“Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art,” a vivid though uneven exhibit of approximately 80 works by 45 artists, is — like many of the Brooklyn Museum’s recent offerings — a community-minded show. Opening tomorrow, to coincide with the annual West Indian-American Day Carnival and Parade, the exhibit acknowledges that Brooklyn is home to one of the largest and most diverse Caribbean populations in America. The Brooklyn Museum, at the heart of the festival, is host to four days of concerts on its grounds, all of which lead up to the parade.

Anyone who has attended the annual West Indian-American Day Parade, which typically draws 2 million participants and spectators, knows that it is one of the most extravagant, no-holds-barred street events in New York City. Its carnivalesque sights and sounds — multicolored floats, masks, and spectacular birdlike costumes; thunderous percussion and erotic dancing; a vibration of flags, feathers, and flesh — is a force to be reckoned with: It either keeps you in Brooklyn during Labor Day weekend or it drives you away.

“Infinite Island,” curated by Tumelo Mosaka, has some of the draw of the parade. The show, comprising videos, installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and interactive works, emphasizes the West Indies’ cross-cultural nature, and is colorful, musical, and multifarious, but it is also serious-minded and politically charged. The exhibit acts primarily as a provocative platform for social causes, which ultimately may tell us more about the contemporary issues embraced by the art world than about the rich diversity of the Caribbean.

Divided into four themes — history and memory; politics and identity; myth, ritual, and belief, and popular culture — “Infinite Island” emphasizes the exploitations, inequalities, and underbelly of the Caribbean. The show puts a real face to the place, its history, and its people; it also dirties the mythical view of the tropical paradise presented by your local travel agent. This is all well and good up to a point; and there is a lot of useful information to be gleaned here, but not necessarily in the service of art. The wall text and catalog essays, when they address the history, problems, and makeup of the West Indies, are informative and concise. But as soon as art is introduced, things get muddled; issues and connections feel forced, and artworks, if they aren’t already, often turn into documentary, social critique, and agitprop.

Hew Locke’s “El Dorado” (2005), a mixed-media collage portrait of the queen of England, is one of the subversive hallmarks of the show. At nearly 10 feet high, the bejeweled bas-relief bust is made up of thousands of plastic toys, flowers, animals, guns, and silver swords which, extending outward like quills, transform Her Majesty into a porcupine broach. Terry Boddie’s “Stars and Stripes” (2002) substitutes the stars of the American flag with historical photographs of slaves, and its stripes with whips. Jean-Ulrick Désert’s installation “The Burqa Project: On the Borders of My Dreams I Encountered My Double’s Ghost” (2001) comprises four figures clothed in traditional Muslim dress. Each burqa, however, is made out of a flag — France, Germany, America, and the United Kingdom. Satch Hoyt’s interactive installation “Say It Loud” (2004) is a staircase and a podium made up of 500 books. Playing James Brown’s “Say It Loud” through speakers, it encourages visitors to climb the steps and to sing along karaoke-style through a microphone. The word “black” is omitted from the song’s chorus, “Say it loud!/I’m black and I’m proud” — allowing each singer to substitute a word of his choice.

The show is best when you can escape the din of the artists’ and curator’s drums, which beat loudly about subjects such as race, poverty, heritage, colonization, land and water use, inequality, and the Caribbean diaspora.

Alex Burke’s “The Spirit of the Caribbean” (2006) is a grouping of 47 handmade dolls. Covered like patchwork quilts, and tied with rope and twine, the figures recall mummies, kachinas, votive statues, Venuses, and voodoo dolls. Price tags hang from their necks — a clear reference to slavery. But they transcend a single reading. Tightly wrapped, without faces or arms, and often pierced, like St. Sebastian, with colored pencils, they resemble condemned figures with bags over their heads. Colorful and clumsy, they also look like folk art or a child’s homemade dolls.

Joscelyn Gardner’s series “Creole Portraits” (2002–03), 10 lithographs on frosted Mylar, also deal subtly with slavery. The black-and-white prints, isolated black women’s hairdos seen from behind, float beautifully on the page like Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of seedpods or crustaceans. It is only upon close inspection that the braided creatures resemble heads, or that you realize that they contain shackles, cuffs, balls, and chains.

Anyone who has been to the Caribbean — walked its powder sugar soft beaches and swam in its turquoise water — knows that it is a tropical paradise. Yet “Infinite Island” contains few works celebrating the Caribbean’s beauty. Those that do — such as Ms. Gardner’s “Creole Portraits,” Keisha Castello’s inventive creations “Hybrid Realities” (2005), a series of small handmade creatures mounted in black boxes, and Ibrahim Miranda’s mixed-media series “Island Night: Metamorphosis” (2004–06) — feel refreshingly out of place.

Ms. Castello’s creatures are made from found natural objects such as insects, bones, shells, and leaves. Mounted like natural history specimens, they resemble fossils, as well as exotic underwater or alien flora and fauna. Mr. Miranda’s altered maps are illustrated with images of animals, weapons, and Adam and Eve, as well as biomorphic forms that recall amoebas, sea life, islands, and water currents. Like Ms. Castello’s sculptures, they are metaphoric worlds in which the Caribbean’s various associations and diversity blend beautifully and float freely. It is in these works that Caribbean art, true to its theme, is defined not by the times but by the place.

August 31 through January 27 (200 Eastern Parkway, 718-638-5000).