Articles Archives - Page 13 of 25 - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

Potter’s Cay: Markets and the Importance of Public Spaces

18 April 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas . “Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value” provides an invaluable view into the way the islands have been visioned for decades. It is a unique and important show that serves as a historical and current window into a perspective that adds value to our discussions and to how we see ourselves. Working in tandem with “We Suffer to Remain”, both shows provide an incredibly fruitful and open discussion for the cultural materialism and intermateriality cross-materiality that allows deeper and broader understanding of where we live and how we live here. The latter show deals with the loss of tangible and intangible cultural heritage of slavery through erasure. The periphery, the colony where the history physically took place has gutted its memory through a process of deletion and writing over.

Locked in Our Bodies: A Resurrection of Voices

27 March 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. We are locked in bodies that demonstrate a temporal fixity that is only such. This became more apparent to me on my first experience in Salvador de Bahia, where the material remnants of slavery and colonialism remained intact and on view, unlike in New Providence where most of the remains of slavery are either dematerialised, vanished and decontextualised. As “We Suffer to Remain” evidences, the coloniality of the postcolonial condition becomes even more poignant when expressed through a clash/confluence of arts. Art allows space for a dialogue that exposes the pasts and versions usually edited out by the passage of time, and the power of the state to redirect what was once empowerment discourses.

“Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value” – The Colonial Gaze

19 March 2018 Articles

By Holly Bynoe. On March 22nd through July 29th, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas presents the first of two historical surveys exhibitions that include works produced from 1856-1960 by visiting artists and expatriates, who were inspired by the then-colony’s landscapes, people, luminescence, coastlines and seas and bustling lifestyles. Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value draws from several familiar and a few new collections to detail the breadth and scope of how The Bahamas has been framed within the popular global imagination and the impact of the colonial and outsider gaze on the development of a historical understanding of the nation.

Speaking of culture: Thinking about change

7 March 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Over the last few weeks we have been journeying through “Medium: Practices and Routes of Spirituality and Mysticism” and discussing linkages with the upcoming show “We Suffer To Remain”, an international collaboration between the British Council and The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Writing this piece from Dubai at the Chamber of Commerce conference for Latin America and preparing for Expo2020 the polemics of culture become more clearly abstracted. So much of our culture and life resides beneath the surface. From time to time it surfaces to be revealed in stunning works of art, vibrant crafts, suggestive and politically critical music, or just fried into a fried-dry piece of chicken. We overlook that we exist in culture and that our culture dictates how we think about who we are and how we respond to a crisis.

Lamenting Slavery: Unearthing our history through art.

20 February 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethel Bennett. The materiality of art and culture is essential to the experience with art and our understanding of the relationship between space, time and humanity. When we do not see, feel or experience the materiality of space, we tend to ignore its existence. Art can be used to bridge gaps between the materiality of experience and the historical omissions and erasures that leave the space open to deletion, and de-historicisation. Music, similar to art, can speak to a similar materialising of experiences that have been wiped out by the passage of time and the shifting sands of spatial economic change. The disappearance from the mental record of the Nassau Market is a salient example of the vanishing materiality and so the memory of that experience. What remains is a space that has been razed of the material market and so the only vestiges remain. The artistic renderings and musical recitations of that material experience, where women and men walked over Market Street, often through Gregory’s Arch, to sell produce in the market, is what remains.

“Defender of the Faith”: Rembrandt Taylor’s Dragon-slayer.

13 February 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Rembrandt Taylor is truly a master of his craft. His meticulous attention to lines and cell-shaded blocks of colour is testament to his skill. His body of artwork generally contain references to Exodus, to Black kings and queens, to religion, and his beliefs as Rastafari are clear and given deference. The religious and social movement, which began in the 1930s in Jamaica, gives rich territory for explorations of faith and identity, of self, and Taylor doesn’t shy away from re-framing the conversation to suit his roots.

In this vein of celebration of Black histories of faith, “Defender of the Faith” (2001)—depicting St. George slaying the mythical dragon—would seem to be something of a contradiction. Why on Garvey’s green earth would a Rasta paint the patron saint of England in such detail? The image is iconic in art history, and the story is popular not just in England but across Europe – oddly enough, particularly in Russia and Georgia. Saint George, in Georgia, who’d have thunk it?

“Prayer in a Dark Place” (2013) by Jace McKinney: Hope in spite of sinking feelings

7 February 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. “Each night before you go to bed, my baby, Whisper a little prayer for me, my baby. Because it’s hard for me, my baby, And the darkest hour is just before dawn.” The Mamas & The Papas crooned about the sort of hope and prayer; the battle of light and dark and hard times that we all encounter, but we are used to hearing things a bit more succinctly in these parts. “I ga pray for you.” It’s something we all hear growing up in this place because regardless of what your personal beliefs might be, someone, somewhere in these 700 isles will be there to pray for you in hard times. Jace McKinney’s “Prayer in a Dark Place” (2013) is a visual representation for many of us of the vulnerability we can be made to feel in life, as we attempt to navigate this very particular space we inhabit. It’s by and large a part of being human for most, but especially for this complicated pocket of the world we live in with our rich and dark history.

From the Collection: “Untitled (Balcony House on Market Street)” (ca 1920) by James Osborne “Doc” Sands

31 January 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. There is this assumed romanticism of the past for many, especially when looking the quaint images of Nassau-from-yesteryear. But here, we find it is often laced with a pain of looking at where we were as a nation, those issues we faced then and the echoes of this past that we deal with now. “Untitled (Balcony House on Market Street)” (ca. 1920) by James Osborne “Doc” Sands shows us a Bahamas that is still reeling and reconfiguring after the abolishment of slavery, and post-apprenticeship, even in 1920. The legacy of racial power structures inherited by The Bahamas, and by the wider Caribbean region, was very much present and felt. The tiering of whites, mixed-race, and Black Bahamians is still something we feel today, even with all the work done to dismantle this hegemony.

This has all been said before: Art, Racism and the words of representation

24 January 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett.I borrow words from Haitian writer and activist Edwidge Danticat to start this piece “Nou Led, Nou La,” “We are ugly but we are here,” to express the sentiment against the “shithole countries” that have been accused for their suffering by powers that created it. And here we find ourselves again, in the ugliness of a non-racist, historical depiction of people and countries, even while some may be continents, that have been set a light by a history of gun-boat and dollar diplomacy, and representation that shows them to be nothing other than shithole countries with monkeys in the jungle.

Gaia Reimagined: “Mother Earth” (1992) by Clive Stuart

23 January 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Clive Stuart’s “Mother Earth” (1992; acrylic on plywood) is a serene and unapologetic celebration of both womanhood and Blackness. Born on Cat Island, Stuart imbues “Mother Earth” with the spirituality, magic, and mysticism of his birthplace. With an unapologetic Black woman standing front and centre as subject, the work celebrates just that – Black womanhood and all that it comes with.