Title: Diaspora

Size: 36’’x48’’

Materials: Paper, Paint, Hot Glue, Black Rhinestones, Gold Leaf, Canvas

The art piece below is the artwork I created while creating a tasting menu based on works of art by the Italian-English painter Agostino Brunias, who emigrated to Dominica, and the French painter, Le Masurier, who emigrated to Martinique.

These two painters were instrumental in understanding, classifying, and ranking human beings according to their skin color. The tools utilized by these painters encompassing art history, science history, and political history, are indispensable in the historical investigations regarding race. Their ideal of landscapes and interactions among individuals of different ethnicities and social spheres attempted to counteract the brutality of reality.

The artwork I created is my interpretation of their works of art. The patterns created by the paper are meant to be an interpretation of Impressionism, a style of painting that these artists may have been influenced by. The colors are taken directly from their works as they used a greenish-blue-black and pops of a copper-like color. The division between the two sections is meant to represent the division among people, and the cavernous area represents the population of people who fall between two worlds and will never be able to fully integrate into one population.

Find more information about this piece under the Tasting Menu tab.