Chris Cozier exhibits at NY Museum of Modern Art

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 Tumelo Mosaka and Bocas Lit Fest program director Nicholas Laughlin were the only ones who paid attention to the body of work.

Pieces were shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, and were positively reviewed in the New York Times.

“There are close to 400 drawings in the series. Some I gave to friends, I had to sell off one or two to survive, as income doesn’t stay where you want it to be – but the core group is about 300.

“But one image in particular, which is the guy with the sail in his back floating in the sea, got very popular, and there were a lot of requests for it to be in books. So a lot of people don’t know it’s a detail from a larger body of work.”

The work was also exhibited at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool as part of a show called Afro Modern in 2010, and then moved to Santiago de Compostela.

Cozier said the pieces came back to Trinidad and were packed away in boxes, except for one show in 2012 where friends came to see it.

He said he used to spray the boxes with insecticide and sprinkled white pepper on them to get rid of the silverfish, as the pieces remained packed away until 2022. He worried about the climate, termites and plumbing accidents.

They remained in those boxes until he got the call from MoMA.

Cozier said the call came at a time when artists from TT are beginning to become more visible to global audiences.

“The people at MoMA said to me, which is kind of embarrassing for them, that when they went through their collection, I might be the first Anglophone Caribbean artist that’s got into their collection that’s still living in the Caribbean, and still alive. They’re still checking that.

“But to be living and working in the Caribbean, in TT in particular, to get that kind of recognition, I’m as surprised as they are. Adler said she learned about Cozier’s work from González, who she said took part in a residency at Alice Yard in TT and saw Tropical Night when it was mounted in Cozier’s studio.

She wanted to see it in person, and flew to Trinidad in September 2022.

To view the pieces on the museum’s website, go to https://www.moma.org/artists/135371.