FORGOTTEN LANDS Presents:
Patricia Encarnación & Stephen Arboite
This online curation brings together Patricia Encarnación and Stephen Arboite, two Caribbean artists who treat objects and materials as carriers of history, critique, and ancestral knowledge. Through machetes, coffee, fire, clay, natural pigments, collage, ceramics, and image-making, their practices read the Caribbean through what has been handled, cultivated, extracted, repurposed, and remembered.
Arboite’s layered surfaces draw from Haitian spiritual and material traditions to make visible what is obscured or inherited, while Encarnación turns to the quotidian with irony and refusal, challenging the colonial fantasies that shape how the Caribbean is consumed and misread. Together, their works ask what Caribbean objects know, and how they continue to hold labor, violence, kinship, survival, and return.
Black Ice Porcelain, clay, glaze, dried palm leaf
6 x 1.2 x 2 in.
$800
Coffee, charcoal, acrylic, mixed media collage on canvas
78.5 x 63.5 in.
Framed
Ceramic, cement, metal
Variable dimensions
Coffee, fire, acrylic, mixed media collage on paper
11.5 x 9.5 in.
Coffee, fire, acrylic, mixed media collage on paper
12 in. diameter
Chocolate casting slip
7 x 3.5 x 4 in.
Coffee, fire, acrylic, mixed media collage on paper
21.25 x 0.8 x 6 in.
Coffee, fire, acrylic, mixed media collage on paper
21.25 x 0.8 x 6 in.
ARTISTS
PATRICIA ENCARNACIÓN
Patricia Encarnación (she/they) is an Afro-Dominican interdisciplinary artist, scholar, curator, and artivist based in New York City. Their work challenges colonial tropes within Caribbean, Latin American, Afro-diasporic, and Global Majority communities through ceramics, photography, video, performance, installation, and critical pedagogy.
Encarnación has participated in residencies and fellowships at The Shed, Smack Mellon as a Van Lier Fellow, MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Kovent Catalonia, and Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center. Their work has been presented at Documenta 15, NADA Art Fair, the Tribeca Festival Artists Award Program, MOLAA, the Hudson River Museum, NYU, and the Centro León Jiménez Biennial. They have received recognition from the NALAC Fund for the Arts, CIFO, the City of Cádiz cultural immersion prize, and Tropiques Atrium in Martinique.
Encarnación is also a co-founder of Ojos Caribe, an itinerant video art platform centering Caribbean insular, continental, and diasporic perspectives. They hold an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies with a focus on Museum Studies from NYU, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and an AAS from Altos de Chavón.
STEPHEN ARBOITE
Stephen Arboite (b.1987) is a multidisciplinary artist of Haitian descent born in New York City and now based in Miami, Florida. Primarily self-taught, he builds upon his foundational studies in drawing and painting at Purchase College to explore memory, space, and cultural identity through a material language of coffee, fire, natural pigments, and mixed-media collage. His process-driven works transform the surface into layered textures, in which fragments of imagery move between what is visible and what remains obscured.
Through material experimentation, Arboite’s practice examines how memory, spirituality, and identity reveal personal and collective histories embedded in the present. Arboite’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including T&Y Projects in Tokyo, Sperone Westwater in New York, and MOCAD Detroit. Notable collections include the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami. In 2021, he was recognized as a Knight Arts Champion by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.