Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine

Paul Petro Contemporary Art will present works by Llanor Alleyne, Romy Ceppetelli, Bev Koski, Zachari Logan, Deborah Root and Natalie Wood, with Andil Gosine, beginning Oct. 10.


Toronto, March 21, 2025 -- Today should have marked the opening of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition over three years in the making, at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, D.C. But on Feb. 14, just weeks before installation was set to begin, AMA officially cancelled the show, as directed by the Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), which administers the museum. Neither AMA nor the OAS has offered any explanation to either Gosine or the press, however, he points to the OAS’s response to an executive order by the US President.

In the wake of the show’s cancellation, Gosine is pleased to announce that three art spaces have come forward to rescue and celebrate elements of the exhibition:

On March 22, the New York-based Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (LLMA) will present Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine: A Quinceañero. This performance will recuperate both the opening celebration of Nature’s Wild, and another element of the lost exhibition: the circulation of a new publication rescued from the archives of renowned queer activist Colin M. Robinson: a tender book of poems Colin wrote when he was thirteen years old, in 1970s Trinidad. “I don’t know if another document like this exists—poems written by a confidently queer teenage Caribbean boy in the 1970s, including about his crush on a classmate.” Gosine, who also curated The Plural of He, a tribute show to Robinson at LLMA, had planned to give away copies of the poetry book during the run of the exhibition at AMA. LLMA Executive Director Alyssa Nitchun is thrilled the Museum could support this initiative. “Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is a haven for queer artists and community,” she says, “even as the government seeks to erase LGBTQIA+ lives and cultural, institutional support goes silent. As an unabashedly queer institution, we experience community as the cornerstone of resistance and understand that it is up to us to preserve and uplift our own voices.”

The Montreal-based gallery ELLEPHANT will showcase Gosine’s collaborative work with Canadian painter Angie Quick. “What cannot be experienced on American soil can be experienced here,” says ELLEPHANT owner Christine Redfern. The exhibition is slated to open on Sept. 6.

Finally, Toronto-based Paul Petro Contemporary Art will display many works beginning Oct. 10. “We wanted to make a strong statement about our core values by centering the exhibition in our fall calendar and have it coincide with Art Toronto, thereby ensuring the critical reception of a larger audience,” says Petro, whose gallery will present nearly all of the new, collaborative works from the cancelled AMA show. “In the midst of the disruption and the fallout that we are now directly experiencing, it is of utmost importance to demonstrate your loyalties and hold your allies close. In the words of artist and community builder Will Munro (1975-2010), and echoing American writer Rita Mae Brown, ‘an army of lovers will never be defeated.’”

“I am so touched by the outpouring of support, and especially by these spaces,” Gosine says. “Make no mistake about it: I remain completely decimated by the cancellation, but I am very grateful some of these works will reach audiences. These events loudly say: we will not be erased.”

The AMA exhibition emerged from Gosine’s lauded text about sexual rights and freedoms, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean. It included a number of his collaborations with artists and writers across the Americas, including: the late American conceptual and performance artist, writer, translator and critic Lorraine
O’Grady; Caribbean painter, sculpture and installation artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Bev Koski, Zachari Logan, Natalie Wood, Angie Quick, Deborah Root, Romy Ceppetelli and Llanor Alleyne.

Already complete, the extensive accompanying catalogue was to include essays by writers like celebrated Canadian novelist Shani Mootoo, prize-winning Caribbean literary figures such as Shivanee Ramlochan, and leading art critics Marsha Pearce and Jon Davies. The project was edited by PREE journal editor Annie Paul. WorldPride had selected it as one of their marquee arts events and organized dedicated programming.

A list of press coverage of the exhibition’s cancellation is available here.


ABOUT ANDIL GOSINE

Andil Gosine is a professor of environmental art and justice at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is credited with constituting the field of “Visual Arts After Indenture.” and has made numerous scholarly contributions to the fields of Caribbean studies, international development, environmental justice and art history. His book Nature’s Wild has been the subject of academic papers and discussions. Gosine’s most recent curatorial projects — everything slackens in a wreck at the Ford Foundation Gallery (2022), Kelly Sinnapah Mary the international solo debut show of the artist at Aicon Gallery (2023) and The Plural of He at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2024) — received widespread praise. In 2024, Gosine held the Beinecke Fellowship at The Clark Art Institute.