Art is the Solution

Rumor de la Tierra Source: Guggenheim Museum I encountered this painting today when I was reading about one of the MET’s current exhibitions: Arte del Mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean. I found it to be a very interesting painting, so I wanted to chat about it. The painting, Rumblings of the Earth, is an outlier in the collection. While every other piece in the exhibition dates to pre-Columbian times, Rumblings of the Earth is modern. In a video posted to the MET’s YouTube channel , curators explain that Rumblings of the Earth was included to demonstrate the legacy of the pre-Columbian art of the Caribbean. I thought that this was a very salient point. I’ve written before about how art can be used to reclaim Caribbean heritage and challenge the colonial paradigm. Rumblings of the Earth does this by borrowing the visual language of pre-Columbian art and Caribbean culture. The jagged shapes that dot the painting echo the shapes of pre-Columbian pendants and amulets as wel...