Caribbean Painting Is Having a Global Moment, and the Region Is Barely Banking It

From the auction rooms of New York to the biennials of Europe, Caribbean and diaspora artists are commanding serious prices. Very little of that market sits at home.

The work of Caribbean and diaspora painters has moved from the margins to the center of the contemporary art market, with figures from the region and its diaspora shown by major galleries and collected at prices that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The subject matter, light, migration, history, the body, reads as universal and unmistakably ours.

The trade, though, happens elsewhere. The galleries that set the prices, the fairs that make the reputations and the auction houses that record the results are in New York, London and Basel. A painting can be about a Caribbean childhood and still generate its entire economic value abroad.

There are signs of a home market forming, in the galleries of Kingston, Port of Spain and San Juan and in a slowly growing base of regional collectors. Building it out is the unfinished work. A region that produces the art but not the market keeps exporting the value along with the canvas.