St. Croix – Pride Month, which takes place throughout June 2026, and celebrates LGBTQ+ history, advocacy, and culture, was commemorated in the arts community with the recent opening, at CMCArts in Frederiksted, of the exhibition Conversations on Pride, co-curated by CMCArts and Sonia Nahar Deane of Cane Roots Art Gallery.
This dynamic show speaks out to many of the hopes, dreams and fears that face the LGBTQ+ community as they forge their own world within the larger context of society.
Augustin Holder’s The Awakening; Gena Seroogy’s Heads High and Sunshine; Victoria Rivera’s Worthy; and Jose Rodriguez Fuster’s Blessing and Espiritus, open the show’s conversation with a powerful blow that lights up the LGBTQ+ experience. These works seem to act as a spiritual uplifting along with a suggestive set of daily guidelines for all those who wish to follow a different path. They sing of hope and despair, of revolution and evolution. They blend and bend reality into fantasy, the abstract into the unknown. They hoist up their individual flags as if each of the artists were rushing off to grab the last seat on some hedonistic artistic express, one that will carry them to their chosen place of ultimate nirvana.
Johanna Bermudez-Ruiz, II Soul Love: A Celestial Meeting, acrylic on canvas, splits the apple at its core. It is the conquest of the female over the male, the ultimate conflict of man vs woman, finally set in its correct order. Its size (52”x52”) soars! Its meaning soars! It delivers its message in no uncertain terms: “I am woman, hear me roar!”
Eduardo Roca Salazar’s Guiguindo, colorgraph, moves the show across to a different longitude and latitude. His portrait of an African female is nothing short of spectacular! It captures the viewer with its pronounced beauty and signals home a clear message of defiance and difference. Can you love me as I am? Can you list my beauty among the great beauties of the ages? Will I haunt your future as you have haunted my past?
The piece de resistance of the show is Victoria Rivera’s Self-Portrait, acrylic on canvas. Here is a stunning work of self-exploration by an artist who is just beginning to hit her artistic stride of greatness. The sad, but knowingly expressive look on this young woman’s face that peers out at us beneath piercing blue eyes, splashed in colors of reds and yellows, is truly unforgettable. It is no doubt impossible to pass her by without being stabbed in the heart by thoughts of what might have made up her past. At the same moment, we are taken captive by what she might be thinking of now.
Johanna Bermudez-Ruiz’s 2019 short film Solene, was shown as part of the Conversations on Pride exhibition. It is a provocative quickie of a film about two female lovers who rendezvous on an island similar to St. Croix. Subtitled, Some Secrets are worth Revealing, the film explores the rights of lovers to reveal their love to the establishment that rules their world. The film goes hand-in-hand with the underlying theme of this year’s Pride exhibition: We cherish our beliefs. We cherish our rights.
The downstairs courtyard at CMCArts was buzzing, filled with smooth conversation, a great mix of music by DJ Chef Chevy, and lovely intermittent poetry readings by Kaden Grouby. And of course there was scrumptious food. Those ultra-delicious Gene’s Meatballs, along with those fantastic bites of heavenly appetizers by Barb’s Bites, all of which Barb topped off with some dyno-mite cupcakes that were a creation of great art in themselves!
So it was a beautiful night. The cruise ship sailed off to its next port-of-call. The sun set down gently across the Caribbean Sea. And CMCArts waved the proud flag of freedom from oppression, of freedom to love and be loved by whomever we choose.
Conversations on Pride closes June 20, 2026, at CMCArts, 10 Strand Street, Frederiksted. 340-772-2622
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