Derek Walcott’s Painters

Walcott's lifelong concern with painting and painters deeply inflected his aesthetics and politics. Walcott's interventions on the relationship between Caribbean and colonial history have been thoroughly scrutinised, but, arguably, Walcott was also keen to address and (re)write an art history "of which," paraphrasing a line from Omeros, the Caribbean "too" was/is "capable". Contextualising and putting in conversation Walcott's published and unpublished writings (poems, plays, essays, journalism) and his drawings or paintings (privately owned and publicly disseminated) with specific artists from the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America, Derek Walcott's Painters recalibrates and sharpens our understanding of Walcott's articulation of his own politics and poetics and of the Caribbean's contributions to Atlantic and global culture.