Christopher Cozier

b. 1959 Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago

Christopher Cozier is an artist, curator, and writer living and working in Trinidad. As a visual artist, he works in a variety of media, including drawing, printmaking, sound, and installation. Through his series of ink-wash sketchbook drawings, Cozier has developed a collection of visual vignettes of contemporary Caribbean moments along with memoryscapes of the Caribbean’s colonial past and observations from his travels abroad. By translating images from his sketchbook to prints and sculptures, Cozier places his visual vocabulary in new settings and configurations, revealing alternative narratives and seeking a multitude of interpretations.

Cozier’s Tropical Night series was included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), Tate Liverpool and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Spain (2010). This installation of hundreds of sketchbook drawings, with the last arrangement including 210 works on paper, was the inspiration for his recent edition of silkscreen prints, All That’s Left (2011), published by David Krut Projects and printed at Axelle Fine Arts in Brooklyn, NY.

In addition to exhibiting his works in the US, Canada, Europe, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and throughout the Caribbean, Cozier is an active curator, most recently co-curating Wrestling with an Image: Caribbean Interventions at the Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. (2011). In 2006, he co-founded Alice Yard, a non-profit art organization that continues to have regular exhibitions and performances in Port of Spain. Cozier is also a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe, a Caribbean Journal of Criticism, distributed by Duke University Press. He was an editorial adviser to BOMB Magazine for their Americas issues (Winters, 2003 – 2005) and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004.