Tropical Frequencies
Upper Gallery at The Arts Center at Governors Island
On view through September 29, 2024
Tropical Frequencies is an exhibition featuring paintings, sculptures, and installations by Caribbean artists who channel and engage with alternate realms in their practices. These realms are heavily influenced by Caribbean culture, the tropics, passed-down stories, and the artists’ African and Indigenous roots. The artists tap into imagined, spiritual, mythical, ancestral, and ultimately, infinite realms. The art pieces act as a medium to connect with the Metaphysical. The basis of the exhibition explores how the process of making the work and the finalized piece serves as a portal and connection to the intangible— a transmutation that is learned and sourced from Caribbean traditions. The paintings and sculptures connect back to the islands through repurposed organic and manmade materials such as wood, sand, seashells, and clothing.
Curated by: Kiara Cristina Ventura, Founder of Processa
Artists Featured: Cheyenne Julien, Emily Manwaring, Bony Ramirez, mosie romney, Quiara Torres, Tiempo De Zafra
Artist Bios
Cheyenne Julien’s practice explores cultural and collective histories reflected through her own lived experiences. Often derived from memory, Julien’s paintings and drawings portray intimate subjects inspired by her closest relationships and life in New York City. Through portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, she highlights the interdependency of bodies and their contexts, focusing on the architectural settings and inanimate objects that impact daily routines. Grounded in the darker side of reality, but with a humorous bent, Julien’s work reveals the power of built environments to dictate racial perception.
Cheyenne Julien (b. 1994, Bronx, New York) lives and works in the Bronx, NY. She received her BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Smart Objects, Los Angeles; Water McBeer, New York; and American Medium, New York. Julien’s work has also been included in exhibitions at James Fuentes, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Canal Projects, New York; the Museum of the City of New York, New York; Paula Cooper, Palm Beach; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Galerie Hussenot, Paris; Hotel Europe, Zurich; Carl Freedman Gallery, Kent, UK; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; the Schlossmuseum, Linz, AUR; The Jewish Museum, New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; The Harvey Gantt Center, Charlotte; Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise/Unclebrother, Hancock, NY; Almine Rech Gallery, New York; Karma, New York; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and White Cube Bermondsey, London. Julien’s work is included in the collections of the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; RISD Museum, Providence; University of New Hampshire Museum of Art, Durham, NH; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Emily Manwaring was born in Queens, New York. As a senior in high school, she interned at The Studio Museum in Harlem where she immersed herself in the history of Black art and artists such as the works of Kerry James Marshall and Jamel Shabazz. Following The Studio Museum, she attended The Cooper Union to receive her BFA in Fine Art. Emily has since been featured in galleries and shows such as New Image (LA) Thierry Goldberg, Canada Gallery, Swivel Gallery, Cierra Britton Gallery,Venice Biennale (Italy), Arcteryx (Flatiron), to name a few. She has also been featured in articles for Artnet, JUXTAPOZ, It’s Nice That, ArtDaily, Office Magazine, Art News, and The New Yorker. She was most recently a visual arts resident at Abrons Arts Center.
I imagine my life in the Caribbean and the celebration of my culture. There is a revolution, storytelling, prayer, and freedom within the celebration. I think about painting and sculpture in the same way a musical composition is formed or a dance that is choreographed. I look at the amalgamation of notes that creates a symphony in a composition. A blast of sound and different senses emerge from my work. The rhythm of a paintbrush takes a viewer into a world that has textures within its terrain. Dancing through the winds of the island and experiencing the vibrancy of the colors and joyous energies takes you on a journey. My work is an ode to the precious spirits of the celebration within the diaspora of Black culture. I look to storytelling as a medium for language, communicating the experiences of my life and shared consciousness. Through rich and dazzling color, my work is composed of abundant beauty. The autonomy of one's body and love is important in my art. How can I embody someone's true essence through a painting or sculpture? Collaging allows me to gather images from the past and present to create a futuristic memory that encapsulates the journey of time. When you circle back to the work it feels as if you looked back at family photos of precious times with the love surrounding you. I think about looking in a window into the lives of the people I paint and the occasions they share. What would it visually look like if you combined all your memories together and had it be focused in one environment? The memories create a patchwork and textile pattern resembling the complexities of a quilt. These collages become offerings to the world and a renewable source of solace. I think about my work translating in materiality, how painting allows me fluidity, how cement and bricks allow me solidification, and how steel allows me luminosity. I’m interested in the worlds built within my work and how visual language communicates a memory and emotion. I hope my art is reflected within life around me.
Bony Ramirez was born in 1996 in Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic. He currently works in Jersey City, New Jersey. His rural upbringing in the Dominican Republic, his first encounters with Catholic imagery, and his deep interest in sources as varied as Italian mannerism, Renaissance portraiture, and children’s illustrations reverberate within and around the fictional characters he creates. If each figure appears to be transposed into a changing theatre of symbolic surroundings and backdrops, it is the artist’s technique that renders this possible. Ramirez creates his heavily stylized, proportionally distorted figures on paper, and adheres them onto wood panels featuring idyllic, colourful backdrops of Caribbean imagery. As Ramirez’s characters, developed separately and simultaneously in oil stick, paint, and coloured pencil, make their way onto his works, so too do various other symbolic appendages. Ramirez uses a variety of objects which either complement the playfulness and idyllicism of his work, such as colourful beads, or contrast it by penetrating it with violence, such as real knives stabbed into the canvas.
Bony Ramirez has exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others, and was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style category in 2023, and The Artsy Vanguard 2021. His work has recently been acquired by the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the X Museum in Beijing.
Bony Ramirez was born in 1996 in Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic. He currently works in Jersey City, New Jersey. His rural upbringing in the Dominican Republic, his first encounters with Catholic imagery, and his deep interest in sources as varied as Italian mannerism, Renaissance portraiture, and children’s illustrations reverberate within and around the fictional characters he creates. If each figure appears to be transposed into a changing theatre of symbolic surroundings and backdrops, it is the artist’s technique that renders this possible. Ramirez creates his heavily stylized, proportionally distorted figures on paper, and adheres them onto wood panels featuring idyllic, colourful backdrops of Caribbean imagery. As Ramirez’s characters, developed separately and simultaneously in oil stick, paint, and coloured pencil, make their way onto his works, so too do various other symbolic appendages. Ramirez uses a variety of objects which either complement the playfulness and idyllicism of his work, such as colourful beads, or contrast it by penetrating it with violence, such as real knives stabbed into the canvas.
Bony Ramirez has exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others, and was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style category in 2023, and The Artsy Vanguard 2021. His work has recently been acquired by the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the X Museum in Beijing.
Working in the space between figuration and abstraction, mosie romney uses painting as a portal through which to explore themes of self-perception and polychronic time. A worldbuilder informed by a background in set design and puppetry, romney stages fantasy worlds that disrupt our notions of nostalgia, memory, the archive, time, the past, and the present. Recontextualizing images from a multitude of sources including family photo albums found on the internet, movie stills, literature, screenshots, dreams, and an evolving cast of characters continually recycled from previous works, romney tells stories of empowerment and explores life as a multi-performative experience. Using fantasy as a tool to grapple with realities of daily life, romney’s work conveys the emotional disposition of living in a society where contact across boundaries is constantly in variance. In their 2022 interview with Ben Fama in BOMB magazine, romney states “I’ve been thinking about visibility and its complications, the satisfaction and limited subjectivity of seeing and being seen.”
romney received their BFA in Visual Art from SUNY Purchase in 2016 and have completed residencies with the Home School, Hudson, NY; Pocoapoco, Oaxaca City, MX; Painters Painting Paintings, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Spoleto, Italy, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others. romney’s work has been included in exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; Nicodim, Bucharest, RO, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; Greene Naftali, New York, NY; Gern en Regalia, New York, NY; Almine Rech, London, UK, and New York, NY; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Their work has been featured in articles in BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, T Magazine, and Juxtapoz, among others.
Quiara Torres is an Afro-Dominican self-taught artist from New York City currently based between NYC and the Dominican Republic. Her artistic practice incorporates painting, sculpture, installation, and musical composition. Through these mediums, she explores ancestral traditions of the Americas and Africa, challenging colonial legacies. Themes integral to her creative process include salvaging burlap and produce sacks, and re-contextualizing found materials into sacred art objects. Guided by surrealist ideas and intuitive interpretations, her work reveals symbolism through examining the natural world. She transmutes herself through animal & female portraits while echoing divine feminine iconography and other forms of spiritual tribute.
Quiara had her first solo show in New York City in 2018 at Five Myles Gallery and has shown internationally, including galleries such as Almine Rech, London, Shrine Gallery, NY, Meca Art Fair, DR, Focus Art Fair, NY, Wonzimer, LA, and Cantinca Tabacuru, NY. She has been featured in articles in Latina Mag. As a part of her community and curatorial practice, she also founded The Buena Suerte Arts Clubs residency in Santo Domingo.
TIEMPO DE ZAFRA is a multidisciplinary collective based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic co-founded by Edgar Garrido and Stephanie Rodrigues in early 2018. The collective aims to decontextualize what already exists and its perceived value by utilizing what they have available, and through it sparking a conversation about our consumption habits. TDZ’s approach to excess and waste is to reimagine it, elongating its lifeline and presenting different ways of thinking about our waste. Posing the question, “How can we create value out of things that will otherwise be discarded?” Framed within a contemporary lens, TDZ works these concepts to provoke a sense of urgency, incorporating found objects, textiles, photography, and video. The backdrop to their work is the Caribbean, which they call home. A place that comes with informality and a reality that more often than not feels magical. Much of their work is influenced by their environment working closely with the community to speak about consumption and waste through a global perspective.
Curator Bios
Kiara Cristina Ventura (born 1996) is a Dominican-American artist, curator, writer, and founder of PROCESSA. Hailing from the Bronx, Ventura has dedicated herself to curating spaces that illuminate and celebrate artists from marginalized communities, with a particular focus on Black and Brown artists under her platform, PROCESSA.
Ventura's journey began with a keen observation of the stark absence of representation for artists of color in both her art history education and the broader art world. In response, she has curated numerous impactful group exhibitions in collaboration with galleries, museums, and non-profit venues nationwide.
Founded in 2015, PROCESSA embodies Ventura's vision as a roving curatorial platform that fosters collaboration between galleries and artists. In 2021, PROCESSA expanded with the opening of its headquarters in Ridgewood, Queens, serving as an experimental studio space co-directed by Ventura and artist Kameron Robinson. Here, Ventura continues to champion the narratives of marginalized communities and artists of color through curated experimental events that bridge the gap between artists and the public.
Throughout her career, Ventura's curatorial prowess has graced esteemed institutions such as The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, The Bronx Art Space, Vis Arts Maryland, Penn State University, The Longwood Gallery at Hostos, The Andrew Freedman Home, Reparations Club LA, NXTHVN, and Sean Kelly Gallery. Her insightful writing has been featured in prominent publications including Art Forum, Performa Mag, Cultured Mag, Elephant Magazine, Teen Vogue, and Aperture.
Ventura's multifaceted contributions to the arts landscape continue to resonate, inspiring meaningful dialogue and fostering inclusivity within contemporary art.
PROCESSA (formerly ARTSYWINDOW) (est. 2015) is Ventura’s brainchild and continuous roving curatorial platform that collaborates with galleries and artists. Processa’s physical space in Ridgewood, Queens serves as an experimental studio and programming space run by Ventura along with artist Kameron Robinson. PROCESSA centers the narratives of marginalized communities & artists of color with the goal of creating curated experimental happenings to connect artists and the public.
Under her platform, she has taught mobile & digital art history classes about contemporary artists of color. She has previously taught at the Miranda Kuo Gallery, the Gavin Brown Enterprise, VICE headquarters, various artist & collectors’ living rooms, Ed.Varie, 8Ball Collective Headquarters, and Ghetto Gastro.
Her work has been written about in Afro Punk, Sugarcane, Gallery Gurls, Art Forum, Elephant Magazine, and Art Net.