Over the past five years, the DVCAI Artist-in-Residence (AIR) has been housed in an apartment at the Nahar home in Paramaribo, Suriname. This house became home to more than fifteen artists and practitioners who participated in its programs or used it as a space to exchange ideas and present their work. This residency space has become integral to shaping our international community, and will continue to inform how we come together in the future. With renovations and enhancements to the studio apartment conducted in late 2025, DVCAI continues to offer a one-month residency in Suriname, and a reciprocal opportunity for international artists to apply to the AIR program in Miami, Florida. The 2026 DVCAI Artists-in-residence in Suriname program is made possible in part by the CreARTE grant program from The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. This support was provided to DVCAI for a six year period, in recognition of its capacity to deliver, grow, and manage impactful artist residencies and fellowships.

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. invites audiences to experience DVCAI at Barry’s experimental, multimedia summer exhibition, Across ebb and flow, during a four-month run. Across ebb and flow is a two-person exhibition featuring installations by artists L.A. Samuelson, an interdisciplinary choreographer working in performance, sculpture, and new media, and Amanda Bradley, a Belizean American artist, photographer, and curator. Both artists present works that are adaptive to the site and transform with each iteration of presentation. Within each body of work, the artists deconstruct notions of ownership, division, and permanence, seeking a more expansive relationship to change, connection, and loss. Samuelson’s work, Telegraph Valley, assembles house frames, ladders, floating decks, mattresses, rotating light sources, and one dancer to make momentary dwellings out of holes and passageways. The work looks for the ways we find home in bodies that experience more loss as they accumulate more life. It attempts to deconstruct the body as a “house for the soul” metaphor to uncover something that roves, collides, undercuts, and transforms what we understand ourselves to be, how we merge with others, and merge with our solitude, to get somewhere new. For Bradley, photography is a language that bridges the seen, felt, and spoken. Her photographic work explores how landscape can serve as a visual threshold that triggers memory, imagination, and a sense of belonging. The sea acts as a well of memory, and water becomes a meeting place and a place of possibility. Pairing the photographic installation with a poem that reveals itself as one walks along the seashore, the work invites viewers to become active participants. It embeds a journey within the visual narrative. The title of the exhibition refers to the artists’ explorations in moving across in-between states and places as a means to build a language around what it means to belong and to be. The exhibition spans installation, photographic, poetic, and performative practices–building a world within the ebb and flow of disciplines and forms.

The shipping container—a vessel of movement, transportation, and memory—serves as a lens through which we explore the personal and collective histories of containment. For Caribbean communities, containers and barrels symbolize both migration and support: they carry essentials, treasures, and the intangible legacies of family, culture, and resilience. These structures, physical and metaphorical, hold the weight of memory, trauma, care, and joy reflecting the ways we navigate histories shaped by colonialism, displacement, and global exchange.

This summer, during This Summer Too: Conversations with Makers Exploring Memory, Materials, and Meaning, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator curators Rosie Gordon-Wallace and Lauryn Lawrence turn our attention to artists who bridge the artificial boundaries between art, craft, design, and artisanship. These are makers—creators who work from a place of ancestral knowledge, driven by the need to fill an inner void and propelled by the desire for self-expression. During regular library hours, visit the exhibition to view works by artists Lauren Austin, Barbara Garvine, Alida Martinez, Yossi Peled, Evelyn Politzer, and Miki Speijers, and Barry University MFA Candidates, Robertha Blatt and Joy Johnson. These artists’ practices are often sparked by specific provocations, with memory as a recurring catalyst. This Summer Too invites students visiting DVCAI at Barry to participate in these conversations—designed to tickle the imagination and ignite curiosity. We hope these encounters spark new ways of seeing and prompt students to think differently about art, materials, and objects in their own homes. May this conversation about makers open doors to broader dialogues about what art is, who gets to make it, and where it lives.

Panama’s modern art world is complex. Our visit was anchored by two significant references. At one end stands the father of Panama painting Alfredo Sinclair who passed in 2014 and at the other his living and practicing artist daughter Olga Sinclair. On the last day, taking in their figurative and abstract art at Olga’s studio I recalled the conversations had with other creatives and art professionals the previous days. The current Panamanian art scene is intergenerational. We met with established artists like Aristides Ureña Ramos and Olga Sinclair. We visited mid-career artists Fernand Toledo, Esviel Jeffers, and Cisro Merel. The pool of emerging creatives included Sergio Smith, Risseth Yangüez Singh, Hugo González, Giana De Dier, and José Braithwaite. Located in Portobelo, the Taller Congo collective is made up of artists that run all career stages from amateur to established even if they do not necessarily enjoy the recognition or view themselves as such. The list comprises “Yaneca” Esquina, Ariel Jimenez, Virgilio “Titto” Esquina, Manuel “Titto” Golden, Gustavo Esquina, Jairo Esquina, Loreyma Barrera, and Daffna Mahecha.

The show is a contemplation of interpersonal relationships between citizens and between states and their constituents and ways humans interact with the environment. Lindsay, Woods, Mattai, and Tilala Fall celebrate Afro Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, African American, and African identities. They weave elements of Trinidadian, South Carolinian, East Indian, and Senegalese material culture into their celebratory narratives. Davis, Myung-Sik, Tosari, Yantis, Métura, Holder, and Arrate Hechavarria focus on the correlation between nature and creativeness. They praise the ecosystem for providing and inspiring.

This year DVCAI inaugurated a new destination, Bermuda. Throughout our exchanges with Bermudians across the socio- economic spectrum they defined themselves by referring to the Atlantic World Experience. What constitute the Bermudian iden- tity? Bermuda is an island, but it is not in the Caribbean. Many islanders have lived, studied, or travelled to North America. They do so regularly. The closest land mass to Bermuda is North Caro- lina but the island is not American or Canadian. Bermuda is part of the British Commonwealth but it’s not in the UK. Many citizens have an American or Canadian accent. Some sound British. This positions the place in a unique situation.

Inter | Sectionality: Diaspora Art from the Creole City is a bold, multidisciplinary curatorial collaboration and exploration of the emergence of the “Creole City” as a local, regional and global phenomenon. Internationally recognized curators Sanjit Sethi, president, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and former director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder and curator of Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), have designed this collaboration to provide a lens through which communities and community leaders internationally can begin to better understand themselves, their diversity and their unlimited possibilities.

From Thursday, March 30 – April 8, 2023, Readytex Art Gallery in Paramaribo Suriname will host an International Cultural Exchange Project (ICEP) in association with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator of Miami, Florida. This is a unique experience, in which artists from diverse backgrounds, working in various media, converge to explore the concept of ‘cultural Diaspora’, intellectually and creatively. This is the 24th exchange organized by Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, and it is the third exchange with Suriname, as the host country. We welcome the partnership with Readytex Art Gallery.

Chromatic Cogitations. Rhythm Reboot, a group exhibition at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, is the result of a year-long conversation and exploration between past and present RedLine resident artists. Contemplating color and cadence, the exhibition reveals similarities between seemingly disparate artists working within an engaged creative space, RedLine, while emerging from the disruption of a global pandemic. The curatorial vision for the group exhibition Chromatic Cogitations, Rhythm Reboot is one of unity and connection, where the singular works by RedLine artists converge into non-traditional exhibition zones. Visitors are encouraged to navigate the space as a singular encounter, forming their own narrative about the selection and placement of artworks while being energetically uplifted by synergistic colors, sounds, voices, rhythms, movements, and performances in this community-centric cultural space.

For the past year and a half, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on the arts and culture landscape, causing organizations to close or limit their operations as stated by Greg Guibert and Iain Hyde in their report. Consequently, to stay relevant and more importantly solvent institutions and artists have had to adapt and innovate. It is in this challenging context that DVCIA implemented its 2021 International Cultural Exchange program to Panama. The relevance of the destination is significant at different levels. The country shares part of its history with the US. Firstly, after the failed attempt by the French, the United States took over the construction of the Panama Canal which they successfully completed a decade later. Secondly, in 1989, the US army invaded Panama and overthrew the military leader Manuel Noriega, who incidentally had been recruited and trained by the CIA. Thirdly, the country constitutes a landbrige connecting the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, linking North and South America.

Traveling to Guadeloupe for the third time provided some insight into the geography of the art and culture landscape on the island both literally and figuratively. The landmass has the shape of a butterfly with the two wings separated by a body of water, the Riv- ière Salée. From our base at the tip of the east side of the archipelago, we drove to artists’ studios, art galleries, cultural centers, museums, and organizations’ headquarters across the land. As we engaged a new pool of artists and collaborated with entities different than in 2015 and 2017, we acknowledged the diversity of working ar- rangements and the variety of exhibition and conservation centers. Also, our innovative collaboration with the art association Agence Kultur’Tour led to a pop-up art gallery/museum experiment. The partnership fostered a deeper reflection on the animation of public places in a/the Caribbean context.