PHILIPSBURG–Curator, producer and writer Sasha Dees, who has been working in Amsterdam and New York for more than twenty years, is visiting St. Maarten/St. Martin until July 29. She is researching the sustainability of professional art practices and the influence of international (exchange) projects, funding and markets in the Caribbean.
Dees has been in the region since November 2017 and will be travelling until the end of 2018. She will be visiting Dutch-, English-, French- and Spanish-speaking islands to get a complete view of the region and take the different colonial histories and present political social systems into consideration.
She has visited Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Curaçao, Aruba, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and St. Croix so far, and now St. Maarten. She will continue on to visit Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Cuba and the Bahamas.
Dees’ research comes out of her own personal interest and practice and is not for scientific purposes. Her research has been made possible in part by Mondriaanfonds, the Dutch National Visual Art Foundation and by art practitioners who host her on the different islands.
In St. Maarten, Dees is hosted by Cultural Department head and National Institute of Arts co-founder Clara Reyes. They were introduced by St. Maarten-born visual artist Deborah Jack and met in person at the Tilting Axis Conference in the Dominican Republic this past May/June.
Dees is mapping out the art-infrastructure per island and is visiting, meeting and interviewing a wide range of people in the contemporary arts, such as artists, gallerists, curators, museums and other institutions, funders, collectors, art dealers, art historians and critics.
She is building a simple database of the people she is meeting and is sharing this network and access with everybody in it. Hogeschool voor de Kunsten art school in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is looking into making this database and mapping of the art infrastructure in the region a credited project for its students to work on in the curriculum for the department of Art and Economy.
They would digitalise, maintain and build upon the network Dees is building as an open source so the information can always be current and freely available to the art field in the region.
While travelling, Dees is also making connections between artists and organisations in the region that share similar visions and organize similar activities. To open up the art field in the region to a wider audience she is writing a weekly article for the Dutch Art E-zine Trendbeheer and a monthly article in English for Art E-zine Africanah.
She is daily posting works by artists who live and work in the Caribbean on Instagram and does frequent postings on her various social media outlets.
In 2019/2020, after her research, she will work on a book about her experiences travelling in the region, to be published by Amsterdam University Press.
Source: The Daily Herald https://www.thedailyherald.sx/islands/78823-research-on-sustainability-of-st-maarten-s-art-scene
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