Give Yourself the Caribbean, again, Samantha Box

Give Yourself the Caribbean, again by the Jamaican-born, Bronx-based artist Samantha Box is a modest object: nine pages, offset-printed, folded, and sized to sit comfortably in your hand. It’s an object of quiet simplicity, yet its structure invites a layered reading. When folded, it offers fragments; when unfolded, it opens into a single field, encouraging movement across text and space. This choreography mirrors African diasporic themes at their core: the Caribbean not as a fixed geography but as a portable sensibility, something carried and reconfigured through memory and migration.

The zine was released as part of the Artist Volume Series, Issue 2 (Spring 2025) by New Poetics Publishing, an independent artist-run press based between Bogotá, New York, and Austin, and founded by artists Nechama Winston and Cristina Velásquez. The press collaborates with emerging artists to explore experimental approaches to photography in book form, amplifying underrepresented voices and diverse visual narratives. Through photography, the publisher aims to foster alternative ways of learning and thinking, and over the years, it has published work by various artists, including Felipe Romero Beltrán, Camilo Godoy, Guanyu Xu, and Jenny Calivas. 

Box’s photographic practice has long interrogated identity and representation. Her earlier documentary work, notably “The Invisible Archive”, centered on unhoused queer youth in New York, while her recent studio-based series “Caribbean Dreams” turns inward, using still life and self-portraiture to explore colonial legacies embedded in aesthetics. As we unfold the zine, it reveals a layered narrative, offering a meditation on memory, diaspora, and the layered histories of the Caribbean. We might think of the zine as an atlas of diasporic imagination, a map that redraws itself as you turn the paper over and back again, and in this way, the constraints of the format keep the focus on the artist’s ideas and images. 

Published by New Poetics Publishing
Softcover
9 pages
165 x 228 mm
ISBN 29815320