Magna Carta

STANDING ON ALL FOURS against a seamless white background, a brown-leather English saddle strapped to his naked body, the Andil Gosine of Caribbean Studies, or Contemporary Art, except DS, 2025, anchors the solo exhibition “Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine.” With the artist’s body positioned squarely in the middle, this large color photograph aptly summarizes the exhibition’s tone: Evoking the idea of a “workhorse,” the saddle doubles as a metaphor for the precarity of art-world labor itself, where artists of color often carry the invisible weight of institutions that depend on their presence yet deny them full recognition or support—an insidious dynamic illustrated by the cancellation of the original version of this exhibition, which was slated to open in March 2025 at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, but was abruptly shelved without explanation on February 5, over three years into its development. How can art continue its work when expelled from the institution?

Related

Dealer’s Choice

Art Museum of the Americas Axes Two Exhibitions After Trump Executive Order Banning DEI

Following this cancellation, a new version of the project opened at Paul Petro Contemporary Art in Toronto on October 10 of this year, featuring collaborations between Gosine, friends, and community members including Llanor Alleyne, Romy Ceppetelli, Bev Koski, Zachari Logan, Angie Quick, Deborah Root, Marinna Shareef, and Natalie Wood. The original exhibition, developed from Gosine’s book of the same name, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021), was to have been a survey of his ongoing project confronting the social and institutional suppression of what he calls “our animalities,” which are the impulses, intimacies, and attachments that dominant orders of race, law, and sexuality work so hard to contain. To frame Nature’s Wild only as a story of censorship is to miss the artist’s practice at its core. Indeed, the cancellation didn’t quite shut down the project, reinforcing Gosine’s claim that attempts to suppress the “wild” only make its vitality and necessity harder to ignore.

One work, Magna Carta, 2025—a photograph of Gosine as a child—has been widely circulated. In it, the young Gosine poses on the steps of his family’s home in Trinidad, surrounded by chickens, his shoes bearing a sparkly overlay that induces an intentional queer whimsy; a reproduction of that photograph was originally intended to hang as a banner across the exterior of the Art Museum of the Americas as part of show’s promotional materials. That same image was later chosen to represent “DON’T LOOK NOW,” a group exhibition organized by the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This, on view in New York in October 2025, which brought together artists whose work has faced censorship in the United States in recent years and situated Gosine within a growing landscape of cultural suppression. This moment recalls the “NEA Four” controversy of the early 1990s, which saw four performance artists lose their NEA grants after their work was judged “indecent” by the US government. In 2025, similar pressures resurfaced as an unprecedented number of art and creative entities saw their National Endowment for the Arts funding withdrawn. In parallel, the Trump administration circulated a list of artworks and exhibitions that they labeled negatively on the White House website, signaling them as “un-American,” a direct echo of the so-called “degenerate art” of the past.

But organizing projects in reaction to more generalized censorship (like in “DON’T LOOK NOW” and the upcoming “Fall of Freedom” art initiative) is a low-hanging fruit, and like most purely aesthetic reactions that claim activism, these often fail to achieve any specific material change. As art historian Richard Meyer writes in Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, censorship is not just repressive, it can also be generative: “Far from a solely restrictive force,” he observed, “the censorship of art functions as a powerful (if unwitting) generator of visual expression.” Censorship, a messy thing, often ends up producing what Foucault called “reverse discourse,” turning prohibition into a sort of regeneration.

Perhaps interestingly, Gosine is not American, but Trinidadian Canadian. Nature’s Wild itself is a cross-pollination of creativity from across the Americas and acknowledges the effects of colonialism on contemporary society, a critical approach that rubs against the nationalist undertones of the institution circuit occupied by the Smithsonian campus, a key part of the United States’ cultural production arm. The exhibition’s position between the Caribbean and Canada allows it to sidestep the US art world’s habit of sanctifying “censored art” as a kind of “ready-made virtue.” In other words, the artist turns away from shallow moralism to produce effects that emerge unexpectedly, grounded in relation rather than easy reaction. This is exemplified by the restructuring of Gosine’s Nature’s Wild and the many collaborations that have arisen. See for instance Deborah Root’s illustrative painting Divine Idyll (Richard and Tim), 2025, a portrait of queer-rights and AIDS activist Tim McCaskell with his longtime partner, Trinidadian Canadian video artist Richard Fung. In the background of the painting, indigenous flowers (as noted by Gosine in an interview) rise subtly from the cracks of the overall scene, creating floral motifs as a visual scaffolding for the composition. The couple’s powerful biographical legacy similarly rests on the foundations they helped lay. These same resilient flowers are referenced downstairs in Ixora Coccinea: Proposition for a Public Monument, 2024, a bronze sculpture portraying a rounded flower silhouette. Elsewhere, a vinyl copy of pop star Charlie xcx’s recent brat album is playfully locked up in a clear box on the floor (Lifetime Achievement, 2025). Internet-savvy viewers will immediately recognize the overly circulated green album cover, intentionally added to this new version of the exhibition, signaling a similar tongue-in-cheek effect as Gosine’s smirking nude self-portrait. The installation echoes the clickbaity online channels in which the show’s highly publicized cancellation recently found itself.

In one of multiple events held during the Toronto exhibition, Gosine and Trinidadian activist chocolatier Gillian Goddard presented a tea-tasting event featuring chocolate concocted by the artist. Though censorship forced Gosine to rebuild his exhibition, these small acts of sharing food and initiating collaborations aligned with what the artist calls “tender economies,” systems of relation grounded in kinship and care rather than visibility economies, marking a deliberate turn away from the institutional hierarchies that shape how art generally circulates today. As Gosine noted in an interview, the chocolate is a sly reference to the artist being eaten, a counterpoint to being consumed by the show’s original cancellation; on another level, it’s a claim to deliciousness as an answer to the orchestrated colonial objectification of the body. “Everything slackens in a wreck,” a 2022 exhibition he curated at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, explored this dynamic while looking at the history of indentured workers taken to Caribbean plantations, cheap labor intended as a replacement for slavery.

Though never framed as martyrdom or victimhood, the difficulty of having had to restage this exhibition is visible throughout the show. Still, such fragility is also where much of contemporary queer and diasporic art now lives. Interdependence shapes an alternative para-institutional life, sustained not by authority, professionalization, or acquisitions but by practices that prioritize mutual support. In this way, the exhibition embodies the following words by Gosine’s long-term friend and mentor, artist Lorraine O’Grady: “The idea bears repeating: Self-expression is not a stage that can be bypassed. It is a discrete moment that must precede or occur simultaneously with the deconstructive act” (Olympia’s Maid, 1994). Plenty has been written on censorship, a quotidian occurrence today, but the restaging of Nature’s Wild plays out what is known but often forgotten: that art, like ecologies, always persists.

“Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine” runs through November 8, 2025, at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Tannon Reckling is an HIV-positive arts worker whose practice engages messy queer ontologies, hacked technologies, and the shadow labor of contemporary survival across art and institutional life.