With FUZE, John Cox Is Carving Pathways Between the Caribbean’s Scenes and the Broader Art World
Observer ·
Now in its fourth edition, FUZE Caribbean Art Fair is helping position the Bahamas as a meeting point for the region's artists, collectors and global arts institutions. Beyond the booths, a network of museums, artist-run initiatives and corporate partnerships is laying the foundation for a more robust and visible cultural ecosystem.
Judging by the exhibitions, art fairs and biennials of the past year , the art world has turned its gaze toward the Caribbean. Long underrepresented and even overlooked in institutional narratives, the region is gaining attention, with multiple shows and sections dedicated to its artists, while the colonial histories and maritime routes connecting its islands to the rest of the world are increasingly entering curatorial discourse. The Caribbean section was probably the best part of this year’s Armory Show , and one of the few things people will remember about it. A large number of the artists in the 2026 Venice Biennale were from the Caribbean or connected to the region, and its curatorial framework was grounded in the writings of Caribbean philosophers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau , both from Martinique. The Bahamas’ inaugural pavilion was among the 10 most reviewed national pavilions.
What can the world learn from the Caribbean today? Plenty. As one of the first regions to experience what Glissant called creolization—a more or less forced hybridization of cultures and identities, shaped in equal parts by mobility and displacement—the Caribbean’s past can tell us quite a bit about our present. But first, the wider world must move past the longstanding Caribbean stereotype that positions the islands as little more than a tropical paradise of leisure and pleasure.
In an intense 48 hours of discovery, Observer experienced the Bahamas through the eyes of its contemporary artists, whose work engages with the past and present of the country and the broader region. Now in its fourth edition, FUZE Caribbean Art Fair connects that region, positioning the Bahamas as a meeting point where Caribbean artists, galleries and cultural institutions can gain international visibility.
Behind it is John Cox , a Bahamian artist who has become a cultural producer on multiple fronts, working for more than a decade to promote Bahamian art, curating exhibitions at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and driving the country’s inaugural pavilion in Venice. “I think the Bahamas is in a unique place, geographically and systemically, for the world to see the Caribbean, creating a meeting point for the region. For the region to come here, for the world’s eyes to be on it, and for people in the diaspora who’ve been operating there for the last 20 or 30 years to have another platform,” Cox told us.
Despite its population of fewer than half a million people, the Bahamas has produced artists who operate internationally at a remarkably high level, and it is uniquely positioned to become a regional meeting point capable of attracting global attention. The breadth of Caribbean creativity is vast, though long overlooked, Cox emphasized: “What is unique about Bahamian and Caribbean creativity is the scale… how do I say it? We can creatively and culturally punch way above our weight.”
Part of the Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival, FUZE featured the work of more than 100 artists from over 20 galleries, museums and cultural institutions. Upward of 10 Caribbean nations as well as the wider Americas, Africa and the U.K. were represented. Several booths were solo presentations, while the thoughtfully curated “Mediums” sections featured group presentations organized by medium—Fabric, Object, Light, Clay, Painting and Paper—which let artists participate with just a single work.
This year’s theme, “Coming Home,” was an invitation to return to a place of familiarity, safety and belonging. “It speaks to the need to be seen, supported, and embraced by community, while also reflecting a broader contemporary longing for identity, stability, and connection in an increasingly fractured world,” read the introductory text. It resonates with a broader movement among Caribbean artists and creative professionals who, after years spent studying and building careers abroad, are returning to the region or strengthening their ties to it, contributing to local cultural ecosystems while pursuing international visibility from within.
Among the established artists at the fair was Lavar Munroe, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow who, after years spent abroad, now divides his time between Baltimore and Nassau. Represented by Chicago’s Monique Meloche, Munroe populates his mixed-media paintings and installations with fantastical hybrid creatures that draw on the symbolic richness of Caribbean cultural traditions and mythologies, rendered in an expressive, often layered visual language. A participant in Okwui Enwezor ’s main exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Munroe also represented the Bahamas in its pavilion alongside the late John Beadle .
Another returnee is Barbadian photographer and fashion designer Junior Sealy , who studied in Toronto and established himself in the international fashion industry before moving back to Barbados. In his solo booth, vividly staged photographs and evocative mixed-media collages celebrate Rastafarian identity and community, elevating its cultural expressions beyond the stigma and stereotypes that have long surrounded them.
Several Caribbean galleries took part, from the expanding Bahamian scene and beyond. Downtown Nassau’s Sixty2Sixty presented young Bahamian artist Yutavia George with a series of abstract works exploring identity and the shifting relationship between the body and its environment. Now pursuing a second MFA in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, George moves fluidly among painting, performance and installation, investigating the visibility and invisibility of labor and the traces physical activity leaves on bodies and spaces. Her expansive canvases are animated by a gestural abstraction that evokes at once the rhythms of nature, the blossoming of a forest and the ebb and flow of ocean waves.
Another Bahamian participant, ICE Gallery, brought together the ceramic practices of Ricquel Rolle and Jamaican artist Anna-K Cuffe in a presentation where land and sea converged in a reflection on migration, roots, belonging and return. Born in Philadelphia to a family of Bahamian heritage, Rolle is another artist who chose to come home, settling in Nassau in 2023 after studying psychology in the U.S. Clay became her medium for exploring processes of personal healing and transformation, materially and sensually, resulting in hand-built ceramic figures, predominantly women, suspended in intimate rituals of reconnection with their bodies and the natural world. In dialogue with them were intricate coral sculptures by Cuffe, a ceramicist, reef-rescue diver and ocean activist who translates the delicate structures of underwater ecosystems into clay. Beautifully articulated and elaborately glazed, her sculptures trace the effects of environmental degradation.
Across the aisle, several works were similarly rooted in the local ecosystem, often informed by the tropical warmth, celebratory spirit and abundant energy of nature. Presented by The Current: Baha Mar Gallery & Art Center (which Cox oversees as executive director), Lynne Parotti ’s vibrant botanical paintings from “The Rewilding of Aquabotanica” flourished in an immersive environment, with artist-designed imagery wrapping the booth and extending her tropical landscapes into the space.
One of the Bahamas’ leading contemporary galleries, TERN, brought multiple presentations of homegrown talent, from a two-person booth featuring Melissa Alcena and Delton Barrett to solo booths for April Bey , Blue Curry and Steven Schmid . Alcena and Barrett’s booth set their distinctive photographic perspectives in conversation, capturing the islands’ natural and emotional landscapes beyond familiar tropical imagery. April Bey’s solo project showcased the richness of her vibrant Afrofuturist and Afro-surrealist practice, which combines Bahamian cultural references, pop culture and feminist critique, often unfolding within Atlantica, the fictional planet through which she reimagines Black identity, beauty and alternative systems of power.
Particularly engaging was the presentation of Toronto-based Bahamian artist Steven Schmid, whose playful hybrid figures emerge from an experimental process of painting, collage and assemblage. Drawing on the logic of hip-hop sampling, he combines fragmented bodies and visual references into unexpected configurations that question conventional representations of masculinity and identity in Bahamian society. Even more experimental was Blue Curry’s presentation, which hovered somewhere between a souvenir shop and a concept store, featuring an entire line of clothing, accessories and other objects in a parodic display that challenged the exoticized image of the Caribbean and the expectations the visitor economy imposes on the region.
Now a regular at international fairs, including Art Basel Miami Beach this December, TERN was founded by Amanda Coulson , former executive director of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and co-founder of VOLTA Art Fair, with Lauren Holowesko Perez and artist-curator Jodi Minnis-Rolle .
Bahamian artist Anina Major ’s second solo show with the gallery connects directly with the fair’s theme. Titled “Soon Come Home” and inspired by Jamaican author Erna Brodber ’s novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home , the exhibition asks: “What does it mean to find one’s way back?” Rather than imagining home as a fixed geography, Major approaches it as something continuously reconstructed through memory and inherited traditions.
Ceramic versions of straw vessels sit at different heights on pedestals like archaeological relics of a vanishing tradition, their shifting forms and partly fragmented structures suggesting a continuous tension between erosion and erasure. Alongside them are some of the artist’s straw dolls, translated into ceramics and glass. After moving to the U.S., Major came across a Bahamian straw doll at a flea market priced at just $2—a discovery that prompted her to reflect on how easily the cultural and emotional value of an object, and the ancestral knowledge embedded in its making, can be lost when it is uprooted from its context and reduced to a commodity.
Straw plaiting has been central to Bahamian cultural and economic life for centuries. Rooted in techniques passed down by generations of artisans, particularly women of African descent, the practice originally served everyday needs, producing baskets, hats, fishing traps and other utilitarian objects. With the expansion of tourism in the 20th Century, these crafts became one of the country’s most recognizable cultural exports, supporting generations of Bahamian women and their families through the historic Nassau Straw Market. Yet the same tourism economy that helped the industry flourish has also contributed to its gradual erosion, as cheap imported souvenirs replace locally handmade goods and ancestral techniques risk disappearing.
In December 2014, Nassau joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a City of Crafts and Folk Art, recognizing the cultural importance of straw craftsmanship and of the Junkanoo festival, another defining Bahamian tradition. Junkanoo also surfaces in works on view downstairs at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) in “The Gaulin Woman: Uncovering Our Bahamian Selves.” Honoring writer, cultural historian and arts advocate Patricia Glinton-Meicholas , who played a pivotal role in developing the Bahamian art scene, the show features vibrant works by artists of Generation ’80, who forged a distinctly Bahamian visual language drawing in part on Junkanoo’s explosive colors, rhythmic energy and collective creative processes.
Appointed curatorial director of the NAGB in January, Minnis-Rolle is also behind a brilliant exhibition on the second floor, “A Sum of Parts.” Through the work of contemporary artists, it offers valuable insight into Bahamian culture and history as shaped by migration, colonization, mobility and displacement, but also animated by a powerful sense of cultural retention and resistance that has allowed the archipelago’s ancestral knowledge to survive and be revived through contemporary practice.
Major’s sculptures reappear in the exhibition alongside poignant works by key Bahamian and Caribbean artists, many of whom are also presenting at the fair, including Tracy Assing , John Beadle, Stan Burnside , William Colebrooke , Jacob Frank Coonley , Tyrone Ferguson , Tamika Galanis , Kendal Hanna , Denis Knight , Cardo Knowles , R. Brent Malone , Jace McKinney , Sanford Sawyer , Carol Sorhaindo , Dave Smith , Clive Stuart , Edrin Symonette , Katrina Vanderlip , Elyse Wasile , Tessa Whitehead and Homer Milton Williams .
One of the works that most directly, yet wittily, exposes the historical dynamics that have long obscured a fuller understanding of the Caribbean is Sonia Farmer ’s installation A True & Exact History (2018). Challenging sanitized narratives of colonial history, Farmer assembles a constellation of postcards and narrative fragments, using erasure to rework Richard Ligon ’s 1657 A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados , extracting and reversing its meaning to reveal the realities the original concealed.
The NAGB building bears the traces of this intricate colonial history. The museum occupies Villa Doyle, an elegant Palladian-style mansion built in the 1860s by Sir William Henry Doyle, the first Bahamian-born resident to be knighted and a former chief justice of the Bahamas. Saved from demolition and extensively restored before opening as the National Art Gallery in 2003, the building has since been reclaimed as a public space dedicated to preserving and reinterpreting Bahamian cultural identity. Yet its history and architecture impose significant limitations on an institution seeking to serve as a contemporary platform for envisioning the country’s future through its artists.
The museum has expanded its cross-disciplinary programming into The Suite at The Current: ECCHO, Baha Mar, and, as Cox shared, conversations are underway about a new space better suited to larger contemporary exhibitions, which could allow Villa Doyle to focus more specifically on the country’s post-independence artistic identity.
At FUZE, one soon realizes how many themes, experiences and even symbolic and archetypal sensibilities are shared across the region. Despite the distinct colonial trajectories that tie Caribbean countries to different parts of the world, similar processes of creolization and cultural retention continue to shape their artistic production.
Havana-based Bordón’s Studio, a family-run gallery and creative space, presented the work of painter Edel Bordón Mirabal ; his wife, sculptor Yamilé Pardo Méndez ; and their son, photographer Pablo Víctor Bordón Pardo . A longtime professor at Havana’s historic San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Bordón has developed a distinctive figurative language in which surreal scenes become allegories of Cuba’s complex historical and cultural identity. Weaving together mythology, spirituality and everyday life, his paintings depict symbolic narratives poised between reality and imagination, moving through a dreamlike space where ominous revelations emerge. Among the works on view was Isla a la deriva , in which ascending human figures evoke the uncertainty of an island adrift, caught between displacement and the possibility of rising above today’s difficult historical reality.
In a separate booth, Yamilé Pardo Méndez presented sculptures with an almost ritual presence, transforming familiar domestic materials into forms charged with symbolic associations. One circular composition, assembled from metal bed frames, evoked the Ouroboros, a traditional symbol of cyclical time, destruction and regeneration. Pablo Víctor Bordón Pardo showed a photographic series that experiments with HDR processing and deliberate digital glitches, exaggerating colors, contrasts and distortions until the documentary truth of the image becomes increasingly uncertain.
Participating has not been easy for Bordón’s Studio, yet the gallery returned for a third consecutive year, with its artists carrying all the works on the flight over. Cox acknowledged that the logistical challenges of organizing a genuinely regional fair remain considerable. Paradoxically, it can be easier for a gallery based in Canada or Belgium to exhibit in the Bahamas than for one from another Caribbean country, given the varied customs regulations, transportation routes and economic circumstances across the islands.
To address these disparities, FUZE covers a significant share of participation costs and offers incentives to lower barriers to entry, including free booths for participating galleries and artists, occasionally relying on the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas to facilitate the importation of artworks. The aim, according to Cox, is to build the fair’s credibility and regional network before gradually transitioning to a more financially sustainable model.
The Bahamas’ membership in the Commonwealth and its special trade relationship with the United States also make it a potentially advantageous location for an international fair. FUZE has attracted a growing number of American galleries, including Baltimore’s Galerie Myrtis, which presented Lavett Ballard and Damilare Jamiu Kanyinsola , and New York’s Richard Beavers Gallery, which made its debut at the fair after its artist Desmond Beach won the FUZE x SCOPE Residency Prize last year.
FUZE has established a partnership with SCOPE in Miami, resulting in an entire section, the “Blue Floor Project,” which brings a curated selection of Caribbean contemporary art to Miami Art Week. Last year, 20 artists from FUZE’s third edition were selected for the Miami presentation, and for the second year running, the collaboration also offered SCOPE collectors a VIP trip to FUZE. Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) also had a booth at FUZE, and its director, Franklin Sirmans , took part in programming throughout the weekend. Yet another cross-border collaboration involved Toronto’s OCAD University, whose students took part in a creative exchange in Nassau.
Among the most ambitious international exhibitors was U.K.-based DēpART Consultancy, which showed Royal College of Art graduate Emily Alice Mitchell , a young British artist of Trinidadian and Scottish heritage whose multidisciplinary practice explores memory, migration and the ancestral connections that survive geographical displacement. Raised in London, Mitchell draws extensively on family archives, particularly photographs, recordings and objects inherited from her grandmother, who migrated from Trinidad to Britain in 1967. Through digital manipulation, collage and photography, she brings images from different eras and generations into dialogue, recovering fragments of personal and collective history that might otherwise be lost. In Maracas Beach Prayer (2026), two photographs of the same Trinidadian beach, taken by Mitchell and her grandmother 30 years apart, collapse temporal distance into a shared landscape of memory. Ocean tides recur as a metaphor in her practice, at once separating her from her ancestral homeland and sustaining connections that transcend physical distance.
As the hybrid trajectories of TERN’s founders and Cox suggest, the Caribbean art ecosystem does not observe the rigid distinctions between roles and institutional levels found in more established art centers. Cultural practitioners often take on multiple responsibilities to build and expand local infrastructure. At FUZE, galleries are joined by organizations, institutions, collections and even corporations committed to raising the visibility of Caribbean artists, many of whom lack formal representation.
A group of very young artists independently ran the booth of Pro Gallery, an experimental exhibition space affiliated with the University of The Bahamas, which mounted a presentation of small-scale works offering a glimpse of the next generation of local talent. Established in 1996 as the College of The Bahamas Art Gallery by artist Antonius Roberts , the space was later developed by Cox, who joined the university’s art department in 1997. It has since become an important platform where students, faculty and emerging artists experiment, exhibit and develop their practices, opening the Bahamian art scene to younger voices.
ICE Gallery is the Incubator for Collaborative Expression, established by Roberts, a pioneering figure in Bahamian art. In 2019, Roberts began transforming a former ice factory in Nassau into his studio, which soon evolved into a multidisciplinary creative hub offering workspace, mentorship and residencies for local and international artists.
Roberts’ own practice is deeply rooted in Bahamian heritage and its ancestral connections to West Africa. Known for his almost totemic wooden figures, he often works with reclaimed trees and discarded materials, channeling an ancestral relationship with nature to transform them into symbolic, archetypal sculptures. When we spoke at his studio, he recalled his mother telling him that his umbilical cord was buried beneath a tree, an intimate connection to the land that resonates throughout his practice.
Roberts is another central figure in the development of the Bahamian art scene, not only as an artist but through decades of advocacy, teaching and institution-building, including playing a role in the establishment of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. He describes himself as a “cultural specialist” more than just an artist, acknowledging that in the Caribbean, cultural practitioners often take on multiple roles to sustain the artistic ecosystem.
Before establishing ICE, he restored Hillside House, a 19th-century building on Nassau’s Cumberland Street, transforming it in 2012 into an artist’s studio and cultural center. During our visit, the exhibition “Good Company” reflected this communal spirit, bringing together drawings produced in workshops led by local artists.
The Central Bank of The Bahamas also had a booth at FUZE, with a multilayered exhibition marking the journey, book launch and world premiere of Bahamian trumpeter and composer Giveton Gelin ’s new jazz album, Island Dreamer . Alongside it was a curated selection of works by artists and photographers he has collaborated with in recent years, including photographs by Rampo and Heath M. Grout and digital artwork by Cayden Coleby . Born and raised in the Bahamas, Gelin graduated from the Juilliard School in New York in 2021 and has since emerged as one of the most compelling voices of his generation.
The presentation was part of the Central Bank’s Arts and Culture Program, which, through annual competitions, exhibitions and acquisitions, has played a crucial role in supporting Bahamian artists and building an institutional collection. Launched in 1984, its competitions often support artists early in their careers, and then the bank continues to acquire their work as they gain recognition, as resources allow.
On view at the bank’s gallery during our visit was “Grey Matters,” an exhibition dedicated to Bahamian artist Dave Smith, who has 551 works in the bank’s collection. Better known for his vibrant, Pop-inflected paintings, Smith was exhibiting the drawings and visual collages he began developing during the pandemic, which carry a similar sociopolitical charge. Layering images, spaces and temporalities, these compositions juxtapose historical events with contemporary political and social realities, reflecting on the unsettling recurrence of similar tragedies across generations.
From its first edition, FUZE has secured corporate sponsorship across three key sectors: banking through Scotiabank, communications through BTC and hospitality through Baha Mar, where the fair takes place. Four years in, Cox said that conversations with institutions and government are improving, particularly after the resonance of the Bahamas’ participation in Venice, but substantial longer-term planning is needed. For that to happen, public authorities and investors must first recognize that cultural value cannot be measured solely by direct sales or revenue per square foot. They must also weigh its long-term impact on building capabilities and opportunities, as well as its potential as a diplomatic tool for raising the Caribbean’s profile in global conversations.
These concerns were addressed during the panel, “Caribbean Pathways to the Venice Biennale,” which brought together Cox, Dr. Krista Thompson , Lavar Munroe and Annalee Davis (a Barbados-based artist included in the Biennale’s main exhibition) in a conversation moderated by Minnis-Rolle. Beyond calling on Caribbean governments to recognize the region’s contribution to global culture, the discussion raised the more pressing question of how to build institutional structures capable of sustaining that visibility over time.
Thompson cited Zimbabwe’s longstanding participation in the Venice Biennale as a useful model, highlighting the role of the country’s National Gallery in developing an internal curatorial team and a more consistent pipeline for future presentations. Cox emphasized that the issue extends beyond individual exhibitions to the broader challenge of securing reliable cultural funding and institutional support.
As he reiterated in our conversation, the goal is to create a year-round ecosystem connecting FUZE, galleries, museums and international platforms such as the Venice Biennale, so that the visibility generated by one event translates into lasting opportunities for artists across the region. “What we’re trying to do is carve canals between existing bodies of water,” Cox explained. “The success of the Biennale informs the success of FUZE, which informs the success of the independent spaces that are moving through the conversation.”
The fair’s resort setting situates it in the destination economy, with FUZE running alongside the Bahamas Culinary & Arts Festival, now in its fifth edition. While the model makes sense in theory, it remains to be seen whether visitors drawn by the culinary festival can be converted into art buyers. Cox emphasized that his aspiration is not to create another Art Basel but to keep the platform oriented toward artists and people: “I want the fair to remain about human beings in the creative community. I want it to be artist-focused. I want it never to lose a kind of studio sensibility. I come from that making space. I’m not an academic. I’m not an art historian. I want the fair to feel like the energy of a studio that people are drawn to.”
Cox was equally firm in asserting that the Caribbean will always remain at the center, keeping the event rooted in the Bahamian and broader regional ecosystem. The longer-term ambition is for FUZE to be recognized as a Caribbean-focused platform comparable in function, if not in scale, to major international fairs, with a regional network and opportunities for exchange. “We’re carving, like the first thing I said, between existing bodies of water. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re making the water connect so the tides can rise and fall together. That’s the goal.”
Already answering FUZE’s call for regional exchange are the National Gallery of Jamaica and Campus Caraïbéen des Arts, an art school in Martinique, as well as foundations such as the recently launched ABIRAC Contemporary Foundation, dedicated to contemporary Caribbean art and its diaspora. Founded and directed by Ziggi Golding , the foundation presented photographs by Savannah Baker , black-and-white images from Renée Cox’s early Last Supper series and Victoria Ruiz ’s colorful costume performances.
Ironically, FUZE’s continued growth will likely be contingent on attracting more collectors and curators from abroad. Yet this is less a matter of creating something new within the region than of encouraging greater engagement from outside it. The artists, institutions and cultural practitioners are here, and an ambitious, fast-growing platform is beginning to facilitate their discovery. So to art lovers, we say: come for the sea, but stay for the art and the rich culture the Bahamas has to offer, and perhaps leave with a better understanding of the dynamics that shaped the global society we live in today.