In a season increasingly defined by questions of origin, ownership, and cultural authorship, LEHWE introduces BIRTH PAPERS, a traveling design exhibition that positions Caribbean creativity at the center of a global dialogue. Opening May 7, 2026 at El Kilómetro in Santurce, Puerto Rico, the exhibition will journey across the region, with subsequent presentations in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Kingston, Jamaica.
Bringing together 15 artists from across the Caribbean and its diaspora, the exhibition interrogates the systems that define value and legitimacy in design. Through sculptural objects, material interventions, and experimental practices, the exhibition challenges conventional frameworks of authorship, offering instead a distinctly Caribbean perspective rooted in multiplicity, adaptation, and lived experience.
The title BIRTH PAPERS operates as both metaphor and critique. In the language of design, it evokes provenance, documents that authenticate and assign value to objects. Within the Caribbean context, however, “birth papers” carry a more personal weight, signifying identity, belonging, and the bureaucratic structures that govern both. By collapsing these meanings, the exhibition examines how legitimacy is constructed, while foregrounding the ways Caribbean people assert self-definition through material culture.
From the cool permanence of tile and rebar to the quiet resonance of inherited porcelain, the works in BIRTH PAPERS locate identity not in fixed narratives but in the textures of everyday life. Participating artists, including Clayton Rhule, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Kara Springer, Simon Tatum, Shani Strand, Yiyo Tirado-Rivera, and Zoé Pheron, engage found, reclaimed, and naturally sourced materials to produce works that resist singular origin stories. Instead, they reflect a region shaped by movement, exchange, and layered histories.
Curated by Azi Jones, the exhibition introduces the concept of “counter-documents,” objects that function as living archives, carrying embodied knowledge and communal memory. These works reject rigid systems of traceability, allowing meaning and value to emerge through interaction, use, and relation.
Spanning May through November 2026, BIRTH PAPERS unfolds across multiple sites, activating each location through a series of public programs, including panels, workshops, and community-led engagements. The exhibition will be presented at El Kilómetro in Santurce, Puerto Rico, 81C in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and a culminating pop-up in Kingston, Jamaica in alignment with the Kingston Biennial.
Through its traveling format, BIRTH PAPERS moves as its subjects do, across geographies, languages, and diasporic boundaries, expanding the visibility of Caribbean design while insisting that the region’s creative practices be understood on their own terms.
Exhibition Details:
Opening May 7 to June 5, 2026
El Kilómetro, Santurce, Puerto Rico
Opening July 11, 2026
81C, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Final presentation in Kingston, Jamaica in alignment with the Kingston Biennial
Participating Artists:
Clayton Rhule (Jamaica/Trinidad), dach&zephir (Guadeloupe/Paris), Emily Braswell and Jenna Rees (Puerto Rico/St. Croix/USA), Jasmine Thomas-Girvan (Jamaica/Trinidad), Kamala Davis (Jamaica), Kara Springer (Barbados/Canada), Karlo Andrei-Ibarra (Puerto Rico), Leonie Edmead (St. Kitts/U.K.), Marlon Darbeau (Trinidad), Sebastián Meltz-Collazo (Puerto Rico), Shani Strand (Jamaica/USA), Simon Tatum (Cayman Islands), Suzanna Missenberger (Jamaica), Yiyo Tirado-Rivera (Puerto Rico), and Zoé Pheron (Guadeloupe).
