Gallery Hours
Tues - Thurs
12PM – 8PM
CCCADI Firehouse
120 E 125th St, New York, NY 10035
An Afro-Caribbean Carnival story of rebellion, ritual, and the joy that knows what it costs.
On View APRIL 30th to NOVEMBER 21st 2026
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) is thrilled to present Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry and Resistance, our landmark 50th anniversary year exhibition curated by Know Your Caribbean that explores Carnival as a living representation of resistance, identity, and collective memory.
Rooted in Afro-Caribbean histories, the exhibition traces Carnival’s evolution from rebellion to ritual, revealing how practices once born out of oppression have transformed into powerful expressions of freedom, creativity, and joy.
Through layered environments that merge sound, texture, archival material, contemporary art, and interactive elements, visitors are invited to experience Carnival as a living, embodied language that moves through the body, memory, and time.
Unfolding as a multi-sensory journey, the exhibition operates as part installation, part archive, and part altar, illuminating the shared cultural threads of the Caribbean Diaspora.
Each space reveals how resistance has long been encoded in celebration, and how traditions continue to evolve across generations.
Forever present in CCCADI’s 50 years of programming and storytelling, Carnival is a perfect embodiment of the African Diaspora, its diversity and complexities. Presented as a cornerstone of CCCADI’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2026 – Carrying a 50 Year Legacy of Justice, Joy and Resistance into the Future – the exhibition reflects the institution’s enduring commitment to preserving and amplifying Afro-Diasporic culture.
“Carnival is resistance.
It is joy,
freedom, love, and
courage living in the same breath.
We’ve curated this space with intention and reverence for those
who came before us,
and for those who have yet to experience its fullness.”
A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO THE JAB, J’OUVERT, REVELRY & RESISTANCE EXHIBITION CURATOR:
Know Your Caribbean
OUR GRATITUDE TO THE FEATURED ARTISTS OF THIS EXHIBITION:
Fiona Compton
Melissa Simon-Hartman
Paloma Dubois
Jouvay Fest Collective
Kambule 1881
Kalinda Kollective
Keegan Taylor
Henry Danner
Michel Chataigne
Onika Henry
Nickel “Blacka” Paul from House of Creationz Mas Band
Cherice “Queen Reesie” Harrison-Nelson
Ani Brutus
WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE VITAL SUPPORT OF:
Ashé Cultural Arts Center, located in New Orleans, Louisiana
Installation by : Leslie Gray
Thank you to : Lydia Hussain, Lil Natty and Thunda, Stephanie Pierre - The Melanin Project
Exhibition Graphic Design by : Mikey Cordero
This exhibition is a collective effort, anchored by CCCADI’s Living Archive and featuring contributions from our community.
About KNOW YOUR Caribbean
Know Your Caribbean is the number one platform for Caribbean history and culture in the world, reaching a global monthly audience in the millions. Founded in 2017 by Fiona Compton, the platform was built to fill a critical gap in accessible, authentic Caribbean storytelling online, and has grown into a movement that spans social media, podcasting, live events, and education.
With more than half a million followers across platforms and a podcast listened to in over 180 countries, Know Your Caribbean serves the Caribbean Diaspora and a global community of people who understand that Caribbean history, told on Caribbean terms, is both a cultural imperative and a form of advocacy. Its programming spans history, heritage, identity, and the ongoing case for justice and recognition that the region deserves.
Know Your Caribbean Inc. is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to education, advocacy, and community empowerment, with a particular focus on youth programming. The Caribbean Green Book, an initiative born from the platform, extends the mission into economic empowerment, serving as a directory that champions Caribbean-owned businesses across the region and connects a growing community of people committed to keeping Caribbean wealth in Caribbean hands. Know Your Caribbean’s partners have included Meta, Reddit, Hearst Publishing, Soho House, and J.P. Morgan.
Our Existence is Resistance
I am honored to welcome you to the 50th Anniversary year of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, an exceptional milestone for a Black-led cultural institution. CCCADI has served as a vital home for the artistic and cultural life of the African Diaspora that serves, educates, advocates and advances racial and social justice for us all. Anchored in East Harlem, our work connects communities across New York City and the global African Diaspora. At this critical moment in our country’s history, CCCADI’s work has never been more resonant or more necessary. Now half a century old, CCCADI continues to uphold these priorities as our responsibility to the communities we serve and the traditions we practice. We continue to pass the truth to the next generation, teaching them early what many of us learned late.
The exhibition, Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry & Resistance, is designed to remind us that while Carnival is a celebration, it is also political, and an economic driver. A festival that spread from Europe to the Americas, the original carnival celebrations were not inclusive of people of African descent. In fact, African descendants were not allowed to participate in these celebrations at all, except for in the role of servitude. With time, African and Indigenous descendant peoples in the Americas created their own version of these festivities, infusing them with their customs and traditions, making it their own and often employing them as a form of mockery and satire towards white culture, particularly towards European individuals who were slave owners.
When we chose AfriCarnaval as a theme for this milestone year, we wanted to honor the long history of CCCADI’s Carnival in New York presentations throughout the 80’s and 90’s. As we look back on those events, and others like them locally and globally, we realize the importance they have in our communities. We also recognize the disparity between the significant economic impact these cultural events generate and the limited prosperity that returns to the communities who carry them forward.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR STATEMENTIn 2021, CCCADI and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans established the AfriCarnaval Initiative. Guided by our promise to explore and advance economic equity within our communities, we seek to establish policies and strategies with local and global government and community partners, to support and provide financial stability for the very communities, artists and culture workers that create, protect and maintain these practices and who provide these experiences, year in and year out, to audiences throughout the world. We seek avenues for our communities to benefit directly from the “economics of the business of carnival,” as millions of dollars, visitors and revelers visit our neighborhoods, cities and countries, to experience events like the West Indian Day Carnival in Brooklyn, Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Brazil. The goal is to ensure that those dollars are circulated equitably to our communities, acknowledging the power we hold.
I encourage you to experience this exhibition as a state of mind: Culture Is Power! Remember the strength and resilience in our JOY and never forget the influence that we, as Black people, have on world cultures.
I offer my gratitude to our partners at Know Your Caribbean and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center for the sharing of expertise, care and love.
In Community,
Melody Capote, Executive Director
Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute
Before the sequins and the soca, before the road marches and the revelry, there was fire. There was mud. There were people who had nothing left to lose and chose, in that loss, to create. To make meaning from the unmakeable. To build culture from the wreckage of what was taken. Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry and Resistance begins there, in that origin, and follows the thread forward.
This exhibition moves the way Carnival moves: through the body, through memory, through sound and color and the kind of joy that knows exactly what it costs. Rooted in Afro-Caribbean histories and the long tradition of resistance encoded within them, the experience traces how a people transformed suffering into ritual, rebellion into art, and survival into something that could be danced.
Room by room, the space unfolds as a living archive, part installation, part altar, part invitation. The machete and the marigold. The mask and the mirror. The ancestor and the Afrofuture. Each environment carries its own weight and its own frequency, pulling you deeper into a story that was always meant to be felt.
Across every room, a deeper truth surfaces: that regardless of which island we come from, which dialect we speak, or which version of Carnival we grew up watching from the sidewalk or dancing in the street, we share the same roots. The same fire. The same longing for freedom that made Carnival necessary in the first place. This exhibition is built to illuminate those shared threads, to inform, to honor the cultural architects who gave us this tradition, and to remind us that what unites us has always been greater than what separates us.
Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry and Resistance holds space for all of that. It reaches toward the generations who will carry Carnival forward, transformed again, into forms we have not yet imagined, and it asks each visitor to see themselves somewhere inside that continuum.
The mask, when it comes off, shows you something true. It shows you that you were never alone in this.
Know Your Caribbean - Fiona Compton and Jadine Yarde.
CURATORIAL STATEMENTKnow Your Caribbean
Curators BiographiesFiona Compton
Fiona Compton has spent nearly two decades doing exactly what Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry and Resistance was built to do: ensuring that Caribbean history is told on Caribbean terms, with the depth, dignity, and brilliance it has always deserved. A proud daughter of St. Lucia and the CEO and Founder of Know Your Caribbean, the number one platform for Caribbean history and culture in the world, Fiona launched the platform in 2017 after identifying a critical gap in accessible, authentic Caribbean storytelling online.
A vocal advocate for reparations, Fiona works directly with Caribbean countries to help tell their stories in ways that honestly confront the past while offering a clear and hopeful vision for the future, the same dialectic that lives at the heart of this exhibition. She believes, as this space does, that what was taken can be transformed: that from fire and mud and loss, a people can build something powerful enough to be danced, to be worn, to be passed forward.
A multi-award-winning filmmaker and artist, her films have screened globally, earning honors including Best Documentary and Best Director at the Caribbean Film and Fashion Awards, with her work featured by the UK Cabinet Office. She has served as Historian in Residence at the National Maritime Museum, contributed to The World Reimagined as a commissioned artist and board member, and has delivered cultural workshops at the South Bank Centre, and Black Cultural Archives in London. She is an official ambassador for London’s Notting Hill Carnival and was trained at London College of Printing and Central Saint Martins.
Jadine Yarde
Jadine Yarde is a business strategist, producer, and creative of Barbadian and Grenadian heritage, with over a decade of experience across artist management, major event production, commercial and print production management, small business development, and corporate strategy. She has worked with organisations across the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States since 2012.
She holds a degree in Marketing with a minor in Chinese from St. John’s University in New York and was published in the American Academy of Pediatrics Journal at the age of 19 for her research in youth-based participatory work. Through J. Ventures International she has launched the careers of musicians, models, and photographers, and has supported businesses across sectors in building strong foundations. She served as CEO of the Nevis Tourism Authority, leading the organisation to being ranked number two island in the Caribbean by Condé Nast Traveler in 2021.
As co-founder of Know Your Caribbean Inc., a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, and co-curator of Jab, J’ouvert, Revelry and Resistance, Jadine brings a practitioner’s understanding of what it takes to build Caribbean cultural enterprise, and a commitment to ensuring that the stories told in this space are grounded, ambitious, and built to last.
Meet the Team
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Fiona Compton
FOUNDER
With a vision for building something meaningful, our founder brings a blend of big-picture thinking and hands-on experience.
They set the tone for everything we do. -
![]()
Emmett Marsh
SALES MANAGER
Focused, approachable, and driven by results, our sales manager is all about building strong relationships. They help connect people to the right solutions—with clarity and care. -
![]()
Eleanor Parks
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Creative and strategic in equal measure, our marketing director brings fresh ideas to every campaign. They turn insights into action and help our message resonate with the right audience. -
![]()
Karl Holland
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGER
Friendly, attentive, and always ready to help, our customer service manager ensures every interaction is a positive one. They keep communication clear, timely, and human.
Meet the Team
-
Monet Goode
FOUNDER
-
Emmett Marsh
DESIGN DIRECTOR
-
Eleanor Parks
SUSTAINABILITY DIRECTOR
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Karl Holland
SALES MANAGER
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Jaya Dixon
MARKETING DIRECTOR
A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO THE JAB, J’OUVERT, REVELRY & RESISTANCE EXHIBITION CURATOR: Know Your CaribbeanOUR GRATITUDE TO THE FEATURED ARTISTS OF THIS EXHIBITION: Fiona Compton
Melissa Simon-Hartman
Paloma Dubois
Jouvay Fest Collective
Kambule 1881
Kalinda Kollective
Keegan Taylor
Henry Danner
Michel Chataigne
Onika Henry
Nickel “Blacka” Paul from House of Creationz Mas Band
Cherice “Queen Reesie” Harrison-Nelson
Ani Brutus
WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE VITAL SUPPORT OF:
Ashé Cultural Arts Center, located in New Orleans, LouisianaInstallation by : Leslie GrayThank you to : Lydia Hussain, Lil Natty and Thunda, Stephanie Pierre - The Melanin ProjectExhibition Graphic Design by : Mikey CorderoThis exhibition is a collective effort, anchored by CCCADI’s Living Archive and featuring contributions from our community.
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Meet the Team
-
![]()
Monet Goode
FOUNDER
With a vision for building something meaningful, our founder brings a blend of big-picture thinking and hands-on experience.
They set the tone for everything we do. -
![]()
Emmett Marsh
SALES MANAGER
Focused, approachable, and driven by results, our sales manager is all about building strong relationships. They help connect people to the right solutions—with clarity and care. -
![]()
Eleanor Parks
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Creative and strategic in equal measure, our marketing director brings fresh ideas to every campaign. They turn insights into action and help our message resonate with the right audience. -
![]()
Karl Holland
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGER
Friendly, attentive, and always ready to help, our customer service manager ensures every interaction is a positive one. They keep communication clear, timely, and human.
