Interviewer: Kalila Ain
Mentor: Dr. Joan Morgan
This interview was produced in conjunction with the solo exhibition Vendah by Cornelius Tulloch with mentorship from Danny Baez and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 7 – October 21, 2023. The text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
“Those that do not smile will kill me,” 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
Cornelius Tulloch’s Vendah (vendor) brilliantly asks us to reconsider how we identify Antillanité (Caribbean-ness), Créolité (Creole-ness), and Blackness throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas. Tulloch’s travels to specific sites led him to a definition of connected Caribbean identity. Through installation, architecture, printmaking, and painting, he transports us to moments and places that expand his perspective. The vendahs of the marketplace, though visible, are porous and evade our gaze. Works such as “Those that do not smile will kill me,” with its warning of the concentrated poison in unripe ackee, and Plantain Prayer, which pays reverence to an iconic fruit of the islands, remind us that food is a bridge between lands, languages, and lived experiences. Whether we say plantain (Jamaica), platano (Cuba), or plantayne (Uganda), Vendah softens our oppositions, and recognizes magnificence in transformation.
–Kalila Ain
Kalila Ain: Upon entering the gallery, your work brought me immediately to water. I thought about weathered boats, eroded materials, cutting boards, inventiveness, and resilience. Typically when water is incorporated as it relates to the diaspora, it’s a metaphor for breaking. With mention of Édouard Glissant in the press release, I wouldn’t say that's your intention here. How are you using water to convey Caribbean identity in this body of work?
Cornelius Tulloch: As I was traveling the Caribbean, I visited Jamaica, Miami, Colombia, and Suriname, and I collected all these images of water. There was this theme of color, with aquas and blues building up in my process – this same color palette apparent in the tarps at the marketplace in Jamaica. In 2022, when I showed work in an exhibition called Culture Caribana, an artist named Lauren Baccus shared a quote that introduced me to the concept of the Caribbean as one unified landscape rather than an archipelago.
There came this layeredness when I started to think about the Caribbean as a continuous landscape connected under the water rather than separated. I have always seen very blue water as a signifier of what the Caribbean is, so I used that as a tool when establishing a visual language people could identify with, and it became a motif throughout the exhibition. Recognizing water as the connector of these spaces, and allowing us movement from location to location, has generated an expansion of what Caribbean identity looks like, sounds like, tastes like.
When I was introduced to Glissant years ago, I began to consider Créolité more expansively, and investigate new ideas of Caribbean-ness, particularly between Caribbean traditions and new landscapes. Growing up in both Jamaica and Miami, I always noticed an exchange of pallets, materials, and walls. I saw hand-painted signs in Jamaica that were also in certain Caribbean neighborhoods in Miami, but not in other American cities. While visiting Cartagena and Santa Marta, I thought: this feels very much like Jamaica. We're all cousins, we're all connected. We have our differences where cultures split, and there's beauty in the nuances of each region as our cultures shift and adapt. I’ve blurred the boundaries of these different locations, collaging them. Allowing for a sense of material weatherednes is one of my approaches to understanding memory.
Catch, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
KA: The connectedness you describe under the water is truly apparent throughout the portals you’ve created in the exhibition. The oculi in Catch and Produce Patwah, the fragmented iron gate in Marina and Dougie’s Wholesale, and of course the curtains of Verandah Views. The open curtains invite our gaze to observe a marketplace that could be Jamaica, Haiti, or Ghana. What were you thinking about while constructing these entryways?
CT: I have been exploring what I would describe as ephemeral architecture: windows, doors, portals to the outside world and, particularly, the verandah of houses, which is the space between public and private. I'm working through the idea of architectural memory through materiality, and how it connects us culturally. It can give sensations and feelings about what these spaces are to us and what makes them Caribbean or not Caribbean.
Verandah Views is an image of Charles Gordon Market in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Rather than creating a perfected image, I’m sharing notes and hints. I want people to be intrigued by the feeling and aspects of the image rather than focusing on individuals.
I always ask myself: how do we break the frame? Photographs capture moments, but what's coming next? Scale makes a big difference, and adding this portal into the gallery space allowed me to invite people into a scene while leaving room for them to wonder what's happening outside this exact moment. Where exactly is this? As I’m describing these complexities of what the Caribbean is, I’m also considering what these places look like outside of the Caribbean. Whether in West Africa or Miami, there are certain spaces that still feel like or remind you of home.
Verandah Views: Vendah, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
KA: Glissant's concept of opacity feels prominent throughout the completed works as well as through your physical labor of printmaking, layering, obscurification, and manipulation of images. There are beautifully cropped compositions of your parents cooking and showcasing different ingredients. Tell me about the experience of photographing your parents and how you came to conceive of Dougie's Wholesale as a site of cultural exchange.
CT: I am always thinking of my family and how to make concepts discussed by artists and academics accessible. If my family doesn't enjoy an exhibition and isn’t grasping what's going on in a show, then it's not good. If people not connected to the art world cannot grasp the concept, to me, it defeats the purpose of why I’m making work.
I try to clearly represent the idea of cultural exchange, and it always comes back to food. Food was a big thing in my household. Both of my parents cook. Frequently, we cook as a family with ingredients from our yard in Jamaica. There is always a conversation; I have learned about many different places through food.
In the past, my parents were a little reluctant to participate, but nowadays they're so willing.
Especially my mother; she's always either in front of or behind the camera, and has been since I first began creating work. Now, my family is more eager, and asks when it will be their turn to be part of a painting, or they say “you got to do something that includes me,” and I think it's so funny to see that change.
A lot of ideas in this show come from Fruits of Our Mother's Labor, a photographic series I developed of my mom and dad holding fruits and plants grown at our house. The imagery was iconic and venerating. Now, anytime they pick something from our yard or return from the market, they say ”oh, he has first dibs, let him choose what he wants to photograph.” Or my dad will come with specific fruits and say “you need to photograph this." Maven, which shows a figure with a mesh bag carrying plantains on her head, is a portrait of my mother. Multiple people have asked me if it's a self-portrait because we have similar eyes. The plantain is one of those fruits that explains the multi-layeredness of Caribbean identity, Black identity, and cultural connectedness. It's been great to include my family; they’ve become part of the process and development of my work, and food is a part of our storytelling.
With Dougie’s Wholesale, I was interested in creating an entry point where there could be more dialogue among visitors. My focus is for people who are of Caribbean or any Afro-diasporic background to get the nuances of the work, but I also wanted people of different backgrounds to feel invited into the conversation as guests. Decentering my own perspective has allowed visitors to reflect and actively participate by sharing their own recipes.
Installation view of Dougie’s Wholesale, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
KA: You touched on it briefly in terms of the series Fruits of Our Mother's Labor, but do you recall the first thoughts that led to the creation of the body of work presented in Vendah?
CT: I initially wanted to have a conversation about Caribbean markets through Miami and Jamaica. The funny thing is that there's a specific Jamaican curry brand that is manufactured in Miami but exported to be sold in Jamaica. So I began to look at the exchange between these two spaces through markets and food production; although separated, they're connected. It wasn't until I came across these motifs of water from going to Cartagena that I actively put it all together. Visiting a Maroon village in the Amazon and seeing their culture intact because of geographic separation was the first time I experienced the Caribbean outside of my own version and lens of Jamaica. As my own understanding expanded, I was able to explore more of what I wanted the show to encapsulate.
KA: Is there anything specific you want viewers to carry with them after participating in the exhibition?
CT: I want people to ask questions about their own histories, and consider their cultures through the lens of exchange. What are the things that make us who we are? Trace where those things come from. What does it mean for our culture to exist in this new hybrid, hyphenated experience? I want people to look more intentionally at how we tell stories through everyday objects, and how these items inform our understanding of identity and cultural evolution.
KA: Lastly, why the title Vendah?
CT: Market vendors literally and figuratively feed the entire country. Our cultural traditions and recipes exist due to the labor they put in. When it comes to Caribbean and Black culture, there is a historical tie to labor and landscape. The way culture cultivates itself in Jamaica, in particular, begins to mend that history. The work vendors do and their street culture colloquialisms are part of the psyche of the country and its people. This is a microcosm affecting the macrocosm, catalyzing massive cultural exchange and development.
Detail of Dougie’s Wholesale, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.
About the Interviewer
Kalila Ain is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, Italy, and earned her bachelor's degree in painting and art history from SUNY Purchase. Her painting and printmaking practice is grounded in healing from breaking and illuminating sources of reconnection succeeding fragmentation. Ain's work is presented in permanent installations at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in New York City and The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a Laundromat Project grant recipient and illustrator of the children's book Life is Fine. Her painting My Mother Named Me Beloved was selected by New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture to represent The Black Rest Project initative.
About the Mentor
Dr. Joan Morgan is the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author, Grammy nominated songwriter, and pioneering hip-hop journalist. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down, which is taught at universities globally. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, race, and gender, Morgan has made numerous television, radio, and film appearances, including on HBOMax, Netflix, Lifetime, MTV, BET, VH-1, CNN, WBAI’s The Spin, and MSNBC. She has written for numerous publications including Vibe, Essence, Ms., The New York Times, and British Vogue.
Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Scholar at The New School, Vanderbilt, and Duke, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Cultural Analysis at NYU. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University’s Institute for the Diversity of the Arts, where she was awarded the Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She is the first Visiting Scholar to ever receive it.
Dr. Morgan is a mentor for Unlock Her Potential and serves on the Board of the National YoungArts Foundation. She is currently working on a screenplay adaptation of her first book, which has been optioned for screen rights. Jamaican born and South Bronx bred, Dr. Morgan is a proud native New Yorker.