Earlier this year, I finally got around to reading The Source of Self-Regard. “Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools,” Toni Morrison begins. “But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts.” Authoritarians regularly censor writers, Morrison continues, whether through control of media industries, incarceration, or murder. They prevent plays from being staged and films from being shown. If the threat is sustained and generalized enough, writers may never put pen to page, not even in private. Novels, poems, and more go unwritten. In Morrison’s account, this epistemic violence affects those under authoritarian rule and those residing in other countries, even if the degrees of violence are different. Neither group can know all the artwork that might have been made under other, less oppressive forms of government.
Morrison’s characterization of art under authoritarianism gained new salience for me this February, when I heard from Andil Gosine. Andil is a professor whose book Nature’s Wild considers how anxieties about animals have contributed to the disciplining of sexuality. He is also a visual artist. I first met him in 2022, to discuss an exhibition of Caribbean artists that he had curated and which resulted in a profile in the New York Times.In part because we both descend from indentured laborers and seek to represent that heritage in our art, we became friends, occasionally wandering through galleries in New York City and texting regularly, often about Nicki Minaj. Andil and Nicki share a homeland, Trinidad. I do not hold that against him. On many occasions, we tried to find a way to collaborate. This phrasing is overly generous. I attempted to write about Andil’s art and curation several times but failed.
This time around, however, it seemed that we had finally succeeded. In January, I interviewed Andil for BOMB about an exhibition, also titled Nature’s Wild, scheduled to go up at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) on March 21. I was just about to email my editor the draft when Andil called. He told me that AMA had just canceled his exhibition and another show, titled Before the Americas, in response to an executive order from the Trump Administration. The Washington Post was about to break the story. Andil’s show, which he had worked on for three years, would never go up. Visitors would never see his art.
But I had. To prepare for the BOMB interview, Andil had sent me photographs of his work, some of it solo-created and some produced in collaboration with the artists Lorraine O’Grady, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and others. I’d also read the essays from the catalog, which would now never be published. I had studied art and writing that was — and I mean this literally, fully aware of the irony, given the past decade’s hand-wringing over political correctness — canceled. I happened to know intimately the cultural objects that the Trump regime was repressing. I could describe them rigorously and with precision.
But what I did not know was why the Trump Administration had targeted Andil in particular; how this iteration of conservative assaults against the arts and arts funding — as opposed to, say, Reagan’s — actually worked; or how its effects would materialize. Some of my confusion was simple naivete. Some of it was about art; for much of my adult life, I’ve been interested in art but have generally thought it unimportant. I wrote a novel about a queer Jamaican in Florida and then witnessed the state pass a great deal of anti-queer legislation, and graduate school disabused me of any belief that the success of Black art produced political gains. Though I like Andil’s work, and though its depiction of queerness and people of color stands in opposition to the administration’s onslaughts against both, I didn’t think it posed a threat. Was this simply another instance of preemptive backlash — that recurring, possibly definitive pattern of American politics since the ascension of the Tea Party (or perhaps since 1968), in which liberals and leftists talk about taking an inch and conservatives respond by going a mile in the other direction?
As Andil and I talked, I read the incident as evidence of a generalized sadism: a desire to make queer immigrants of color suffer and to make suffering the defining characteristic of their lives. For that reason, the measure of the cancellation seemed to me to lie in biography. What had the artists’ and curators’ lives been like in the years leading up to this moment? How had they hoped the exhibitions would change them? And what did they feel now, in the aftermath of such a consequential nonevent? Andil’s answers to these questions, I thought, would help me understand what the repression of his art had actually accomplished. I also hoped that they would offer insight into the effects of the Trump Administration’s artistic repression more generally. Trump was — and is — intent on creating a new future, and to gain a better sense of that vision, I needed to understand what future he was working to prevent. I asked Andil to meet that weekend, and he agreed. I would play amateur journalist and interview Andil again, this time about how he fell into the government’s crosshairs through an event that, I suspect, will be recorded in histories of our time.
On March 1, I leave Nyack at 10:20 AM wearing an olive jacket with a heavy liner. The sun is out, but I was raised in Jamaica and Florida. Fifty-five-degree days in New York feel like winter to me. I shiver in my Mini Cooper, whose heater is slow to warm, as I drive across what I still call the Tappan Zee and into Tarrytown. By the time I get to the Metro-North station and stand on the platform, I have stilled the shakes and found a patch of sun, but it does not bake. My jacket remains zipped.
On the 10:50 AM train, I text Andil that I am running early. Trying to kill time, I ride the subway past my stop and walk. After locating a street sign, I proceed past the New York County Supreme Court building to inspect the ledge that Tyshawn hit in a 2014 Supreme skate video. It is taller than I thought, perhaps ten feet, maybe even fifteen. The drop at the end of the incline looks like eight feet. Wax darkens the gray cement. I cannot believe that such a gnarly ledge — an instant bust — has become a famous skate spot. I would not try a trick there at gunpoint.
If a person cannot display ceramic eggs in a museum, I think, then a great deal is at risk.
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Andil texts that he is leaving his apartment and tells me to ask for Paula when I arrive at James Cohan Gallery, where he and I have agreed to meet to see Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s exhibition, The Book of Violette. Paula curated the show and can guide me around, but I will not ask for her. I never know what to say to strangers. Besides, Andil’s tardiness will give me time to study the work.
After passing an alley in which someone has tagged All Russians are complicit and someone else has crossed out that phrase in spray paint, I turn left on Walker. I step around a skateboarder smoking a joint, pass several galleries that Andil and I have visited, and enter James Cohan. Ahead of me, an archway frames a painting of Sinnapah Mary’s that hangs on a pink wall. It portrays an ambiguously brown woman with braided hair, sitting in front of a background of trees. The same plants spread across her face and her exposed arms like tattoos. Her skin the color of soil, she almost fades into the landscape. On the wall behind the painting, a motif repeats: a reed sprouting from a brown girl’s head, atop which yellow petals grow. I step around a few people and enter the room. The color and the reed span all four walls. This must be wallpaper. Painting each figure by hand — maybe fifty in total — would have taken so much time and effort. I inch closer, turn my body, and try to look at an angle. Paint rises from the wall. Strokes shine in the light. I don’t know if I admire Sinnapah Mary’s dedication or find it extreme. Perhaps both.
I take my time inspecting the work. In The Book of Violette: The Great Camouflage, a woman in cream-colored fabric lies on her side. A snake winds across her arm, fragmented by the way she positions herself. The four-panel painting, The Book of Violette: This earth, ours, can only be what we want it to be, displays a girl dressed in what looks like a school uniform split by two canvases, as well as a wooden boat that grows a woman’s head. Much of the work resembles the painting Sinnapah Mary developed with Andil for his book cover. There as here, the distinction between human and nature is porous at best.
Eventually, Paula introduces herself. She has dark blond hair and wears a blazer and pointed glasses that seem trendy but distinctive. She asks if I’m a writer. I say I guess. She asks if I’ve published a novel. I have, three or four years ago. In truth, I feel like Jep Gambardella from The Great Beauty, who wrote a novel as a young man and then worked as a journalist for decades without publishing another. I could hardly be called a novelist. I don’t say this, but I think it. She asks if I’m writing a second one. I shrug. I’m writing, but who knows if it’s a novel? It’s only a novel once it’s bound. I probably started what I thought were a million novels before I began the one that I finished. All the others are a waste. She laughs and suggests that they’re not a waste. They’re becoming something. I concede the point aloud but remain unconvinced.
I ask what she can tell me about the show. She begins with biography. Sinnapah Mary lives in rural Guadeloupe. Her studio is basically in her garden. I ask about the grass-person motif that I thought was wallpaper. Sinnapah Mary imagines it as a new plant that cleanses the Earth of its toxins as it grows. I ask how long it took to paint the walls. They are a commercial gallery. Things have to go fast. They had about three days. What’s going to happen to them after the show closes? Paula is devastated. They’re going to paint over them.
Andil arrives wearing a black cuffed beanie and a navy zip jacket, a Junya Watanabe and Supreme collaboration from 2021. On the top half, there’s a sentence I cannot parse in white Supreme font. Gray hairs spread across Andil’s face and chin. I have never seen him with scruff before. After he greets us, we talk about the cancellation of his show. Reporters from Guyana and Trinidad and from the New York Times have reached out. They’ve taken up so much of his time that, yesterday, he began to feel dizzy. He worried he would faint. His hand — he raises it to show us — curled into a claw that could not move. It was 4 PM when he finally checked the time. He hadn’t eaten anything, though he was normally quite regular about his meals.
It’s now late enough that my own stomach is starting to ache. At a hotel restaurant nearby, a waitress seats me and Andil at one of the booths that run along the left wall, in front of which sit Parisian-style circular tables. Andil offers me the inside and I take it. While waiting for our food, we talk about the academics who have gotten in touch with Andil — and those who haven’t. To our surprise, the many senior Caribbeanists he reached out to did not respond to his email asking for advice — did not even offer condolences — even though they had collaborated for years. Presumably they were worried about jeopardizing their funding. But a different academic, who had antagonized Andil in the past, wrote to say that he stood in solidarity with him. Mostly, those who offered to help were people with no money, no standing, and no job security. Several graduate students asked how they could support him. His dental hygienist, who had already bought his book, asked what else she could do.
Trump was — and is — intent on creating a new future, and to gain a better sense of that vision, I needed to understand what future he was working to prevent.
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Andil falls silent. I offer some rambling and banal observations about the kinds of people who help others when doing so is a risk. Mainly, I am distracting myself from worries that I myself have not done enough to support Andil, and from the fear that there is nothing I can really do. I cannot reverse AMA’s decision or overturn an executive order. I do not run a museum that can display the work.
The food arrives, interrupting my incoherent musings. On my gravlax toast sits a quartered hard-boiled egg, an upcharge that I did not order. Usually, eggs light a fire in my midsection, though my gastroenterologist is not sure why. (She diagnosed me with chronic stomach lining inflammation, which she admitted was a symptom, not a cause.) I push the egg to the side and eat my toast with a knife and fork. Andil teases me for wasting eggs in this economy, when their price has skyrocketed, and I apologize and look down at the table with shame.
Out on the street after lunch, the sky has turned gray and the clouds have rolled in. The wind picks up. Earlier in the week, Andil suggested that I interview him on the Christopher Street Pier. But it is likely too cold for that. I point out that we might not be able to do an interview outside at all — the audible wind will drown out our recordings. Andil says let’s walk and see. A few blocks west, a gust casts what I hope is dirt into my eyes. We pause before an iPhone tripod, in front of which a person lounges on the stoop of a brownstone. He’s wearing a gray sweatsuit and fisherman beanie, presumably for some upstart brand’s social media. Andil asks the people behind the camera if it’s OK to pass. They say of course; thanks for asking. We excuse ourselves and walk on.
We head to a park: the gardens at St. Luke in the Fields, so named because the church was built on farmland in the 1820s, when the whole island was not yet a city. I follow Andil up Hudson Street and through a wrought-iron gate. A path snakes through the lush garden, sheltered from the wind on two sides by brick buildings. People sit on benches. We continue to the rear, at the far side of which teens share food out of a brown paper bag, and we sit down next to a stained-glass window. Above us, birds perch on bare branches, chittering at a volume that I have not heard since the fall. Perhaps they’ve returned to their seasonal home. Or maybe they’re continuing farther north.
I warn Andil that this conversation will be different from our last recorded one. Normally, when I interview artists or writers for publications, I throw softballs, hoping to give them a chance to rehearse what they have prepared. But today, I will ask much more pointed questions. I may interrupt him. I ask him to start from the beginning: What happened? As he answers, details from prior conversations and our interview for BOMB come to mind, filling in the gaps and fleshing out the timeline of the improbable life of Andil Gosine.
In some ways,it is surprising that Andil ever left Trinidad. His parents descended from South Asian indentured laborers, who traded debt for transoceanic passage only to find themselves bound to agricultural lands throughout the Caribbean. He was born in 1973, the year his countryman, the novelist Harold Sonny Ladoo, returned to Trinidad from Canada and was found murdered on the side of a road. Andil’s birth and Ladoo’s death occurred a year after Ladoo’s debut novel, No Pain Like This Body, portrayed the horizons of the children of indenture as so limited that, when a family flees their violent patriarch, they do not seek sanctuary abroad or even in the city. They escape into the cane fields.
True to his lineage, Andil was raised in the rural town of George Village, Tableland. As Andil puts it, they lived “in the bush,” a colloquialism that conjures an image of untamed shrubbery rising from long grass. In a photograph of him at around 3 or 4 years old, he wears a denim jumpsuit with a flared collar and flared ankles. Hands on his hips, he angles his legs and points his toes. White-and-black chickens sit in front and a brown rooster stands behind, supervising Andil and the hens. To his right, grass claws at the pavement. A stem reaches out of an orange pot, bright pink flowers leaning toward a chain-link fence. Behind him, his home’s concrete staircase looms without a handrail. Because his hips were underdeveloped, Andil regularly fell down those steps, etching scars that remain today.
Like many on the periphery, Andil looked to education for a map for his departure, though he could not have known how many trails school would lead him down. When Trinidad reaffirmed its prohibitions on queer sex and bestiality in the Sexual Offences Act of 1986 — the very kind of legal pairing that Andil would document in Nature’s Wild — Andil was 13, attending a Catholic all-boys school in San Fernando. His math teacher often wore the guayabera, the favored shirt of Fidel Castro and Cesar Chavez. One day, a priest interrupted algebra, and the teacher stepped out. The priest lined up Andil and four other students and insisted that they prove that they were not “homosexuals.” A class clown seated in the rear asked him to bring the girls from the neighboring school. Everyone laughed. After the priest left, Andil asked a classmate to define homosexual. The classmate did. “What,” Andil responded, “is sex?” Though the priest may have sought to uphold religious doctrine and the country’s new law, he unwittingly introduced Andil to a new terrain for life and, eventually, study.
The following year, Andil’s family moved to Oshawa, a factory town outside Toronto. There, cops and teachers surveilled immigrants and anyone who looked South Asian. “When we moved to Canada,” Andil told me, “I felt a very clear pressure to demonstrate that I was not wild, not an animal.” Fearing reprisal, he forewent the usual adolescent experimentations and focused on school. “Life was so precarious,” he continued. “I understood that there were no second chances. Being a good citizen — one that stayed alive and free — meant proving yourself more human than animal.”
Still on the periphery, if closer to the metropole, the rural immigrant found himself in a new arena for demonstrating that he was civilized: Canadian politics. During his last summer in high school, Andil worked as a researcher for the New Democratic Party for a measly honorarium. He wrote a paper arguing that free trade would devastate Oshawa, the constituency of Ed Broadbent, the Canadian socialist icon. The NDP circulated the paper internally while preparing for the upcoming election. As a student at York University, Andil could not escape politics. For the student newspaper, he interviewed the far-right Reform candidate John Beck in 1993. Beck fearmongered about crime, opposed same-sex marriage, and suggested that immigrants would do to Canadians what Canadians had done to Indigenous people. Within a week of publication, someone gave Andil’s interview tape to a larger outlet that circulated it. Shortly thereafter, the Reform Party removed Beck from their ticket and condemned his statements. That did little for the NDP, which lost approximately 80 percent of its seats in the 1993 vote, in part because the far right’s rise pushed leftists toward the centrist Liberal Party. But the interview did prove that Andil could make an impact on politics. The question was whether he wanted to.
Andil did not find an answer quickly. After college, he considered returning to Trinidad to work in environmental policy, did a master’s, and met a long-term boyfriend. Eventually, he began a PhD in sociology at York, writing a dissertation on the French Green Party’s electoral campaigns. He split his time between Toronto and Paris, where his boyfriend lived. And he considered running for office. In 2001, he spoke at an NDP convention. After Andil left the stage, Broadbent approached him and ordered his team to “get him a riding [constituency] to run in.” Instead Andil departed for a planned trip to see his boyfriend in France and decided to stay for a long while. Upon completing his PhD in 2002, he worked in LGBTQ advocacy at the World Bank. Though the institution was maligned across his home region for its structural adjustment policies, it was also one of the biggest funders of HIV medication at the time. Andil pushed the World Bank to work more broadly on LGBTQ rights. But his time there did not last. After two years, Andil became an assistant professor of sociology at York, penning scholarly essays on queer life and global development. But as any junior faculty member knows, the academy raises more questions than it answers.
Tenure is the final resting place of many careers; that wasn’t the case for Andil. A breakup changed his course. “After organizing all of my twenties around a relationship,” Andil said, “I was determined to do something just for me.” He recalled enjoying a trip to see a friend in New York and subsequently taking a fellowship at FIT to study Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, the 1964 performance in which viewers sheared away Ono’s clothing. On Andil’s first night in the city in 2010, he met someone who introduced him to Ethan Shoshan, an artist and roommate of Yoko Ono’s manager’s brother. Shoshan invited Andil to dinner at the home of Geoffrey Hendricks, an artist who belonged to Fluxus, the international network of artists with which Ono was associated. At Hendricks’s, Andil shared macrobiotic dishes with the artists Alison Knowles, Sur Rodney (Sur), and others. Sur invited Andil to an opening at which Knowles was performing, where he met the artists Lorraine O’Grady and Karen Finley. “In these early days,” Andil said in our unpublished BOMB interview, “I had no notion of myself as an artist, but I felt like I landed in my tribe.” What exactly he would do among these people was still undetermined.
Andil found a mentor in O’Grady. Born in 1934, O’Grady was reared, in Andil’s words, “in a highly accomplished Black Jamaican community in 1930s Boston and was primed to be a leader, a good citizen, well educated, and deeply invested in the politics of respectability.” True to her roots, O’Grady studied economics at Wellesley, then worked for the State and Labor Departments. Turning away from a steady paycheck and good benefits, she began an MFA in fiction at Iowa in 1965, then dropped out. In 1973, she moved to New York and wrote for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Still unsatisfied, she started teaching literature at the School of Visual Arts, where she came to feel at home. In 1977, she began Cutting Out theNew York Times, collages fitting their title, and in the 1980s she turned to performance art. When she met Andil, O’Grady was on the cusp of being rediscovered.
Their relationship deepened shortly after Andil and O’Grady spoke at the opening. Sur, O’Grady’s studio manager, emailed Andil and asked for his thoughts on O’Grady’s The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me. Comprising two panels, The Clearing juxtaposes two photographs of trees at the edge of a field. The left presents children playing on the grass and an interracial couple having sex in the sky. The right portrays a white man with a skull for a head, lying above a nude Black woman in the field, hand on her breast. “The diptychs get to the heart of the matter,” Andil responded, “about how power functions with desire — and the complicated ways in which gender and race are harnessed to turn us off and on.” Sur responded that O’Grady “said something like ‘he’s inside my head.’” The two met and made plans to record a conversation for Landscape (Western Hemisphere), a video installation. Andil had become, if not an artist, a collaborator with one.
The recording took place in June 2010. They discussed love, colonization, and sexuality — and those subjects led to animals and civilization. “Every culture feels that they’ve created these hard-won distances between themselves and the animals,” O’Grady said, “and anything that reminds you that you haven’t come quite so far is problematic.” Though their conversation did not make it into the piece, it became a thirty-minute radio interview — one that would later influence Andil’s probing of human-animal relations in his scholarship and his art. More immediately, he gave up on writing about Ono’s performance piece and instead marshaled his inspiration, and his encounters with these other New York artists, into WARDROBES, a collection of artworks revolving around clothing that FIT previewed in 2011. After he returned to York, a graduate student wandered into his office. She was both pleased and surprised to find him there. The student had heard from one of Andil’s colleagues that he was no longer a serious scholar. He “made clothes” now. If that judgment seemed final to his colleague, it could not to Andil. Artists made many kinds of objects in many ways in many settings. Andil was unrooted and his art practice was just beginning. What, where, how, and why he would create — and what that meant for his job as a professor — remained to be seen.
A flock of birds lands in the bare bush behind us, perching on budding branches. They chitter loudly enough that they will inevitably interfere with the recording. I cross one leg over the other, dig one hand into my jacket, and push my phone closer to Andil. He rests it in his palm and speaks into it.
In the ensuing years, Andil traveled between Toronto and New York and tried to balance his old career and his new one, though he did not have a plan for doing so. Luckily for him, his scholarship and the art fed each other. For Art in America in 2012, he covered O’Grady’s show, New Worlds, and the three-museum exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, critiquing the latter for its lack of attention to Indo-Caribbean people. After he and Kelly Sinnapah Mary met in New York in 2015, they began collaborating. The following year, they produced the artist book 1, 2, a “children’s story for adults” composed of illustrations by Sinnapah Mary and text by Andil. Throughout, figures emerge through an accumulation of curved lines that look like cartoon hairs. One memorable drawing portrays human legs as furred, breaking down the boundary between human and animal in a way that would become central to both their work. In 2017, Andil featured Sinnapah Mary’s art in a section in the Caribbean studies scholarly journal Small Axe called “Art After Indenture,” dedicated to scholarly writing on art by Caribbean artists descended from indentured laborers. Around this time, his artistic collaborations and criticism cohered around Indo-Caribbean heritage and its persistence.
The same was true of his solo work, which mined his familial past with special attention to gender and sexuality. His 2011 piece Cutlass transformed the machete into a brooch. Its slight size, curved lines, and sleek design almost undermine the danger of its sharp point. As he wrote in a 2012 statement, Cutlass “aspires to match the elegance of the ways my grandmother wielded hers,” whether to slice cane or coconut. Ohrni, also from 2011, referred to a wrap associated with South Asian people on which was embroidered a gold anchor, after his other grandmother’s tattoo. Both Cutlass and Ohrni were characteristic of, as he put it, “an Indo-Caribbean feminist aesthetic. . . . Both replicas of complicated objects, they are as much markers of oppression as they are evidence of the creative agency of women who lived through miserable conditions of colonization and the still-patriarchal process of nation building that followed.” His 2018 exhibition Coolie Coolie Viens continued to make art from his family history, as in a video installation that superimposed Andil and Vivek Shraya, a transgender artist, over a photograph of Andil’s parents. In academic journals, in magazines, and in exhibitions, Andil attended to the intertwined histories of queer subjects, quotidian and fine art, indentured labor, and the Caribbean diaspora. But whether he was a scholar who moonlighted as an artist, an artist who moonlighted as a scholar, or a scholar-artist was still unclear.
This was, Andil thought, how fascist governments had gained dominance in the past. It was how they were taking root now.
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The call of academia temporarily directed his path. The ever-present question for scholars began to nag in 2018: Where was his book? As his art instructed, he looked to his past. He saw fifteen years of research on the disciplining of sexuality and on movements to secure sexual rights. He also saw art by O’Grady and Sinnapah Mary that considered the ways humans, as O’Grady had said, attempted to differentiate themselves from animals. And he saw the ways in which he had disciplined himself out of pursuing his sexuality by literally distancing himself from the chickens and queer-presenting child of his youth. With these ideas in mind, he contacted Duke University Press about a book project in mid-2018. The premise was simple: in the book, he would not argue with colonizers — in some cases, long dead — who alleged that Caribbean people were animals or animalistic. He would not try to prove that Caribbean people were humans. He would begin from a new assumption: We are animals. So what?
Published in 2021, Nature’s Wild considered how human-animal distinctions forged and upheld inequities in colonial and postcolonial countries. Through discussions of law and history, the book tracked the ways colonizers created and legitimated colonial power relations by depicting colonized subjects as bestial and their sexual practices as animalistic. After independence, some postcolonial subjects reproduced this human-animal binary, representing themselves as civilized while depicting poor and/or queer people as bestial. These efforts were always failing endeavors, as any introductory biology textbook (in which Homo sapiens belong to kingdom Animalia) attests. More productive, according to the book’s final turn, was the art of Sinnapah Mary and O’Grady and the activism of Colin Robinson, the Trinidadian poet who belonged to the Blackheart poetry collective with Sur, founded Caribbean Pride, and served as executive director of the New York State Black Gay Network. They, and Andil, turned to the animal and the natural as a source of inspiration.
In 2020, the spread of Covid-19 stymied travel and Andil stopped commuting between his job in Toronto and New York, the city he had come to love. A year later, in March of 2021, Colin Robinson died of colon cancer and Andil was named the custodian of his archives and his literary executor. Hoping to honor him, Andil asked Devan Shimoyama, Llanor Alleyne, and other artists to create work inspired by Robinson’s archives. Many agreed. Andil began organizing the resultant exhibition, titled The Plural of He, for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. He also curated everything slackens in a wreck for the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2022. Featuring the works of Margaret Chen, Sinnapah Mary, and others, that show of artists descended from Caribbean indentured laborers continued Andil’s project of troubling the boundary between humans and nature. The exhibition’s acclaim established Andil as a renowned curator.
During this time, Andil also dedicated himself to his art practice. He began to plan the exhibition Nature’s Wild for the Art Museum of the Americas. AMA is funded and run by the Organization of American States. Founded in 1948, OAS is effectively a hemispheric UN. The organization has long advanced US interests: at its initial meeting in the early cold war, it resolved to defend against communism, and in 1962 it suspended Cuba. But over the past several decades, according to Andil, OAS has attempted to rebrand as a defender of human rights. Those efforts shaped AMA, which appealed to Andil in part because it represented thirty-four countries. And Andil had previously consulted on an exhibition for its director, Adriana Ospina, and curated a retrospective for AMA on the Trinidadian artist Wendy Nanan. He proposed Nature’s Wild to Ospina in 2021, and she accepted. AMA’s small staff and resources enticed Andil. If he could secure funding, he would have control.
Each piece forNature’s Wild takes seriously O’Grady’s and Andil’s own probing of human-animal relations. Andil’s solo piece Magna Carta edits sparkly silver shoes onto the picture of him as a child among hens. Another solo piece, Natures, juxtaposes two photographs of Andil kissing a white man; in the right panel, the man’s hand grips Andil’s neck. Perhaps the most ambitious piece is Lifetime Achievement, an installation made with Romy Ceppetelli and Zachari Logan that includes broken ceramic eggs spinning on a record player among other elements. These parts revolve around a photograph in which Andil is nude on all fours, body pointed left. A cross hangs from his neck. An unstrapped leather saddle sits on his back, obscuring his midsection. His neck turns so his eyes stare out, displaying an unclear expression — perhaps wry, perhaps stoic. Compared with the photograph of him as a child among chickens, Lifetime Achievement is, in Andil’s words, “what happened to that boy. He became a workhorse.” Andil’s account foregrounds the irony undergirding the installation: in the effort to civilize himself by throwing himself into work, Andil became more beastly, not less.
As the exhibition makes explicit, these civilizing and humanizing projects have disastrous effects. In Andil’s stark print, 70,000 Flowers, black text appears on a white background: 70,000 KINDS OF FLOWERS GO EXTINCT BEFORE THEY ARE FOUND. The bareness of the aesthetic amplifies the sentence’s simplicity — and the devastation of its meaning.
The exhibition’s artworks also attend to the ways that the porous boundary between humans and the natural world has particular salience in the Caribbean and in its people’s spiritual beliefs. Andil’s Ixora Coccinea: proposition for a public monument is a brass sculpture of the titular flower, commonly known as West Indian jasmine. The first word of the flower’s scientific name is a latinized form of the Sanskrit word Ishwara, which roughly means God or Supreme Being in Hindu traditions. Ixora Coccinea’s elements collapse the human (brass), the natural (the flower), the Caribbean (the “West Indian jasmine”), and the spiritual (Ishwara).
As Andil put it, the pieces in Nature’s Wild are guided by an aesthetic of artist-as-curator and curator-as-artist. Artworks like Sinnapah Mary’s 1, 2 — an illustration from Andil and Sinnapah Mary’s art book — foreground the unclear distinction between artist, curator, and collaborator. Co-created pieces like Lifetime Achievement remind that even Andil’s solo works stem from a history of engaging with other artists. The curation honors the people who ferried him into artmaking, including O’Grady, who contributed Landscape (Western Hemisphere). And the curation is itself a form of artistic expression; the inclusion of the Trinidadian artist Natalie Wood’s Yemanji & Varuna — an illustration of a Yoruba orisha and Hindu deity surrounded by the natural world — both magnifies Andil’s engagement with Caribbean spiritualities and the natural world in Ixora Coccinea and offers a different aesthetic with which to approach those subjects. Nature’s Wild would combine Andil’s curatorial, creative, and scholarly practice, marking a culmination of many of his professional pursuits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he came to feel, as he told me, that “this could be my final show.”
Nature’s Wild was not without its difficulties. Andil had heard the AMA staff reductively describe another curator’s show as the “Afro-Brazilian show,” and he’d been told that Nature’s Wild had been referred to internally as the “queer Canada show.” Ospina had inquired about the demographics of Andil’s collaborators as though checking boxes on a form, and every museum staffer he met was white or appeared to be. This was a troubling — if, to my mind, typical of the art world — treatment of identity.
Tragedy struck ahead of the show’s opening. In December 2024, O’Grady died in her home. Though she was 90, the news shocked Andil. He had only ever seen her exuberantly alive. “I expected Lorraine to outlive us all,” Andil told me. “She’s the most brilliant mind I have ever encountered.” The day after she passed, Andil and Sur visited her apartment. Being in her home provided some solace. So did knowing he would feature their collaborative work in Nature’s Wild. And when that wrapped, he would write about her and especially about the art she’d made over the preceding fifteen years, which had largely gone unmentioned even as her older work was increasingly celebrated. She may have been gone, but Andil still faced the unfinished business of remembering her.
While mourning O’Grady, he received more bad news: the death of a close friend who had helped anchor him to New York over the course of many visits. Reeling from the compounding grief, Andil tried to complete his show. He finalized the press release and the catalog, which featured writing by the art critic Annie Paul, the artist and cultural studies scholar Marsha Pearce, and the poet Shivanee Ramlochan. He also developed pneumonia. Feverish and weak, he corresponded with the installer, to confirm that the pieces were set up appropriately — and with the artists, to ensure their work’s safe passage. Despite his literal and figurative ills, he was trying to tie up loose ends.
When Ospina called on February 5, Andil did not answer. He was still sick. He texted and asked if he could talk to her later. She wrote that it was urgent. “I have been told to do this,” Andil recalled her saying in a shaky voice. “Your show is canceled.” Shocked and confused, Andil asked for more information. Ospina mentioned that there were constraints, perhaps the budget. Her tone was still uncomfortable. Andil grew concerned. She sounded like she was worried for her job. What was happening? The call ended without answers.
As Andil recovered from pneumonia, he searched for a solution. He reached out to Ospina. If there was a budgetary problem, he could find more funding. Ospina rebuffed his offer. On February 14, she emailed him a PDF. On OAS letterhead — their slogan reads More rights for more people — Ospina wrote, “On behalf of the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) of the Organization of American States (OAS), allow me to reiterate that the AMA has made the difficult decision to indefinitely suspend all temporary traveling on-site exhibitions, including Nature’s Wild.” Below her signature, the letter cc’d James Lambert, a former Canadian diplomat and the OAS’s secretary for hemispheric affairs. The decision was final.
The cancellation and the letter seemed suspicious. The budget could not have been the issue. The Canada Council for the Arts had provided most of the funding. WorldPride had agreed to cover the costs of two events. The Canadian Mission had funded the opening party and Andil’s stay in DC for two weeks. And AMA and OAS weren’t paying Andil a curatorial fee (though the Canadian Mission was). All the museum had underwritten were the nails on the wall, a few plinths, and a shipping budget that Andil had already reduced. So why had they canceled his show?
When Andil recovered, he began researching. On February 4, the day before Ospina called, Benjamin Netanyahu had visited the White House. During their joint press conference, Trump proclaimed that he would make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East.” That same day, Trump signed Executive Order 14199, withdrawing US funding from the UN Relief and Works Agency, which provided aid to Palestinians, and removing the US from the UN’s Human Rights Council. That order also directed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review, over the following 180 days, all “international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support.” Read in the context of the bill and Trump’s press conference with Netanyahu, the target of the directive seemed to be organizations opposed to Israel’s brutal violence in Gaza. Andil suspected that OAS saw themselves in the crosshairs. In the 2023 fiscal year, per Congress’s estimates, the United States had provided OAS roughly $53.2 million. According to OAS’s external audit, the United States was its largest contributor.
Andil’s research clarified earlier incidents, like the AMA staff’s references to “the queer Canada show.” He had heard that the museum’s internal documents featured the picture of the queer-presenting child surrounded by hens as a preview image for the forthcoming show. Once the regime changed, an image used to garner excitement and inform staffers of the museum’s projects may have seemed like a liability, an announcement that the museum was putting on an exhibition of the kind of art that the Trump Administration would surely oppose. In Andil’s eyes, they canceled the show for its queer undertones and because art was an easy target. They probably assumed that artists wouldn’t sue an international organization. In any case, artists certainly were not worth the headache of the administration’s ire. The little queers with their little paints would go quietly into the night in the name of protecting the OAS budget.
But Nature’s Wild was not the only show that the AMA canceled. Before the Americas — the so-called “Afro-Brazilian Show” — was also canceled. According to its curator, Cheryl D. Edwards, AMA leadership contacted her on February 10 and said the Trump administration labeled her exhibition a “DEI program and event.” Accordingly, the US government had “terminated and defunded” the show. Was it possible both shows were casualties of the administration’s current moral panic about DEI?
Piecing the timeline together, Andil speculated that the OAS acted of their own accord, in advance. Executive Order 14199 directed Rubio to review organizations — not defund them or mandate that they cut certain programs for funding. By the time Rubio was expected to report back, both Nature’s Wild and Before the Americas would have opened and closed. OAS had complied before the administration applied any direct pressure. The response seemed almost sensical to Andil. “At the moment of cancellation,” as he put it, Andil hypothesized that Ospina might have thought, This is my livelihood. This is my professional status. What happens now? I better comply. This was, he thought, how fascist governments had gained dominance in the past. It was how they were taking root now.
Andil didn’t think that compliance would bear much fruit. As he told the Washington Post, “cutting these exhibits is going to do nothing to safeguard that contribution” to their budget. It seemed unlikely that the US would fund the OAS but defund the IRS, the Department of Education, and every other federal agency and organization. Andil still tried to contest the cancellation. He sent AMA another letter, asking for clarity. OAS offered none. He spoke to journalists at the Guardian, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, and Guyana’s Stabroek News. He contacted the Canadian Mission, in part because they funded some of the show and in part because OAS was not a strictly US institution; Canada was also a member state. James Lambert — the OAS’s secretary for hemispheric affairs whom Ospina cc’ed on the official cancellation letter — was Canadian. The Canadian Mission responded quickly with their sympathy but said that they could do nothing.
The cancellation and failed appeals subjected Andil to cruel ironies. Though as a young immigrant he’d considered Canada a hostile place, his success had given him hope that the country’s governmental institutions could and would support him. Though his scholarship critiqued the use of human rights discourse to advance sexuality rights via organizations like OAS, support from AMA had given him hope that they could and would platform his art. On both counts, Andil became the butt of history’s joke. In his effort to embrace the animal that he was, Andil found himself subject to brutally human discipline.
The disdain for the image of that boy still strikes Andil. It was, he says, “circulated with pride before. ‘Look what a great job we’re doing.’ . . . And now this is poison.”
Jacket zipped tight, I am hunched over. Even in this corner of the garden courtyard of a church named for pastures long since covered by cement, the wind has grown colder. Pollen has flooded my eyes and my nose. And I have been resisting the urge to piss for about a half hour. I tell Andil that we have to find a place where I can pee.
The bathroom at Café Kitsuné is out of order, and a normally empty restaurant Andil likes is packed. We keep on, passing the subway station and the hospital, and arrive at the LGBT Community Center. I hurry into a first-floor metallic bathroom that reeks of urine and relieve myself. Then we go upstairs. At the end of the hallway, people sit in what looks like a classroom, listening to a voice out of sight. Ahead, a few tourists snap pictures of Keith Haring’s bathroom mural, Once Upon a Time. Two-dimensional figures and penises intertwine above the tiled wall and the scuffs marking former sinks and toilets. We enter the bookstore and browse. I open Richard Siken’s Crush, flip to “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” and search for a line: “You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?” Then we return downstairs, where a seemingly hallucinating man talks to someone we cannot see. He moves his hands occasionally. Perhaps they are touching. No one looks up or interrupts, not even the security guard. He is safe here, for now. I wonder if the center receives federal funding. Then Andil and I part.
When I descend to the subway, I consider contacting Ospina for a quote. But Andil has told me the organization has refused to comment for any news outlet. In any case, I do not owe them a damn thing. Andil is my friend. The least I can do is represent his point of view at length.
Over the following weeks and months, some events will give me solace about the cancellation of Nature’s Wild. Andil will return to texting me about Nicki Minaj — including a picture of him wearing a sweatshirt with BARB in the college font — and I will infer that he feels better. Paul Petro, a gallery in Toronto, will exhibit some of the pieces. Despite thinking that Nature’s Wild could be his final show, Andil will make art again. He will be named a Getty Scholar. The show might never grace AMA, but it will go on.
But on that day in March, as I hear the familiar screech and speed up to catch the train, those balms are not yet available to me. I have never been convinced by any of the clichéd arguments for art’s importance: that it makes us human, that it reflects our world, that interacting with it makes us moral, and so on. Though I prefer to spend my free days at museums, inspecting paintings that catch my eye, I mainly think of that as a leisure activity, and I am not so self-involved that I believe that the things that I do for fun are important. So why am I so disturbed by AMA’s cancellation of Nature’s Wild?
Was it possible both shows were casualties of the administration’s current moral panic about DEI?
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I search for something to look at in order to avoid making eye contact with anyone, and spot a display from the MTA’s Poetry in Motion program. The background — Francesco Simeti’s illustration Bensonhurst Gardens — depicts 2D flowers in front of a distant mountain range, over which clouds texture a pale blue sky. “little prayer,” a poem by the Black nonbinary writer Danez Smith, runs over the image. “let ruin end here,” Smith’s poem begins. It is part of what is at stake. If Trump has his way, Smith’s poem will not remain up for long. Poetry in Motion might disappear altogether. The administration threatens the little things, like the state-funded queer art displayed on subway cars and the ability to encounter art in transit, to say nothing of transit itself. When Trump inevitably guts the Department of Transportation, will the subway system survive? The vehicles may go the way of the New York streetcar: a story old-timers tell about a mythical past that our infrastructure makes unimaginable. As the train slows and I adjust my weight so as not to fall, the cancellation of Andil’s exhibition troubles me because it gestures to how widely, deeply, and dramatically the Trump Administration will reshape life for those who survive it.
After exiting the train, I get on the Shuttle and get off at Grand Central. I walk through the white-tiled tunnel, weaving around stragglers who seem to move only to obstruct my passage. I wonder what will replace the Danez Smith work when the funding runs dry, how its absence will change riding the train, and what the accumulation of so many small changes will mean for the city’s inhabitants. I also wonder about the artists and whether the loss of income will force them to seek work in a receding economy, or whether they will give up their practices altogether. I try not to think about how many of them will find no wage at all. And as I exit the tunnel into the dimmer concourse populated by cops and speeding travelers, I wonder whether I will ever be able to leave my job and write full-time.
While pushing through a turnstile to the right of a tourist struggling to figure out how to pay and to the left of people queued to buy MetroCards, my thoughts — like AMA’s and OAS’s — gravitate to money. Perhaps because I have been poor and declined invitations to various activities I could not afford, I have never thought that money is simply money. I think of the Marx passage that I perennially misquote: “Capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.” I may not know firsthand what the wealthier side of the relationship stands to gain from the wielding of capital to cancel exhibitions, but I have some sense of what I and others stand to lose from an absence of public art and of wages. I may not be convinced of art’s importance, but I have some sense of the importance of censoring art: doing so offers a dismal forecast for the future. If a person cannot display ceramic eggs in a museum, I think as I stand on the right of an escalator, then a great deal is at risk.
AMA canceled Nature’s Wild in part because of US support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. Trump signed Executive Order 14199 to materially and representationally bolster Israel. The order’s call for Rubio to review US participation in international organizations is a consequence of US support for Israel’s ongoing invasion. That OAS complied in advance by canceling Nature’s Wild is a vote of tacit support for genocidal violence and displacement. At Grand Central, I locate my track and think that the censorship of art foretells and reflects threats to the little things, like the ability to sit on a train that displays Smith’s poem, and the big things, like life itself.
Settling into a two-seater on the left so that I can watch the river, I turn to my usual source of relief and consider leaving the country. I imagine returning to Jamaica, finding work, and spending my free time writing in a home office. But the cancellation of Nature’s Wild suggests that the country’s borders offer little sanctuary for those beyond them. OAS, after all, receives financial contributions from numerous countries. It makes decisions through a General Assembly consisting of member-state delegates. And its leaders are not United States officials; its secretary general at the time of the cancellation, Luis Almagro, had served as Uruguay’s minister of foreign relations. That this international and intergovernmental body kowtowed to Trump in advance makes clear that his fascism extends well beyond national borders. The train is speeding ahead through the tunnel, and it’s unclear what corner of the globe, if any, can offer me escape from the reach of the United States government.
Feeling my temperature rising and my thoughts racing, I breathe deep and put my earphones in. I consider reading the book in my backpack, but my eyes weigh with exhaustion. I look out the window, watching the buildings pass. At the city’s far reaches, the Hudson begins to expose itself, dull and gray beneath the overcast skies. Even this far inland, the water is brackish. The ocean travels upstream as far as Tarrytown, where I will get off, and beyond. It even gives the river a tide. The Hudson is an estuary for much of the length that we call a river, part salt and part fresh, though its briny drops prove indistinguishable from the snowmelt and rainfall that fill the bed. Even this far from shore, I cannot escape the Atlantic.
I wonder about my ancestors, enslaved and indentured, who traversed its waters. I scan the farther banks, where the tall blocky frame of Morrison’s former home in Grand View-on-Hudson will eventually come into sight. From its window, she looked out onto the river that is part ocean, saw a woman fully dressed emerge from its waters, and came up with the idea for Beloved. The image that inspired the book seems to me an inverse of the image of enslaved people thrown overboard in the novel’s famed rendering of the Middle Passage. I remember Ian Baucom’s insistence that the motif of drowning enslaved people signifies that time does not pass so much as accumulate. I wonder if I will ever escape the Atlantic’s spatial or temporal reach. Then I close my eyes and hope that I do not sleep through my stop.
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