Andil Gosine is an artist, curator, Professor of Environmental Art & Justice at York University, Toronto, and author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021). Dr. Gosine migrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Canada during his teen years. Aliyah Khan is Associate Professor of English and Afroamerican & African Studies, and Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (2020). Dr. Khan is originally from Georgetown, Guyana.

 “Magna Carta” (2025) by Andil Gosine, the signature image of the “Nature’s Wild” show.

On February 5, 2025, “Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine,” an exhibition curated by Trinidadian artist Gosine, and a second show featuring Black artists, were cancelled by the Washington, D.C. Art Museum of the Americas (AMA), an arm of the Organization of American States (OAS) of which Guyana and Trinidad are members. Gosine talks to Aliyah Khan about the cancellation.

KHAN: Where did you grow up in Trinidad? How does the Caribbean influence your art and curation?

GOSINE: I grew up in George Village, Tableland, in South Central Trinidad. Those formative years influenced everything. I like to say I was taken to Canada at fourteen, because it was an involuntary migration. Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up to turning fifteen. The very last piece made for the exhibition is about how maybe I don’t need to turn fifteen anymore. It’s about understanding one’s instrumentality and value as a workhorse, how we and the people before us were only valued for work.

KHAN: What was your “Nature’s Wild” exhibition for the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA)

about? What is its connection to your book?

GOSINE: “Nature’s Wild” grew out of the book of the same name and addressed the same tensions: human-animal relations and histories of animalization and race in the Caribbean—how colonists, then postcolonial elites, put the onus on marginalized people to prove themselves human and not animal, for example through dress codes.

KHAN: You curated a show with Trinbagonian artist Wendy Nanan at the OAS’s Art Museum of the Americas in 2020-21. Why did you work with the AMA and OAS again?

GOSINE: The Wendy Nanan show was the Museum’s first show by a Caribbean woman and a Trinidadian. I aspire to work with public institutions, for the people. This museum represents the people of the Americas. I like the space. I had to do all the legwork, but I could control the vision. There was no oversight until cancellation.

KHAN: Why was the “Nature’s Wild” exhibition cancelled? Who cancelled it?

GOSINE: There was no explanation given for the cancellation, not when the director called me at 9AM on February 5, not in the letter the museum sent on February 14, nor in the response to my follow-up letter to the Permanent Mission of Canada to the OAS. I wrote to the Canadian Mission because of Canada’s membership in the OAS and their enthusiastic financial support. My only communication has been with the museum director [Adriana Ospina], but the cancellation order, as she told me, came from the OAS Secretariat. The letter she wrote me confirming the cancellation was cc’ed to the Head of the Secretariat James Lambert, who is a Canadian, ironically.

KHAN: The Art Museum of the Americas is funded by the OAS. Who funded the “Nature’s Wild” exhibition? Was the cancellation a funding issue?

GOSINE: Not one penny has come from the Art Museum of America. I received the main grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. The program was covered by WorldPride. The opening was covered by the Canadian Mission. Some of it was my own money and time during my six-month [Beinecke] Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute. When I received the phone call, the director sounded scared, I think for her own job. She mentioned budget, but there was no clarity. Instead of responding immediately, I did research. Budget constraints were not an explanation. No one has cut funding to the OAS, including the American government. No one has cut funding to my exhibition.

KHAN: Do you believe U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive orders on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and international agency funding are related to the exhibition cancellation?

GOSINE: On the day before the cancellation, while I was having a wall measured at the Museum, Donald Trump issued an executive order directing Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, to study for six months international agencies to which the U.S. gives money, and report back. That was the limit of the executive order. [Trump] was not cutting anything immediately for groups like the OAS. For three years, there had been no disagreements about my show. Suddenly after that order, the cut was made the next morning.

DEI matters a lot in the American context. But this is a bigger story about falling to fascism. My art show is not as important as people getting deported, people losing their jobs, the end of science. People are hedging bets: how do you deal with a new political regime and animal fear? If you bend enough, might you survive, even if it compromises your values and raison d’être, as with the OAS? Who is sacrificed?

KHAN: Do you think race and the artists’ national origins were factors in the exhibition cancellation?

GOSINE: In three years, I produced work with many more artists and writers than represented in the final exhibition. It doesn’t mean you’re choosing the best words, but you’re choosing the words that are telling a story together. The artists came from Canada, Barbados, Jamaica, the United States, Canada, Europe, Sweden, Italy. In the final selection, most were Canadian—Black, white, South Asian, First Nations, women.

KHAN: What Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian artworks and artists were in the exhibition?

GOSINE: All of them are Caribbean, because all of them are me! My two main collaborators were [the late] Lorraine O’Grady, my mentor; and my longtime collaborator Kelly Sinnapah Marie from Guadeloupe. Lorraine is American but identified herself as a West Indian woman born to Jamaican parents. My Caribbean Canadian collaborators in the final show were Natalie Wood from Trinidad and Llanor Alleyne, who is a Bajan.

For the catalogue, the [Guyanese] writer Rajiv Mohabir wrote new poetry. [Trinidadians] Shivanee Ramlochan and Shani Mootoo wrote essays. Work by photographer Abigail Hadeed in Trinidad was included. In [Trinidadian writer] Colin Robinson’s archive, I found an unknown collection of beautiful poems he wrote when he was thirteen. It is remarkable that in 1974 you have a precocious Trinidadian boy writing about his crush in a sweet and confident way. These poems motivated me to make and distribute a chapbook.

KHAN: Media reports imply that the show was also cancelled because it was a “queer show.” How did you describe it?

GOSINE: I never characterized the show as a queer show. That’s how my show was called internally at the Museum: a queer Canadian show. The only image I’ve shared with media is the show’s signature image. That was the beginning of what made it a queer show, that little image from George Village.

In the clumsy, ineffective, shortsighted way that the Museum has dealt with their agenda of inclusivity, we are just check boxes. I was asked to identify the collaborating artists by their gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, so they could say, “Look how great we’re doing, we have queer people, we have women, we have Black and indigenous people.” This is since Black Lives Matter forced museums to contend with their homogeneous collections and exhibitions. The OAS has advanced LGBTQ rights in the [Caribbean and Latin American] region. Everyone made a calculation. Queer people are an easy target.

KHAN: What professional losses did you incur because of the cancellation?

GOSINE: I took my academic sabbatical around the show, including a 15% pay cut. I received a grant related to my book to bring it to life through creative work. It was connected to me, not any institution. I chose the Art Museum of the Americas. I worked on this project for over three years and spent USD $100,000 employing fifty people—technicians, artisans. I have not put more work, resources, and heart into anything in my entire life.

KHAN: Were you offered redress or compensation?

GOSINE: I asked for communication, conversation, and compensation—even a discussion. There was a firm “no.” There was no interest from the Museum or the OAS in having a conversation. They thought I’m inconsequential, that artists can’t understand what the OAS is.

KHAN: The exhibition cancellation received major newspaper coverage in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. What support have you received from Caribbean and other institutions and people?

GOSINE: I am moved and encouraged by how many people who are vulnerable and have very little, whose immediate reaction was “What can I do?” I am simultaneously disappointed and scared about the silence of people in positions of power, whom I have worked alongside—people with a lot more resources. Protecting yourself alone will ultimately fail. Cancelling my exhibition at the OAS is not going to erase the OAS’s advancement of human rights. They constructed themselves as a social justice organization.

The most delightful thing is that someone posted how outraged they were that Andil Gosine, our “fellow Guyanese,” had this exhibition cancelled. There was so much outrage from my fellow Guyanese, until one Trinidadian killed the vibe. In my previous New York exhibitions, the opening was jam-packed with brown people from the community, Indo- and Afro-Caribbean. That means the most to me.

KHAN: Do you have alternative exhibitions and lectures planned?

GOSINE: “Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine” is dead, because the exhibition was conceived for that site. But I’m touched by [interest from] smaller galleries in Canada and the U.K. Two places immediately reached out for public lectures. PREE journal, my partner in the catalogue, will bring the essays to life there. WorldPride committed to having an event. In spring at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, I’m doing a celebration event along the theme for the exhibition opening: a belated quinceañero, with the poems of late Caribbean queer activist Colin Robinson.

KHAN: What is the danger of censoring art?

GOSINE: It’s a red flag for artists and academics, not other people. The Museum is dealing with diplomats who have little understanding of art except as a decoration and irritant. Art is a thing people turn to first in moments of joy, depression, coping with life. But in market economy logic, art doesn’t have [non-financial] value. It’s hard to understand why putting up pictures on a wall might be as important as or connected to people losing their jobs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. “The CancelANDILation Welcome Pack” and artworks from exhibition collaborators will be available at newcarib.com.