Even before the pandemic reached North America, 2020 was off to a dispiriting start for Sheena Rose. After several years of baffling health struggles, the Barbadian contemporary artist was diagnosed with lupus; just a week later she was held at gunpoint. Then, the world began to shut down.
In February, it was announced that Rose was selected by the 6th Avenue Corridor Urban Neighborhood Main Street Program and the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation to enliven the glass panels of bus shelters lining the district with her designs. Instead of rushing off to Iowa, though, Rose was forced to stay put in the Caribbean, giving her a chance to wade “through the trauma by being still and reflecting,” she says. She swam, gardened, read, and created, turning out intricately detailed pen-and-ink drawings—often washed in watercolor—spray-painted canvases, and colorful paintings, all imbued with a graphic poster quality.
As a kid, Rose treated her bedroom “like a gallery space” and aspired to make comic books, a passion that led her to study art at the Barbados Community College, win a Fulbright, and go on to earn an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Crying with Dry Eyes, part of Rose’s “Compendious” series
Today, she is an activist and savvy businesswoman as much as she is a visual artist, and her vast, multidisciplinary oeuvre—she’s also keen to bring the likes of fashion and interiors into the mix—reflects those different facets. “I try to find clever ways to articulate that classism, racism, and colorism are problems. If I have to climb a tree or work with clay to show how I feel, I will,” she explains.
Last year was also a whirlwind for Rose. She was the subject of Alexander Murphy’s “ART(ist) #8,” part of a video portrait series produced by Rubis Mécénat; she participated in The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, a thematic group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and she painted a vivid two-story mural at the Inter-American Development Bank headquarters in Washington, DC.
Rose’s work is personal and rebellious, meditating on identity, relationships, and even Barbados, to illuminate everyday life, “not coconuts. People here are understanding that art is not just for decoration or tourists,” she says. Her drawing Festal, for instance, was a response to this year’s cancellation of the island’s Crop Over carnival and was later showcased as a WeTransfer wallpaper.
Now, Rose is giving her illness the limelight. In September, she addressed lupus head on in her solo show, Lampoon, Quick Sand, dance with me, a performance piece at the Caribbean Market Centre in Barbados, where she imagined her own funeral and reflected on healing using dirt. “Not everyone likes to see themselves and be reminded of the past or the future,” Rose says, but for her fans, “uncomfortable, human, and honest like a diary,” is the allure.
Conflicted, one of the works in Rose’s “Invisibles” series, in which the artist explores history, race, culture, and gender
This article originally appeared in HD’s November 2020 issue.
