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The celebration known as Carnival has no singular description. In Trinidad and Tobago, it’s celebrated between June and July, sometimes with participants rubbing down their bodies with mud and paint. In the Bahamas, it takes place around Christmas, stemming from the time slaves were permitted to spend time with their families around the holidays. In Martinique, Carnival is celebrated in the days leading up to Lent, and often includes a massive bonfire around Ash Wednesday.
“Carnival really straddles a lot of different modes,” New Orleans curator Claire Tancons explained to The Huffington Post Arts. “It’s an artistic practice, it’s a mode of public address, it’s a tool for resistance. It’s a touristic device. It is not one thing for one person.”
Tancons is the co-curator of “En Mas: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean,” an upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. The exhibition, also curated by Krista Thompson, art historian and professor at Northwestern University, explores modes of contemporary performance art that are influenced not by the dominant trajectory of the European avant-garde, but by the Carnivals of the streets. Often such carnivals are spurred not by aesthetic experimentation but by independence struggles, civil rights movements, and population migrations, to start.
