Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, which accompanies the exhibition curated by art historian Tatiana Flores at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, ponders the ontological “island-ness” of the transnational Caribbean. Edited by Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, a specialist in Caribbean and diasporic studies, the catalogue elaborates the heuristic model of the exhibition—the archipelago—and introduces the show’s nearly one hundred works, made by more than eighty artists and organized across four intertwining themes: “Conceptual Mappings,” “Perpetual Horizons,” “Landscape Ecologies,” and “Representational Acts.” The catalogue supports the contemporaneity of the art, most of it from the past decade, with seven supplementary essays contributed by diverse writers, which provide helpful historical and critical contextualization. The inward-outward duality of the archipelago, defined as a group of islands, serves as a through line for the artworks as well as for the catalogue, whose texts move between...

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