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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.

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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. 

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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.

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“That Vodou that who do?”: Ancestry, heritage, memory, and light in the work of Eric Jean-Louis.

16 January 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis.  Eric Jean-Louis (b. 1957) is an artist hailing from Haiti, well-known and much loved and it is easy to see why. His work is filled with the human and natural balance of light and dark,  the duality we all struggle with and that we see in the world and in ourselves. Visually, his work packs a graphic punch with his style of shading blocks of dark and adding bright stripes and slivers of light – and they are really a stunning sight to behold. To those who find themselves cringing and shying away from the word Voodoo, as in the title of this piece “Ceremonie de Bois Cayman: The Voodoo Still Lives” (2007) by Jean-Louis, it would remiss to deny and write off this practice of art and spirituality. There is light to be found in this form of spirituality, which is so often, and erroneously, deemed ‘dark magic’. As the current exhibition, “Medium: Practices and Routes of Spirituality and Mysticism” seeks to uncover the complexities of religious and spiritual practice in the region, so does this painting lay plain the crossovers and awkwardness of our relationship as Caribbean peoples to our African heritage.

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Majority Rule: A Snapshot of Our Identity

15 January 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett.  The Bahamas, according to the discourse, is a Black country.  Majority Rule was established in 1967 and, since then, the language of nationalism has been extremely narrow, exclusive and definitive.  Before the power of the majority was inculcated into the halls of Parliament, the language was very different, and usually overlooked the Black population, except as inferior subordinates.  However, the face of The Bahamas, while changing, has changed little when seen through messages deployed through art.  Yes, art has evolved and developed.  The understanding that the Majority are people too, after the end of slavery and the permitting of souls into Black folk was not as earth shattering as one might have expected.  The artistic document, though, speaks of differences and similarities of seeing and unseeing that depends little on one’s majority or minority status, but rather on the depth and wealth of one’s artistic practice.  Many artists chose to include the more comprehensive and complete vision and voice of The Bahamas. Some chose to ignore or exclude.  The nationalist discourse chose to do the latter.

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The Power of Imprisonment through language: The Eye for the Tropics and Majority Rule in The Bahamas

10 January 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett.  “We believe that rape is a private matter and that women are inherently unequal.” As 2017 passed into memory this last week, it seems important to think about how we see ourselves in the future.  Spirituality could play a large part in this vision, or we could simply choose to continue along what seems to be a road paved with consumerist joy. The paradise myth is part and parcel of that consumerism: where beaches and bodies of paradise that we need to survive can be bought, sold, bartered, negotiated away and given to other sovereign states for their own devices. The opening of “Medium: Practices and Route of Spirituality and Mysticism” at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) on December 14, 2017 presented a moment for reflection, but also for a new focus.  When we can celebrate Bahamian ‘masters’ Tony McKay aka “Exuma” or “The Obeah Man,” Amos Ferguson, Wellington Bridgewater and Netica “Nettie” Symonette, along with a boat-load–used intentionally–of other artists, we are saying that perhaps we are changing the way we see ourselves. 

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