Abstract
This article reports on some of the ways in which the Caribbean contemporary artists Tony Capellán, Christopher Cozier, Scherezade Garcia, El Colectivo Shampoo, Jorge Zeno, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, and Nadia Huggins deploy the semiotically rich imagery of the sea to comment on some of today’s most pressing social concerns. The success of their artwork is the result of the fact that in visualizing local realities, they increasingly visualize the global condition. The Caribbean’s history as a laboratory of the “modern” and the “globalized” has undoubtedly offered these artists a vantage point from which to launch their critical interventions.