Caribbean Fine Art (CaFA) Fair Barbados and its artists will be featured at Prizm Art Fair in Miami from December 4-22, 2014. The 2^nd Edition of  Prizm Art Fair, which opens at the Miami Center for Architecture & Design with a VIP reception co hosted by MOCADA Museum and Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, will feature three New York City-based Caribbean artists representing CAFA Fair Barbados: Diogenes Ballester, Francks Francois Deceus, and Jamal Ince. This presentation is the result of an agreement between the organizers of CaFA Fair Barbados and Prizm to work in partnership to increase the exposure of artists of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and the Americas to a global audience.

Diogenes Ballester, visual artist, educator, and writer holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BFA from the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. He has taught as professor of art at The Cooper Union in New York City, the State University of New York at New Paltz, the College of New Rochelle and The State University of New York at Albany.  Ballester’s work explores oral history, memory, mythology, ritual and cultural identity along a transnational spectrum. In recent exhibitions, he has appropriated cultural objects and historical artifacts together with painting, drawing, prints and new media as a way of accessing the past and re-interpreting the present in a trans-Caribbean dialogue.  Ballester has received numerous honors for his artistic work and has exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. His work is in numerous private and public collections. He maintains a studio in East Harlem, New York City.

Born in Haiti in 1966, Francks Décéus and his family moved to Brooklyn, New York when he was nine years old. It wasn’t until he graduated from Long Island University with a degree in sociology that he turned to making art as a career. Stylistically his work incorporates many of the influences and aesthetic forms of the 40’s and 50’s visual artists like William Johnson and Jacob Lawrence and reverberates with some of the artistic strains of his native Haiti. His modernist style combines figurative, abstract and layered elements and relies heavily on a simplification of form and function. Décéus was profiled in a 1998 issue of the International Review of African American Art as “one of the leading young modern painters of his generation, whose work depicts a high degree of sensitivity to social issues and his culture.” He is currently featured in “100 New York Painters,” an extensive survey of significant New York painters and their widely diverse works. His work has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Xavier University and a legion of private collections.

Brooklyn based artist Jamal Ince received his B.F.A in photography from Pratt  Institute in 1991 and his MS in education from Long Island University in 2005. Jamal has exhibited his paintings and photographs widely in the NYC tri state area, as well as in Miami and his native Barbados. Selected group exhibitions include The Stamford Center for the Arts, Selena Gallery/Long Island University, Skylight Gallery Restoration Plaza, Five Myles Gallery, The Barbados Consulate and most recently, Art Africa Miami. His work is held in private collections, and he has created several public works including one for the NYC transit system. Jamal’s painting “Angry Young Tenor” was recently featured in the interior design magazine New York Spaces.  Jamal has participated in artist residencies at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and Museum of African Art. He currently teaches visual art to inner city youth in Brooklyn.

Prizm is the producer of a cutting edge art fair presented Art Basel Week in Miami that is multi-disciplinary in scope. Their goal is to expand the spectrum of international artists from the African Diaspora and emerging markets. E: info@prizmartfair.com        W: www.prizmartfair.com

CaFA Fair Barbados was created with the primary mission of increasing awareness and appreciation of Caribbean visual art and culture through the presentation of works of art and the distribution of information.  For updates please visit event website www.cafafair.com or call 646-267-8831.