Artist’s Guild Stuns at 2026 Art Show

M.A. Dworkin

St. Croix - What could be more beautiful than viewing great art and watching the sun set over the Caribbean Sea from the 2nd Floor Gallery windows at CMCArts. The entire scene delivers a long moment of utter satisfaction. 

The startling new Artist Guild of St. Croix’s 2026 Art Show, that just opened at CMCArts in Frederiksted, certainly packs a creative punch, an artistic wallop, that demonstrates to the surrounding islands that the Big Island of St. Croix is a dynamic leader in the world of Caribbean art. There is so much great talent on display in the dozens of works that make up this exhibition of St. Croix artists. 

The pastel colors and vibrant images pop out at you the moment you enter the gallery space. If you let them, they can drive you through the white-walled rooms in search of some form of nirvana. And you may find it! Here, there and everywhere. The Art Show 2026 can truly be a transcendental experience if you let it.

“This was a dream for me,” Ziva says of her magnificent mixed media work Dreaming. “It was such a peaceful state I fell into. It enveloped me with petals and flowers. They covered my body, my face, and my eyes.”

This remarkable upside-down portrait by Ziva, that is surely the piece de resistance of the show, is much more than a scintillating work of art. It becomes a symbol of a world turned upside down by the madness of the age, and yet it displays a world that is still somehow surrounded by God’s eternal beauty, a beauty that was long ago bestowed upon the earth. 

Dreaming is an artistic triumph of the first order. Ziva has achieved the unthinkable, a statement so shocking, and yet so perfectly beautiful, that it glues our hearts and eyes to the canvas.   

Jona Siverly’s Point Udal, 2025, glass, resin, on surfboard, also shouts out to all points east that St. Croix is quickly becoming one of the epicenters for Caribbean originality in the art world. The colors gloat over the east side of the island as the sun rises, telling a fiery tale of a new day dawning, a new world coming around the bend. 

Waldemar “Waldy” Broadhurst, the undisputed master of wire art, sings the sweetest song of intimacy and love in The Protector, 2025; and then sends a message of a shimmering silver wire world of humanity with his Tree of Life, 2024. No one does wire art better than Waldy!

Claudia Hodges sees the world of art through 3-D glasses. Her Mythical Places, 2025, and Meditation, 2025, both epoxy, jump out at you from her canvas in the most pleasant and unexpected manner. They bring forward a woman’s world that is somewhat archaic and forbidden, perhaps at a time when civilized life was fresh out of the bottle, in so being, there is no way to put it back in again. It is what it has become. It glares at you. Dares you. And speaks to you: I am woman, silent and strong.

Tamara Michael, Who Am I Now, 2025, acrylic on canvas, is up to her usual mind-bending, phantasmagorical artistic tricks. She creates a world that doesn’t just send you down one rabbit hole, but propels you down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, until you find yourself wondering who you are, and what is waiting for you on the other side?

Joyce Hickok, the Mask Lady, presents an entire wall of her remarkable mask constructions. They live, they breathe, they haunt, they hold you up and rob you of your senses of what the real world actually means. She has been thrilling her St. Croix patrons for years. Each mask in this new 2025 edition is a masterpiece!   

No doubt, the night was one for the CMCArts record book. Throngs of patrons filling the Courtyard, the Gallery, the balcony. Loving every minute of it! 

Barb’s Bites couldn’t be finer. She was at her gastronomical best! Providing the food with her signature class-act little dishes, including ‘delish’ Turkey Empanadas, Veggie Samosas, and a dyn-o-mite Tortellini Salad. And of course, those Brownie Bites, oh those mind-bending Brownie Bites, they most certainly should be outlawed, 

The entire night was capped off by Mekiel Reuben blowing that sweet-sweet and hot-hot Sax. Wow! Can that man blow that Sax or what! He certainly caught the vibe of the artistic evening just right with the Temptation’s Classic “Just my Imagination.” But he really sent everyone sailing off into a cool Frederiksted night with the comforting feeling of how nice it could all be when he sounded out “What a Wonderful World.” Hey Mekiel, baby, old Satchmo couldn’t have played it better!