Four Antiguan artists return home, merging their collective experiences to make ancestral memories meaningful through painting, sculpture, dance, spoken word, and storytelling.
Four Antiguan artists, Afreekan Southwell, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, Makŏ S. Williams, and Zucan Bandélé, come together as Rootz Krokus, a multidisciplinary artist collective making its official debut during this year’s Art Week.
Presented by Makŏ Fine Art Gallery on Cross Street, St. John’s, Rootz Krokus will introduce “Out of the Krokus Bag,” an eight-day series of exhibitions, performances, workshops, artist demonstrations, conversations, and community experiences running November 11-18, 2026.
The four artists have each followed distinct creative and life journeys beyond Antigua before returning home, bringing with them experiences that span visual art, sculpture, performance, movement, spoken word, storytelling, design, and cultural practice. Rootz Krokus brings those individual perspectives together around a shared question:
How can ancestral memory help us better understand who we are now and who we can become?
Under the guiding philosophy “Making Ancestral Memories Meaningful,” Rootz Krokus explores how art can reconnect people with cultural memory, strengthen identity, and inspire new ways of seeing ourselves and our future.
Afreekan, Iyaba, Makŏ, and Zucan each bring a distinctive artistic voice and practice to the collective. Rather than dissolving those individual identities into a single style, Rootz Krokus creates a space in which their different disciplines, experiences, and perspectives can meet, challenge one another, and create something new.
Rootz Krokus draws connections between contemporary Antiguan life and ancestral African traditions that remain visible throughout the Caribbean in masquerade, Carnival, folklore, movement, rhythm, spirituality, and community celebrations. Rather than treating these traditions simply as relics of the past, the collective explores how ancestral knowledge can contribute to self-love, identity, emotional strength, and community today.
“Rootz Krokus is not just a name. It is a philosophy. We are grounded in ancestral knowledge while looking toward the future. Our work creates space for people to remember, question, celebrate, and rebuild connections to the stories and memories that shaped us.”
During Art Week, “Out of the Krokus Bag” will transform Makŏ Fine Art Gallery into a living creative space where art moves beyond the gallery wall. Programming will include live performances, sculptural painting, spoken word, drumming, Moko Jumbie and Jam Bull-inspired mask experiences, artist demonstrations, chair yoga, midday meditation, and collaborative community activities.
At the heart of the project is a simple belief: cultural memory is not something we merely inherit. It is something we must actively explore, preserve, reinterpret, and pass forward.
Rootz Krokus was created around collaboration rather than traditional artistic boundaries. Through painting, sculpture, performance, design, movement, storytelling, and cultural practice, the four artists allow each discipline to influence and respond to the others.
“Out of the Krokus Bag” runs November 11-18, 2026, with daily programming at Makŏ Fine Art Gallery as part of Antigua and Barbuda Art Week 2026. The week will include an opening presentation, mask-making and artist demonstrations, open mic and spoken word, live painting, poetry theatre, lectures and cultural conversations, Memories of Wadadli, and a closing presentation.
Art Week 2026 marks the beginning of a wider journey for Rootz Krokus. The collective is developing partnerships with artists, cultural institutions, community organizations, independent venues, and creative partners throughout Antigua and Barbuda and the wider Caribbean.
Rootz Krokus invites the public, artists, collaborators, educators, cultural partners, and visitors to experience “Out of the Krokus Bag” and help shape what comes next.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Iyaba brings a multidisciplinary practice grounded in spoken word, performance, storytelling, and visual expression, using language, rhythm, and lived experience to explore identity, history, memory, and the Caribbean experience.
Afreekan works across movement, performance, dance, and cultural practice, drawing upon African and Caribbean traditions and their continued expression through the body, masquerade, rhythm, ritual, and contemporary performance.
Makŏ is an Antiguan-American multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, mixed media, technology, design, and cultural storytelling. After studying and developing her practice in New York, including at FIT, Empire State University, Teachers College, Columbia University, and SVA, she returned to Antigua, where her work has increasingly examined home, memory, identity, landscape, spirit, metaphysics, and the cultural textures of Caribbean life.
Zucan is an Antiguan artist and storyteller whose practice brings together visual art, sculpture, cultural memory, and narrative. His work examines the objects, experiences, language, and memories through which Caribbean people understand themselves, including the ideas that inspired Out of the Krokus Bag.
Together, the four artists form Rootz Krokus: four individual practices connected by Antigua, return, memory, and a desire to create work that reaches backward and forward at the same time.
This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: Rootz Krokus presents “Out of the Krokus Bag” during Antigua and Barbuda Art Week 2026.