Veteran artist Christopher Cozier’s collection of pieces "Tropical Night" will be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York beginning on March 29. The collection consists of 269 pieces which Cozier worked on between 2006 and 2012.
Cozier said he was stunned when he was approached in 2022 by curator Julián Sánchez González.
“The phone rings and it was Julian, who asked if the work was still existing and in good condition, because if it was, they had had a number of critical conversations about this work and wanted to consider acquiring it.
“It felt like a pie in the sky. I was an art student in the 80s, when those things only happened to white people. It’s an aspiration that every artist may have, but coming from a place like the Caribbean, you know.
“When I was in art school, I was one of two black people, so I didn’t see it as something within reach, and if it was, one might have had to migrate and become an American in a certain kind of way to become part of these engines. Having left the Caribbean and come into the global South, it’s something I’d left behind.”
He said two months later, he was contacted by MoMA’s Department of Drawings and Prints curator Esther Adler, who said she wanted to visit to see the paintings.
“She spent two to three days assessing the work, checking the paper, asking what kind of inks I used, and asking questions about the physical manufacture of the work. When she got back she submitted her report and told me she thought the work was in good condition.”
Cozier flew with the work up to New York and submitted it to the museum, which analyzed it in its conservation department. The pieces will be hung in the museum for a year. The work consists of 268 sheets with acrylic, ink, colored ink, pencil, and colored pencil on paper, as well as some with stamped ink, stencil, solvent transfer, and cut-and-pasted colored and painted paper.
Cozier began working on the pieces in 2006, at a time when he had to travel a lot to make enough to survive, so he found a way to carry the work with him.
“The pieces are nine inches by seven inches long and I could travel with them in my backpack, and if I’m in a hotel room, I could keep working.
“A section of them I had done during a residency at Dartmouth College in 2007, and another section I produced in a Vermont residency. All during the process I was trying to decide what was taking place – is this a series? – because I had tried before to build up a series of that scale, but the problems of survival here in TT meant I had to break them up by one or two and sell them off. So it was a burning question in my mind: can I afford to let a series grow to its ultimate conclusion without having to break it up?”
He said a major event which enabled him to continue working on the series was winning an Pollock Krasner award, which was over a year’s income for him. He was able to put some aside so that he was able to work on the series seriously two years later without having to cover certain costs.
He said South African curator
