Haitian-born, Bahamian artist Jeffrey Meris opened his project ‘Asue: 20/20’ in the Project Space Room of the NAGB on Saturday, January 21, and it drew a sizeable crowd who came out to see how the word “Grace” would be interpreted. Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett writes about Meris’ work and the importance of holding on to traditions and moments that make Afro-Caribbean culture possible.
Images have always been controlled by those in power. Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett writes about how certain kinds of images have been used to represent us in particular ways that we usually have no control over. During slavery, blacks were depicted in a specific manner, and black women were always rendered either as workhorses, conniving thieves, jezebels, or wanton women. Here, Dr. Bethell-Bennett studies the work in the National Exhibition 8 to develop ideas around reconfiguring blackness.
There is a very specific kind of uneasiness in black Bahamians as we try to translate our blackness when we move into other spaces, and it is most felt and visceral when we emigrate. For the eighth National Exhibition (NE8), Giovanna Swaby addresses this discomfort directly in “I Learned In Passing” (2016). Through this displaced domestic setting, Swaby builds up a narrative that so many of us can identify with as black Bahamian women travelling abroad.
The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas(NAGB) has created a space we call the National Exhibition, now on its eighth run. The NE8 offers local artists and artists of the diaspora a space to express their ideas and thoughts, concepts and theories. This week Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett writes about the documentary photographic work of Tamika Galanis currently based in North Carolina and her investigation into the Over-the-Hill communities of Grants Town and Bain Town.
Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett writes about unearthing voices and two central projects of the National Exhibition 8, Edrin Symonette’s ‘Residue of a Colonia Past’ and Keisha Oliver’s “Porch Conversations’.
Bahamian women are often thought of as being outspoken, strong, ‘biggity’ – dare I say – and perhaps it is a result of this legacy of women who won’t suffer fools gladly, that has lead to women being painted in a less favourable light. But can we be blamed? After the referendum, it became clear that many of us felt less-than, and the women artists participating in the 8th National Exhibition (NE8) have made their voices heard. Particularly, emerging artists Jodi Minnis and a first-time National Exhibition participant, Cynthia Rahming.
‘Clay Oven’ (1912) is earthy, it is full of sepias and greens and stony grays, and, it is homely and sincere. This watercolour by ex-patriot Elmer Joseph Read, more commonly known as E. J. Read, is of our oldest works in the National Collection, outside of the traditional black and white film photography by Jacob Coonley, on display in the first wing of the current Permanent Exhibition ‘From Columbus to Junkanoo’ curated by Averia Wright and Jodi Minnis.
Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett pens an argument for supporting local creative production in “Made in The Bahamas: Authentic action, authentic support”
The recently opened 8th National Exhibition (NE8) contains much of the Bahamian art we’ve come to know and love over the years. We are a nation and a region with a very strong tradition of painting and wall-based work, which has expanded into the 3D realm, which we have also grown increasingly comfortable with accepting into our arsenal of Bahamian creative practice. But we also have grown into more expanded fields of engagement and display.
Our culture, as long as we wish it to be, is alive in those feet that pound the streets because they do not have cars, in the rubber that heads north every morning and south every night to earn money to survive. The fear of suffering is as strong as the possibility of death by silence, though silence kills like cancer that eats away at our fibre and when we are asked, who do we think we are? What dare we answer?