The Story of Ourselves: Caribbean Artists Hulda Guzmán & Tessa Mars

The Caribbean can seem like such a small part of the world, with hundreds of scattered islands that look like little splotches on your world map. If you zoom in, you’ll find one such island curiously divided into two territories. With the Dominican Republic on the East and Haiti on the West, the island of Hispaniola is home to contemporary artists Hulda Guzmán (Dominican, born 1984) and Tessa Mars (Haitian, born 1985).

At first glance, Guzmán and Mars seem to have led parallel paths in life. Both started their careers in their home countries before expanding their presence to museums and private collections across Europe and the Americas. Both are Caribbean women. Both are painters and portraitists. And both use their artistry to explore deeper connections between themselves, their families, and their environments.

Despite their perceived similarities, the two caribeñas have distinct styles that display their individual perspectives, personal preferences, and unique personalities.

Hulda Guzmán

Hulda Guzmán shares her story through embellished vignettes of her life. Living and working in her home country of the Dominican Republic, Guzmán often paints what’s right in front of her, using her family homes in Santo Domingo and Lanza del Norte as backdrops for her lively compositions, including the DAM’s own Jusqu’ici tout va bien (So Far, So Good), 2022.

Attracted to a sense of fun and bold expression, Guzmán says the painting’s title is meant to add a bit of morbid humor to the implied danger of wild horses surrounding the subject while she rides her scooter. For her, the story is trivial compared to the potential for endless interpretations from viewers. When explaining this aim for universality in her work, she quotes Eckhart Tolle:

It’s just a story, a concept linked with other concepts. The story of ourselves is not essentially who we are: it is a limited entity, it’s a surface phenomenon.

Guzmán chooses to share limited snippets of herself indulging in fleeting moments of joy, peace, or exhilaration. The tongue-in-cheek title So Far, So Good hints at the risk of someone speeding down the countryside alongside galloping wild horses. It communicates the subject’s state of mind, “A sort of ‘living on the edge!’ attitude,” as Guzmán describes. The figure is recklessly speeding down the dirt road with wild horses without so much as a helmet. So far, so good... for now.

But there is more to question than just the subject’s safety. The spectator’s imagination fills in parts of the story purposefully left untold by the artist, inviting viewers to join her world on her terms. Perhaps this is why the artist prefers to draw inspiration directly from her surroundings.

While Guzmán’s inspiration is mostly external, Mars looks inwards to explore multi-generational stories and connections to the land.

Tessa Mars

On the other side of border, Tessa Mars developed a similar desire to imbue her works with ambiguity and mystery. She most often paints real people, usually family members, in carefully crafted, vaguely recognizable backdrops. “I like to think that these spaces are all imaginary, but they are so simple that [they] probably exist somewhere in the world.”

Added to the museum’s collection following the closing of Who tells a tale adds a tail: Latin American contemporary art, Mars’s 2022 painting Travelling root I depicts two women emerging from the foliage along a riverbank. The elder places her hand gently and reassuringly atop the head of the younger woman, meant to represent Mars, herself. Made while she was living in Berlin, the work alludes to themes of generational connections and land recurrent throughout the artist’s practice. Mars says, “The relation the characters have to each other matters a lot, their relation to the landscape even more...”

Here, Mars depicts women from her family and herself, placing real life people into imagined spaces. We can compare this to Guzman’s approach, in which she depicts real people in real places, most often in imagined, precarious scenarios, more like daydreams. Mars, on the other hand, finds freedom in alternate versions of herself, especially since the creation of her alter ego, Tessalines. Created in 2015, following almost an entire year of creating “funky” self-portraits, Mars says it was a natural next step for her to create an alter ego, finding it to be “totally liberating.” A combination of her first name (Tessa) and the surname of Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), leader of the Haitian revolution, Tessalines became a vehicle for Mars to expose “elements of identity that are not visible at the skin level.”

Unlike most alter egos, Mars’s persona doesn’t always manifest in human forms. In Mars’s full installation for Who tells a tale adds a tail, Tessalines appears as the blue garment of the lone traveler. Made from paper-mache, the lone traveler was one of three works part of Mars’s original exhibition installation. While the two canvas paintings and paper-mache sculpture were created to be in dialogue with one another, they can also be studied independently of one another. This is not dissimilar to the familial relationships Mars’s works explore, in which each subjects’ individual presence is as important as understanding their collective context.

So Far, So Good and Travelling root I may offer some insight into the lived experiences of these artists as Dominican and Haitian women, respectively, but they are only a small glance into the greater, ever-growing canon of Latin American art.

Since the addition of Guzmán’s and Mars’s paintings, the museum has invested in more modern and contemporary artists from the region, most recently acquiring works by Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaica), Didier William (Haiti), and José Maria Mijares (Cuba) to name a few.

This growing presence of Caribbean art and artists at the DAM is a powerful reminder of Tolle’s words: one person’s story is limited. But in the company of hundreds, each one becomes a vital puzzle piece painting a much broader picture.