On tonight’s Blank Canvas, guest host Malika Pryor-Martin, Communications and Development Officer for the NAGB is joined by Katrina Cartwright, NAGB Education Officer, Abby Smith, NAGB Community Outreach Officer and Reagan Farrington, UB art student and summer camp counsellor, to discuss the aftermath of the museum’s amazing Mixed Media Art Summer Camp (MMASC).
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Exuma blue recedes into Ragged Island sargasso and green. Sole inhabitant of Buena Vista Cay, Edward Lockhart, a reminder of Hemingway’s Old Man and The Sea (1952) has pulled up alongside and tied his boat to the MV Captain C and now stands with the others on the deck. Sun pounds down as the heat of living in the tropics feels much hotter than it has in forever. Art is always somewhat less strange than life, as stories come and go and fight to retain their place in a global village quickly being overtaken by overwriting of colour-blindness and leadership that throws women and minorities and their voices under the bus. Ironically, there is this romantic notion about “going back to the island”, it will all be better there, by and by. The irony is that hidden in this discourse of nostalgia for the island, is an erasure of the same island we long for.
Accept that people, like weather, can change. That after disaster flattens everything bare, a community can come together, start over, and become something even better.
Blank Canvas this week focuses on the roving Caribbean art conference “Tilting Axis,” co-founded by current NAGB Chief Curator, Holly Bynoe (far left) and Annalee Davis, founding director of Fresh Milk, Barbados. Tilting Axis brings together artists, curators and other arts professionals from the region and diasporas to network, speak about best practices, open forums and break out sessions to troubleshoot topics ranging from curatorial practices to creative ecologies, all to better connect our region and professionalise our teams. Bynoe speaks to the meeting’s creation in 2014, and its continued development and iterations over the last four years in its various locations: Barbados, São Paulo, Miami, the Cayman Islands and most recently in the Dominican Republic.
By Holly Bynoe. The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) was recently awarded three awards for the production and design of two catalogues for its 2017-2018 exhibitions, namely the retrospective catalogue for “Thierry Lamare: Love, Loss and Life” and the collective showcase “Medium: Practices and Routes of Spirituality and Mysticism” which closed earlier in the year. At the NAGB we have the unique opportunity to create a container of research and curiosity to support the life and dissemination of works that live for a much longer time than exhibitions. With this we have an opportunity to use our resources in powerful ways to inspire and share the wealth of Bahamian visual art.
For the closing event and finissage of the exhibition “We Suffer To Remain” -Sunday, July 29th–we are left to critically, crucially, question the work of language. “I suffer to remain, Saint of a wild mad Land”. The Caribbean has transitioned from this “wild, mad land” of disease and mystery into the tropical Eden we ubiquitously see in media today. But just what makes this place what it is? Who suffers to remain, and who are the saints and sinners? Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the cacophony of voices in the history of this region. In a place suffering from the silencing of so many, it is harder still to discern what voices are speaking – be they loud, soft, deafening, or a whisper.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. The University of The Bahamas. The savagery of hurricanes is clear as people struggle to recover and survive. This is the first of a three-part series that journeys through and to the Southern Bahamas, to Ragged Island. It is an exploration of connectivity, innovation and cultural erasure meeting with opportunity, though not for all. As a part of the content for The Bahamas pavilion at the Expo 2020 “Connecting Minds Creating the Future”, to be held in Dubai United Arab Emirates beginning on 20th October 2020, a group of researchers sought to collect data and stories of life in the tropics. The focus will be revealed as the stories unfold. With the theme of sustainability, the question becomes: can any of us be truly sustainable in a cultural reality that threatens erasure through natural and man-made situations?
