David Gumbs

Saint Martin / Martinique

David Gumbs is an award winning interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin, based in Martinique. Recent projects include his Manifest EU European award, the Mondes Nouveaux national awards for his project Ethno Spirits, the BAC Sonic Clinic exhibition at Mocada NY. His participation to the Zonamaco, the JustLX, and the JustMAD art fairs.

His first solo Museum exhibition in the U.S. From Dust to gold at the Telfair Museums in Savanah, a year-long exhibition of selected works at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Illuminate Coral Gables in Miami, Tod Town Expo in Shanghai, the Currents New Media digital festival in Santa Fe, and the touring exhibition Relational Undercurrents which is a major survey of Latin American and Caribbean Art in the United States. The show opened at MOLAA Los Angeles and has travelled to the Portland Museum of Art, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, and the Wallach Gallery New York. Select works also shown at the TVE Caribbean visual Exchange in Melbourne, Australia. In 2017, Gumbs was part of the Prizm Art Fair during Miami Art week, the Jamaica Biennal, and won the National Street Art contest for the islands of Martinique and Saint-Martin.

Special thanks to:

AMI Mondes Nouveaux selection Committee, Conservatoire du Littoral, Studio Manager : JP Marine
Project manager : Dielando Fiacre
Assistants : Aurore Nereau, Flavio Delice, Chamika Germain

On my home island of Saint-Martin, creole gardens known for their healing and magical powers (secretly used by slaves) are today in danger. After each major Cat 5 hurricane, they are slowly replaced by concrete cities with a goal to protect against the rising sea level.

Ethno Spirits honors the Mondes Nouveaux award which speaks about a futuristic creole garden filled with human hybrids and bioluminescent species with protective & magical properties. The site-specific work aims to bring awareness to the disappearance of this natural heritage caused by natural disasters and globalization. It also reflects on industrial contamination of banana fields with the Chlordecone pesticide that has been used for the past 40 years.

This is an ongoing genocide where the land, seashores, local agriculture, and food are contaminated. Furthermore, Guadeloupe and Martinique hold the world record of prostate and breast cancer. The Chlordecone molecule is indestructible and will take between 500-700 years to leave the land. But where will it go? Have you guessed?

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