Bony Ramirez is a Dominican-born artist 🇩🇴who lives and works in New Jersey. A self-taught artist, he paints surreal images of contemporary Caribbean life and reimagines colonial histories. He engages with Western European painting traditions as a way to think about the colonial influence still present in the Caribbean. This interrogation of and engagement with conventional portraiture activates our 18th and 19th century American portrait collection, while also prompting the viewer to think about who has traditionally been left out of these paintings.    🖼️ This artwork blends Ramirez’s interest in engaging with traditional portraiture, art history, and Latin American traditions of magical realism. He has combined the art historical convention of depicting allegorical figures with his fantastical interpretation of Caribbean history. He created a powerful, Black goddess rescuing the Caribbean, symbolized by the still-live crabs, before the moment of complete destruction (when they ha...