Ayón (Cuban, 1967-1999), Yanira Collado (Dominican, born 1975 in Brooklyn, NY; lives and works in Miami, FL), Marielle Plaisir (French and Guadeloupean, born in Le Havre, France; lives and works in Miami, FL), and Lisa C Soto (Jamaican and Puerto Rican, born 1969 in Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Ghana and Puerto Rico).
Together, their works intertwine the local and the global, combining history and autobiography. Confronting the experiences of displacement and diaspora, they celebrate the Caribbean’s complex past. Their respective practices speak to conditions of the contemporary world at large, allegorizing timely themes relating to identity, justice, disintegration, and wholeness that resonate widely today.
Ayón, Collado, Plaisir, and Soto are heirs to multiple traditions: Afro-Caribbean culture and religion, everyday life in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, France, Ghana, New York, and Miami; and the heroes and heroines of Black America. They construct stories of identity in ink and glue, textiles and construction materials, colors and textures. Ayón and Plaisir’s work is figurative; Collado and Soto’s is abstract. Practices of layering and intertwining – through collage, sewing, and crochet – play significant roles in their respective work. The Caribbean is an essential point of reference for all four artists—stimulating meditations upon place and displacement, memory and oblivion, while enacting rituals of synthesis and recovery.
Artists
Belkis Ayón (Cuban, 1967–1999) was a pioneering printmaker known for her innovative use of collography to create richly textured, monumental prints. Her works feature velvety blacks, brilliant whites, and luminous grays, depicting mysterious scenes inspired by Abakuá, an Afro-Cuban secret confraternity founded in 1836. A graduate of Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte, Ayón taught printmaking, curated exhibitions, and influenced contemporary Cuban printmaking. She exhibited internationally at the Havana, Venice, Kwangju, and San Juan Biennials. Her work is held in major collections worldwide, including museums in Havana, Los Angeles, and New York.
Yanira Collado (Dominican, born 1975 in Brooklyn, NY; lives and works in Miami, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes sculpture, installation, textiles, painting, drawing, photography, and sound. Informed by her Dominican heritage and experiences of place and cultural transmission, Collado often uses materials associated with construction, domestic life, and reuse. Her work explores how objects carry histories across time and geography, examining themes of memory, identity, labor, and cultural continuity. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited at institutions including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. Collado has received several honors, including a Latinx Artist Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Ellies Creator Grant, and South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.
Marielle Plaisir (French and Guadeloupean, born in Le Havre, France; lives and works in Miami, FL) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, textiles, film, and performance. Rooted in Caribbean and European histories, her work examines systems of power, race, class, domination, and social inequality. Drawing from historical research, literature, and lived experience, Plaisir connects past and present to reveal how inherited structures and narratives continue to shape society. Beauty is central to her practice, serving not only as an aesthetic language but also as a means of questioning, disrupting, and reclaiming representations historically linked to power. Plaisir creates spaces where critique, imagination, resilience, and alternative futures coexist. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections across the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean.
Lisa C Soto (Jamaican and Puerto Rican, born in Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Ghana and Puerto Rico) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, installation, photography, and site-responsive work. Her work explores place, identity, territory, and belonging, often combining natural and industrial materials in unexpected ways. Plants, soil, seeds, wire, Mylar, sound, and photography become elements of immersive environments that encourage viewers to reconsider relationships between human and nonhuman worlds. Soto has exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, including at the Museum of Latin American Art, Portland Museum of Art, and the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. She has lectured at MIT, the Ford Foundation, and Rutgers University.
“Intermittent Islands: Four Caribbean Women Artists”— featuring work by Belkis Ayón (Cuban), Yanira Collado (Dominican), Marielle Plaisir (France/Guadeloupe), and Lisa C. Soto (Jamaican and Puerto Rican)— opens on October 18, 2026, from 5:00pm until 7:00pm, at the Katonah Museum of Art (located at 134 Jay Street, Katonah, New York). This fascinating exhibition will be on view
