Deborah Jack grew up in the Dutch part of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, or Sint Maarten. In the late 1990s, following secondary school, she left the island to study art in the United States, graduating with an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2002. From early on in her career she has examined representations of her native island, outside of (neo)colonial perspectives and touristic perceptions. Through the heart of her work – plastic, photographic and filmic – the Black Atlantic runs like a thread, tying together varying subjects: slavery, diaspora and roots that stretch across the ocean. Salt has played a crucial role in the artist’s work since the early 2000s, bringing its themes to the surface and linking them with the Saint-Martin salt industry, and its impact on the territory and its inhabitants. The series Foremothers (2002) and the works A/Salting (2001) and Shore (2004) notably evoke the historical implications of salt in local slavery, its extraction having been carried out by enslaved people. These investigations continued into the 2010s, with the series What Is the Value of Water if It Doesn’t Quench Our Thirst for… (2014) and Drawn by water: Sea Drawings in 3 acts (2018–2019).

Over the course of her career, D. Jack has delved ever deeper into the cultural memory of her island as witnessed through historical and ecological lenses. Saint-Martin is on the frontline of the climate crisis, battered by winds and hurricanes, its coastline receding and its sea levels rising. The artist is developing a colossal video archive project on the island, entitled To Make a Map of My Memory: Wayfinding Along Synaptic Topographies. This polyphonic installation, for which she was awarded the Soros Arts Fellowship in 2023, consists of interviews with inhabitants that together create a collective work of memorial, a record of the island’s own identity. Here, the artist argues for the value of the island consciousness to counter extractivism and a tourism that is disconnected from local reality.

D. Jack is considered one of the great voices of the Caribbean. Her work has been displayed in several major solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, including The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019–2020) at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, The Visual Life of Social Affliction (2020) at TENT Rotterdam, Deborah Jack: 20 Years (2021–2022) at the Pen + Brush Gallery in New York, and Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022–2023), ICA Boston (2023–2024) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2024). The notion of transmission is central to her artistic and pedagogical practice; hence she teaches art at New Jersey City University, in the city where she lives.