Articles Archives - Page 4 of 25 - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

From the Collection: “The Deanery” (1979) by Alton Lowe

20 August 2019 Articles

By Natalie Willis The work of Alton Lowe, a realist painter born in Green Turtle Cay, Abaco, has an easy

Epistemic and Cultural Violence: Powercutting as Light

19 August 2019 Articles

Anibal Quijano (31 May, 2019) and Toni Morrison (5 August, 2019) – two great thinkers have gone. Nicolette Bethel’s 1990 play, Powercut, produced and performed at the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts, shows what happens in the dark. Nowadays, lights drop into darkness at least once a day for hours at a time. The violence of structures invisible to the naked colonised eye is only ever gossiped about. We are afraid to cease being what we are not, we do not know how to be who we are. It is the culture of violence and silence revealed through ‘discussions’ around tourism and prostitution, two interlocked economies of pleasure. The Victorian Bahamas avoids discussing these things in the same breath, yet the exoticisation and tropicalisation of space and place speaks to a reality of total erasure of self for what we are not, to pick up on Quijano’s statement. In “The Visual Life Of Social Affliction,” the upcoming Small Axe Project exhibition which opens at the NAGB on Thursday, August 22nd, we see what we are taught/made not to see; we see the violence of not seeing who we are and the trauma of being held in bondage through invisible structures. Powercut reveals a lot of the invisible structures, as do the works of recently departed thinkers Anibal Quijano and Toni Morrison.

The Visual Life Of Social Affliction: Structures of Violence in the Caribbean

13 August 2019 Articles

Structural violence is rife and regionwide. At least we are here, even if we may be. In Bahamian artist Blue Curry’s “The New Riviera”(2014), we are not even here. This erasure of us from the scene is yet another form of unperceived structural violence, as we can also see in Curry’s “Nassau From Above” (2004).

From the Collection: “Poor Man’s Orchid” (1989) by Sue Bennett-Williams

12 August 2019 Articles

By Natalie Willis. a portal into the practice of a dedicated educator. The 19th Century marked a period in Britain known as Orchidelirium. Not entirely unlike the Dutch tulip fever, this flower-frenzy was a mad scramble for the exotic, elusive orchid. They became connotative as a symbol of wealth, prestige and knowledge, of the affluence required to secure these items from far-off lands. Sue Bennett Williams’ “Poor Man’s Orchid” (1989) is no such thing and no less beautiful.

Finding Our Voices: Resisting Violence and Oppression

7 August 2019 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” – Hamlet, II.ii. Is it a bad dream, a nightmare provoking somnambulance? We all think the best of green gentrification because we have been taught, in spite of the climate sceptics, we need to do something to improve our resilience. We are also told by the media that while people know about climate change and the havoc it plays in their neighbourhoods, jobs are more important because many of us are one paycheque away from poverty.

From the Collection: Jolyon Smith’s “Transformation” (1987) and imagining Black Bahamian futures

6 August 2019 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Jolyon Smith’s Transformation (1987) is one of the first works collected for the National Collection at the NAGB, shown in the Inaugural National Exhibition or the INE. To have a work that appears so afrofuturist in its aesthetic speaks volumes for the genre and also for the nascent years of the NAGB in thinking what a National Collection could and should look like. What does a Black future look like, and a Bahamian one at that?

Designing for Space: Working with Possible Futures in Mind

30 July 2019 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett,The University of The Bahamas. Colonialism and coloniality in design occur when little is left of the past to remind us of the physical reality. On a recent trip to Cape Town, I had the pleasure of enjoying two spectacular spaces of art and design that showed how important it is to think through purpose and landscape and how the beauty of both can be made functional in the spaces created. I had the pleasure of stumbling into a nursery that doubled as an apparent antiquarian. The space was large and well-designed with room to breathe. Form and purpose combined with the art of design to speak to concepts of natural beauty, much like the wave design at the London Aquatic Centre at Stratford designed by Zaha Hadid especially for the 2012 Olympic games and constructed by Balfour Beaty; the perfect example of form, design and purpose merging and blurring lines of functionality and beauty.

From the Collection: “Untitled (Rake Bird)” by Tyrone Ferguson

22 July 2019 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Metal is a tricky medium. It’s industrial, ceremonial, it can be strong enough to build bridges or soft enough that your very teeth could dent it. For Tyrone Ferguson, he doesn’t seem to find these traits something to work against, rather he works with his medium intuitively, sensitively, and brings some spirit back into metalwork and blacksmithing.

From the Collection: Chelsea Pottery “A Brief Bahamian History of Clay”

11 July 2019 Articles

By Natalie Willis. A beautifully formed piece of handmade ceramic work, produced at the Chelsea Pottery in Nassau in 1960, serves as a great point of departure for talking about some of our Bahamian art histories. Clay work, like drawing and painting, has a history almost as old as humanity itself. Our legacy of pottery here begins with the indigenous peoples of The Bahamas – the Arawaks, Lucayans, and Tainos. As Dr Erica M. James lays out in her key text on Bahamian art history in “Bahamian Modernism”, our background of creative visual culture is much richer and varied than we tend to hear about.

Timelines: Developing Blackness

8 July 2019 Articles

Historical photographs show Bahamians claiming and embracing their African heritage. Aptly named, these photographs show us a period in our history where Bahamians were pointedly claiming and embracing their Blackness. This sense of pride was born out of, but not limited to America’s expressions of Black power during the Civil Rights Movement, the road to Majority Rule in 1967, and The Bahamas’ independence in 1973.