Contemporary Art
With rapid socio-economic advances transforming the Cayman Islands from a small maritime society to a financial mecca in less than 50 years, there have been significant repercussions within our wider culture, its expressions, and material testimony. The Islands’ contemporary artists are responding to these changes by creating work that is both critically engaged and culturally affirmative, seeking to explore the impact this has had on their sense of self, and on the wider concepts of national identity, through a series of personal and social narratives. Some create from a deeply introspective viewpoint via memory, family, language, and personal mythology, while others address the wider, often highly contested, notions of immigration, political status, ethnicity and race, rights of citizenship, urban development as well as erosion of tradition. Executed in a wide range of media, they are challenging existing borders and continuing to articulate new meanings for contemporary Caymanian identity.
