Christopher Cozier at David Krut Projects

Christpher Cozier, Installation view: I Find Myself Wandering Wandering/Wondering. Courtesy of David Krut Projects Arts Space.

By JONATHAN GOODMAN March 2, 2025

Christopher Cozier, now in his sixties, is a Trinidadian artist with significant ties to David Krut Projects, a progressive gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa. Krut's New York satellite gallery, where I saw the show, is located in the heart of Chelsea, whose affluence undeniably creates tension with the pointed implications of Cozier's work.

The artist lives and works in Trinidad, where intersections of class, race, and imperial history create what I observe as a dense texture of change. After receiving his BFA from MICA and MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, Cozier's time in the United States likely provided perspective on racial dynamics affecting Caribbean and Black populations. Upon returning to Trinidad in 1988, he deliberately rejected the tourist-brochure aesthetics then prescribed for Caribbean artists. This presents a tension in Cozier's work which stems from challenging the racial and post-colonial frameworks that dictate how Caribbean culture is presented to the world.

Christpher Cozier, Installation view: I Find Myself Wandering Wandering/Wondering. Courtesy of David Krut Projects Arts Space.

In the small environs of David Krut's New York space, four interconnected screenprints - "Tropical Night," "Seeing and Listening," "Sound System, Voice," and "Reaching Out" (2000) - weave a nuanced narrative of Caribbean life and culture. They have space separating them, but visual motifs, carried out in relation to all four compositions, tie one work to the next. Musical notation runs through the compositions, with speakers marking the corners of each print, while images of guitars appear throughout - all referencing the profound influence of Caribbean musical traditions, particularly calypso. One panel shows a figure with raised hands - a gesture that speaks to multiple conditions: from celebration to surrender, from party spaces to moments of arrest, reflecting complex intersections of class and access in Caribbean society.

Christpher Cozier, Installation view: I Find Myself Wandering Wandering/Wondering. Courtesy of David Krut Projects Arts Space.

Another striking image shows a palm tree enclosed by a fence, a potent symbol of how paradise narratives collide with security measures and restricted access in contemporary Caribbean life.

The work achieves an attractive mixture of direct simplicity and layered sophistication, addressing racial dynamics as well as broader questions of class tensions and social access in a society where, as Cozier notes, the victims of violence aren't "minorities" but often members of marginalized economic classes.

As one of the co-founders of Alice Yard, an artist-run space in Port of Spain, Cozier works within a vibrant network of Caribbean artists and thinkers. In light of his location-specific engagement with historical legacies of imperialism, the work needs assessment that relates Cozier's aesthetic to current conditions, no matter what kind of past they carry. To the artist's credit, he renders both social and fine art reality in a language that conveys private and public concerns.

As I write this review, Cozier's work is on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Operating from within Trinidad's cultural context, the exhibitions - both at MoMA and at David Krut - demonstrate how contemporary Caribbean artists are actively shaping international discourse through their own distinct visual language. If this is the beginning of mainstream understanding of a shared economy of vision and expression and achievement, so be it. Cozier is clearly taking us in that direction.WM