This article analyses how Caribbean artists approach material culture in order to raise questions of historicism, knowledge and display. Installation artists Nikolai Noel (Trinidad and Tobago), Marcos Lora Read (Dominican Republic) and Blue Curry (Bahamas) approach sugar, kapok wood and sun cream from a materialist point of view in order to transcend referential values. In so doing, they translate a critical concern to the life of the things and materials that have shaped the Caribbean past and present. By examining three of their most fully realized artistic projects, this article seeks to elaborate a reading of Caribbean art based on the restaging through art of the political, economic and social implications arising from the entanglement between human beings and things.