During the first two months of 2017, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas welcomed its newest staff members, Malika Pryor-Martin and Katrina Cartwright. Since their arrival, they have dived into their roles of Development and Communications Officer and Education Officer respectively, and have seamlessly integrated with the existing NAGB team.
Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett shares: I have visions of colour rubbing up on each other, sliding over liquid slopes of sun-drenched limestone and bleached out roads, deepened by heat and dust. Colour capturing what we do not see, but refuse to ignore. Islands are aloof, detached, yet our islands lay under the vibrant eyes of people who do not know this. They have always travelled, always ventured, always known that life is bigger than us, bigger than this island in the middle of the water, surrounded by beaches of no value until the new people came and barred these things from our lives.
‘Nassau Boy’ (1973) by Maxwell Taylor is a patterned, shifting mass of humanoid parts set against a lightly textured background, with a hint of houses and civilisation in the distance. This work is most certainly not what one expects of Taylor’s practice, but it is one of the more rebellious and unexpected pieces in the National Collection, a bit of a misfit, and our March Artwork of the Month.
Our intern, graduate student Natascha Vazquez writes: John Beadle was born in 1964 on the island of New Providence in The Bahamas. He received his BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Tyler School of Art of Temple University respectively. Beadle delves into various art genres, including painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. Often, his highly conceptual work consists of everyday materials such as wood, found objects or metal. According to Beadle, “Material – the found, already weathered stuff carries with it a fragmented narrative that makes for very interesting placement possibilities.”
On Friday, February 24th, the NAGB in collaboration with Hillside House staged a closing event to mark the end of the National Exhibition 8 OFFsite exhibition. The event featured an artists’ talk with participating artists Del Foxton, Keisha Oliver, Alicia Wallace, and Natalie Willis. The discussion focused on the projects developed for the NE8, which speak to practices that give attention to subjectivities. These include the rise of the woman’s voice in the local creative community and the plight for gender equality in The Bahamas.
The Blank Canvas welcomes US Embassy Nassau’s Public Affairs Officer, Penny Rechkemmer and the winners of the MLJ Jr photo contest and Transforming Spaces founder, Jay Koment, DAF curator, Rashad Adderley, and NAGB assistant curators Natalie Willis and Richardo Willis speaking about this year’s event.
t is quite apparent in taking a stroll around the 8th National Exhibition (NE8) that there are a number of works by women, for a start, but also that many of these works by women deal with just that, with womanhood. These works are explicitly centered on the feminist canon of tackling the issue of women’s rights, or more subtly trying to turn our eyes to other aspects of femininity. Take, for example, the work of Averia Wright and her nuanced reinterpretations of our straw-work culture and the feminine, or the collaborative effort of Joann Behagg and Jackie Pinder with their clay tower of faces and chains confronting basic human rights for women and girls.
Family Island access to the National Collection is of immense importance to the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB). Our country, an archipelago, vast in its length and breadth presents a challenge to facilitating such a critical component of our mission. To answer the call of sharing Bahamian art with every citizen possible, the NAGB developed a travelling exhibition using the works of two iconic Bahamian masters: Max Taylor and Amos Ferguson.
Leaving the visual arts aside for a week, the “Blank Canvas” turns to musical arts and focuses on the festival “Eleuthera All That Jazz.” The Founder and Chairwoman, Patricia Leigh-Wood, comes on the show to speak about how the event was founded and its goal: to expose more Bahamian children to world-class music and to give them the opportunity to learn about different instruments. Also joining us is musician and “Jazz Cat” Adrian D’Aguilar, who has participated in all the editions of the festival for the last six years.
We are very much accustomed to seeing our islands in various forms of media, anything that can spread the image of our too-blue-to-be-true water. And it is true, we do have some of the most beautiful water on the planet (along with a number of other countries though, we mustn’t forget), and we are – according to certain NASA astronauts “the most beautiful place from space”. However, despite the natural beauty of our landscape, for almost 200 years we have been packaged up and sold as this pristine image that seems to be as clear-cut as our crystal waters.