Censoring Caribbean Artists at the OAS’s Museum: An Interview with Andil Gosine

Kingston, Jamaica, March 21, 2025 — Today should have marked the opening of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition over three years in the making, at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, D.C. But on Feb. 14, just weeks before installation was set to begin, AMA officially cancelled the show, as directed by the Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), which administers the museum. PREE would like to take the opportunity to publish an interview with Andil Gosine by Aliyah Khan discussing the background and circumstances of the cancelled exhibition. 

 

Aliyah Khan

On February 5, 2025, Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition of artwork by the Trinidadian artist with collaborators, and a second show featuring Black artists, were cancelled by the Washington, D.C. Art Museum of the Americas (AMA), an arm of the Organization of American States (OAS). Guyana and Trinidad, like many other Caribbean countries, are members of the OAS. Gosine talks to Aliyah Khan about the cancellation.

 

KHAN: Where did you grow up in Trinidad? How does the Caribbean influence your art and curation?

GOSINE: I grew up in George Village, Tableland, in South Central Trinidad. Those formative years influenced everything. I like to say I was taken to Canada at fourteen, because it was an involuntary migration. Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up to turning fifteen. The very last piece made for the exhibition is in part about the longer-term impact of migration at that age.

KHAN: What was your Nature’s Wild exhibition for the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) about? What is its connection to your book?

GOSINE: Nature’s Wild grew out of the book of the same name and addressed the same tensions: human-animal relations and histories of animalization and race in the Caribbean — how colonists, then postcolonial elites, put the onus on marginalized people to prove themselves human and “not-animal,” for example through dress codes, laws about sexuality, and definitions of citizenship.

KHAN: You curated a show with Trinbagonian artist Wendy Nanan at the OAS’s Art Museum of the Americas in 2020-21. Why did you choose to work with the AMA and OAS again?

GOSINE: The Wendy Nanan show was the Museum’s first show by a Caribbean woman and a Trinidadian. We worked well together on that show. I aspire to work primarily with public institutions, and this museum represents the people of the Americas. I also liked the space. The space is the basis of my imagination of the project.

This was a museum where I expected to do all the legwork, but I didn’t mind that as long as it also meant I could control the creative vision. The Museum was not involved in any way in the creation of any of the work made for the exhibition. That was important to me, because like many creatives, I wanted total control of what I put out. I wanted total freedom.

KHAN: Why was the Nature’s Wild exhibition cancelled? Who cancelled it?

GOSINE: There was no explanation given for the cancellation, not when the director called me at 9am on February 5, not in the letter the museum sent on February 14, nor in the response to my follow-up letter to the Permanent Mission of Canada to the OAS. I wrote to the Canadian Mission because of Canada’s membership in the OAS and their previously expressed enthusiastic support. My only communication has been with the museum director [Adriana Ospina], but the cancellation order, as she told me, came from the OAS Secretariat. The letter she wrote me confirming the cancellation was cc’d to the Head of the Secretariat, James Lambert, who is a Canadian, ironically.

KHAN: The Art Museum of the Americas is funded by the OAS. Who funded the Nature’s Wild exhibition? Was the cancellation a funding issue?

GOSINE: Not one penny has come from the Art Museum of America. I received the main grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The programming was covered by WorldPride. The opening was covered by the Canadian Mission. Some of it was my own money and time from taking a sabbatical to complete the work and from a six-month [Beinecke] Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute. The Museum’s contribution was minimal. All the major costs were covered by other actors.

When I received the phone call, the director sounded scared, I think for her own job. She mentioned something about budget constraints, but as a question, not an answer. Instead of responding immediately, I did the research to try to figure out what had happened. Budget constraints were not an explanation. No one has cut funding to the OAS, including the American government. No one has cut funding to my exhibition.

KHAN: Do you believe US President Donald Trump’s executive orders on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and international agency funding are related to the exhibition cancellation?

GOSINE: On the day before the cancellation, while I was emailing with the Museum’s installer who was measuring a wall for a photograph placement, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, to study for six months international agencies to which the US gives money, and report back on how aligned they were with the US government’s priorities. That was the limit of the executive order. [Trump] was not cutting anything immediately for groups like the OAS.

For three years, there had been no disagreements about my show. Suddenly, not even a full day after that executive order, the cut was made. As a researcher, I can’t say for sure without the Museum’s verification, but the facts point in that direction: an Order was issued, then the exhibition was immediately cancelled.

DEI matters a lot in the American context and has framed the reporting of this cancellation. But I think the bigger story here is about how organizations like the OAS, but also universities and foundations, weigh their response to this seismic political shift. It appears some are wondering: if you bend enough, might you survive, even if it compromises your values and raison d’être? Might you make it out this time, regardless of what happens to everyone else?

KHAN: Do you think race and the artists’ national origins were factors in the exhibition cancellation?

GOSINE: In three years, I produced work with many more artists and writers than represented in the final exhibition. At the point of distilling all this work into a single exhibition, it’s about seeing which pieces can be put together, what the language is, how they hold together as a narrative. It doesn’t mean you’re choosing the best works, but you’re choosing the works that are telling a story together. The artists came from Canada, Barbados, Jamaica, the United States, Canada, Europe, Sweden, Italy. In the final selection, most were Canadian — Black, white, South Asian, First Nations, women.

KHAN: What Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian artworks and artists were in the exhibition?

GOSINE: All of the works are Caribbean works, because all of them are me! My two main collaborators include [the late] Lorraine O’Grady, my mentor, whose solo work is in the show. I’m a co-producer of and was very involved in the making of her beautiful video “Landscape: Western Hemisphere” in the exhibition. Lorraine is American but always identified herself as a West Indian woman born to Jamaican parents. I also worked closely with my longtime collaborator Kelly Sinnapah Mary from Guadeloupe. Her pieces represent our long collaboration together and are also instrumental in the narrative of the show.

My diasporic Caribbean collaborators in the final show were Trinidadian Natalie Wood, who lives in Toronto, and Bajan Llanor Alleyne, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. I also worked with Trinidadian organization Arc Co-Create to develop a special chocolate-based piece. For the catalogue, the [Guyanese American] writer Rajiv Mohabir wrote new poetry. [Trinidadians] Shivanee Ramlochan and Shani Mootoo wrote essays.

There is also one very special little piece that would have been gifted to exhibition visitors: a chapbook of poems that I found in [Trinidadian] Colin Robinson’s archive. These poems were written when he was thirteen years old, in 1970s Trinidad. They give us a remarkable portal into what a confidently gay and precocious Trinidadian boy is understanding about his life at the time, and about his desires that were not supposed to exist. Here he was at thirteen, writing poems about a boy in his class in 1974. When I was thirteen, I was still playing with Legos.

KHAN: Media reports imply that the show was also cancelled because it was a “queer show.” How did you describe it?

GOSINE: I never characterized the show as a queer show. That’s how my show was called internally at the Museum: a “queer Canadian[’s]” show. That is likely in part a consequence of the image representing the show, its signature image, being one of me at three years old, standing in front of those steps in George Village. But it is also more certainly a consequence of the clumsy and patronizing ways in which the AMA and other museums have pursued an agenda of “inclusivity,” in which they believe their primary mission is checking a series of identity boxes. I was asked to identify the collaborating artists by their gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, so the Museum could say, “Look how great we’re doing, we have queer people, we have women, we have Black and Indigenous people.”

KHAN: What professional and creative losses did you incur because of the cancellation?

GOSINE: I took my academic sabbatical, including a 15% pay cut, around the show. I received and entirely spent the grant related to my book to bring it to life through creative work — not just for the materials, but also for employing fifty people as technicians, research and production assistants, and more. I was genuinely excited about everything because I have not put more work, resources and heart into anything in my entire life.

KHAN: Were you offered redress or compensation?

GOSINE: I asked for communication, conversation, and compensation — even a discussion. There was no interest from the Museum or the OAS in having a conversation. They believed that I was inconsequential and would not have the resources to pursue compensation from them through legal avenues. I am certain they viewed us creatives as little more than minor irritants.

KHAN: The exhibition cancellation received major newspaper coverage in the US, U.K., and Canada. What support have you received from Caribbean and other institutions and people?

GOSINE: I am moved and encouraged by how many people who have very little, whose immediate reaction was “What can I do? How can I help?” Even from former students I haven’t heard from in years. I am simultaneously disappointed and scared about the surprising silence of better-resourced folks in positions of power. It is a grave miscalculation to believe that self-protection alone will save you.

The most delightful thing is that someone posted how outraged they were that Andil Gosine, our “fellow Guyanese,” had his exhibition cancelled. There was so much outrage from my fellow Guyanese, until one Trinidadian killed the vibe. Identification of me as Guyanese has always been affectionate, which I appreciate. It says how much I’ve shown up in those spaces, and how much it has been a priority for me to recognize the massive contribution that Guyanese people in New York make in supporting my exhibitions. In my previous New York exhibitions, the opening was jam-packed with brown people from the community, Indo- and Afro-Caribbean. That means the most to me.

KHAN: What is the danger of censoring art?

GOSINE: It’s a clear red flag for artists and academics, but perhaps not always understood by other people, and perhaps not understood by those folks at the OAS Secretariat that made the cancellation decision, though the Museum Director understands. In market economy logic, art often doesn’t appear to have [non-financial] value. It’s hard to understand why putting up pictures on a wall might be as important as or connected to people losing their jobs.

KHAN: Do you have alternative exhibitions and lectures planned?

GOSINE: “Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine” is dead, because the exhibition was conceived for that site. But I’m touched by the places that have reached out to host elements of the exhibition, and have come to agreement about three proposals: two shows in Canada, in the fall, that will share a selection of works; and on March 22 in New York, I will lead a performance, “Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine: A Quinceañero,” in which I present a new piece of writing by way of introduction to the chapbook of Colin’s poems.

I wanted this first event around the exhibition to be a moment of joy, a small break from the stress we are all feeling. A major contribution of queer culture has been its ability to access and foster fun in the midst of madness. I wanted the Leslie-Lohman Museum event to channel that history. There will be other opportunities to unpack this moment in more scholarly forms in the future. For right now, a quinceañero will do.

This interview has been edited by the collaborators from its previously published form in Stabroek News, Guyana. Small artworks in support of artists from the exhibition are available at newcarib.com.

Andil Gosine is an artist, curator, Professor of Environmental Art & Justice at York University, Toronto, and author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex,and Law in the Caribbean (2021). Dr. Gosine migrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Canada during his teen years.

Aliyah Khan is Associate Professor of English and Afroamerican & African Studies, and Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (2020). Dr. Khan is originally from Georgetown, Guyana.