Events

Nadia Huggins, Coral & Ash

The Coral & Ash exhibition will be open to the NYU community during regular hours in June, July and August, and will be open to the general public on the following dates:

  • Thursday, June 8, 3 pm - 7 pm
  • Thursday, June 22, 3 pm - 7 pm
  • Thursday, July 6, 3 pm - 7 pm
  • Thursday, July 27, 3 pm - 7 pm
  • Thursday, August 10, 3 pm - 7 pm
  • Thursday, August 24, 3 pm - 7 pm

Please RSVP and select the date of attendance.

For press contacts and special viewing arrangements, please write to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University is thrilled to present Coral & Ash, the first New York solo exhibition of Vincentian artist and photographer Nadia Huggins.

In immersed and immersive images, Huggins reveals her relation to Caribbean seas, reefs, and landscapes, and visions of Caribbean swimmers plunging into ocean blues. Mixing documentary with conceptual photography and video, Huggins' work yields portraits of individuals and communities in intimate relation with the sea and a world of coral life. We enter not only the space and spectrum of the Caribbean sea, but the temporality and sensibilities that open in that immersion. Her photographs of the volcanic explosion of La Soufrière take us to another realm: images of an island cloaked in ash reveal transformation, vulnerability, and a lyrical, mortal materiality.

Nadia Huggins is currently a 2023 Mellon Artist in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute.

Artist

Nadia Huggins

Nadia Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where she is currently based. A self-taught artist, she works in photography and, since 2010, has built a body of images that are characterized by her observation of the everyday. Her work merges documentary and conceptual practices, which explore belonging, identity, and memory through a contemporary approach focused on re-presenting Caribbean landscapes and the sea. Nadia’s photographs have been exhibited in group shows in Canada, USA, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Ethiopia, Guadeloupe, France, and the Dominican Republic. In 2019, her solo show Human stories: Circa no future took place at Now Gallery (London UK). Her work forms part of the collection of The Wedge Collection (Toronto, Canada), The National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston), and The Art Museum of the Americas (Washington DC, USA). Nadia was selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review (2018) and her work has been included in several publications, including A to Z of Caribbean Art (2019). She is the co-founder of ARC Magazine and One Drop in the Ocean, an initiative that aims to raise awareness about marine debris.

Curators

Dantaé Garee Elliott

Dantaé Garee Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She is particularly interested in contemporary Caribbean Art and its relation to migration within the Caribbean diaspora and region through examining the barrel children phenomenon. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) from Roanoke College and an M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature focusing on Colonial Literature from the University of Delaware. She is the program assistant for the Caribbean Initiative workshop series at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at NYU. In the summer of 2022, she served as Co-Director for the CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) Summer Seminar for their Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022/2023. She works as an Editorial Assistant for Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is a featured artist in Volume 04 of Forgotten Lands, titled Currents of Africa. She is also a spring 2023 Mellon Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU.

Ana Dopico

Professor Ana Dopico is Director of the Hemispheric Institute at New York University. She works on the comparative cultures of the Caribbean and the Americas and teaches in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. From 2014-2019, she was Director of the KJCC at NYU. She has published work on the novel, the politics of photography in Cuba, visual art and Latin American literature; Latinx American identities in cinema, Cuban cultural history, and political emotion. In her book project, Cubanologies: Altered States of the Nation, Professor Dopico examines the 'imagined disunity' of the nation revealed by 20th century Cuban culture, wherein altered political states fracture the unifying political and racial myths of cubanidad. Her blog CubaCargo/Cult chronicled the popular and psychic resonance of events between the Obama opening to Cuba and the death of Fidel Castro. Professor Dopico's essays and cultural journalism on the Cuban present have been published and translated in scholarly journals and in publications including The New York Times, NACLA, Al Adab (Arabic), L'Avenc (Catalan) and in the digital project Bridges to/from Cuba.

This exhibition is organized by the Hemispheric Institute with the support of The Mellon Foundation, KJCC, and New York University.

KJCC
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10003

Event Access

The exhibition is free and open to the public. NYU students, faculty, and staff may enter using their NYU ID. All non-NYU attendees must RSVP in advance.