If you’ve been here a while, you already know what Salt & Aloes is trying to do…and what it’s pushing against.

Caribbean art is everywhere, if you know where to look. It’s in major collections, in biennials, in the work of artists who are shaping how the world understands color, land, memory, and the body. It’s dynamic. It’s contemporary. It is, plainly, some of the most urgent art being made right now.

And yet the writing about it too often falls into familiar grooves: framed through diaspora, through colonial history, through what the region has survived rather than what it’s actively building. The artists themselves don’t think that way. The work doesn’t live there exclusively. So why should the conversation?

That’s the gap Salt & Aloes exists to fill. Not Caribbean art as postcolonial case study. Caribbean art as a living, expanding, globally connected field on its own terms.

For the past 6 years, I’ve been experimenting with this work for free because I believed the conversation needed to exist. I still believe that. But to do it at the level it deserves: deeper reporting, artist interviews, access to art listings and sales, and sustained critical writing. More than anything, the work should be sustainable.

That’s why I’m launching a paid tier.

Here’s what it means for you as a reader:

Free subscribers will still receive artist and object spotlights. Selected reading lists will also still be available. The Salt & Aloes community isn’t going anywhere.

Beginning in June, paid subscribers will get access to our Caribbean contemporary artist database and calendar of exhibitions, the full archive of reading and resource lists, early access to art listings and sales through Salt & Aloes, and writing that treats Caribbean contemporary art with the full critical attention it’s owed.

If this project has given you something - a new artist, a new lens, a reason to pay closer attention - I’d love your support in taking it further.

Thank you for being here from the start.

Lauren B
Salt & Aloes

There has been a long and insistent tension between what is hidden and what is revealed throughout Tulloch’s work. I first met the artist across this breach through a series of deeply saturated photographs, and again as he continued to develop his dark, lush portraiture work. For all the potency of Tulloch’s images, there has always been a sense of controlled impenetrability. Disembodied limbs thrust boldly into frame; a copious bounty of tropical flora; the artist himself aching upwards out of a grain mass as in The Harvest (2018).

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For centuries, the Caribbean’s landscapes—mangroves, mountains, caves, and waterways—were sanctuaries for maroon communities seeking freedom beyond colonial rule. Today, Caribbean women artists reimagine these spaces as sites of fugitivity and possibility, engaging shifting ecologies as grounds for autonomy, memory, and speculative futures.

Across Indigenous and Afro-diasporic societies, women have long served as key guardians of sustainable agriculture, medicinal plant knowledge, and resource management, skills vital to community resilience. Despite colonization and patriarchy, this expertise has been preserved and passed down through oral traditions, casual apprenticeships, and sacred ritual. Juana Valdés is a Cuban-born and U.S.-raised artist who explores migration, race, and colonial legacies through materiality, centering women as ecological knowledge keepers and stewards. Her sculptural installation The Journey Within (2003) features roughly 100 delicate, white porcelain boats shaped like folded paper hats. Arranged in clusters to resemble a flotilla, the boats evoked a collective displacement, their fragile forms mirroring thevulnerable state of those undertaking perilous journeys across oceans and seas. The work’stitle, however, posits migration as not only a physical crossing but also a profound internal transformation.

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