In this Research and Academic Program lecture, artist-scholar Andil Gosine (York University / Beinecke Fellow) previews his bronze sculpture Ixora Coccinea from his forthcoming exhibition Nature’s Wild at the Art Museum of the Americas (June 2025). Gosine considers contemporary and historical personal and sociopolitical catalysts for his sculpture. Ixora Coccinea is at once invested in contestation of anthropocentrism, observation and documentation of the historical significance of the labor system of Indentureship to the formation of Caribbean space and culture, and reckoning with traditions of public monument-making practices. Its propositions, particularly as a contemporary and future-looking eco-aesthetic strategy, emerge from and engage with intersecting ruminations across these concerns. 

Andil Gosine is professor of environmental art and justice at York University in Toronto, and author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021). He is at work on a follow-up collection of essays about visual arts that weigh and elaborate his intersecting interests in animality, ecology and desire, particularly in relationship to the Caribbean. 
 
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Andil Gosine, Untitled (detail), 2022