Articles Archives - Page 9 of 25 - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

The Life and Death of Street Trees: Jenna Chaplin’s call to attention for the importance of street trees for the upcoming NE9

28 November 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. “Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics. It has always been political and strategic.” – Henri Lefebvre. But how do you strategize something that grows organically? Cities pose that very question for us. Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher and sociologist with a heavy Marxist influence, was interested in the fabric of our everyday lives and particularly in the ownership of spaces, particularly cities. I’d wager he’d have a field day in Nassau – with our planned and unplanned spaces, historic and new, and that the upcoming printmaking project by Jenna Chaplin for the National Exhibition 9 (NE9) might whet his appetite too.

Art of The Bahamas: An era of negotiating self-definition

19 November 2018 Articles

By Patricia Glinton-Meicholas. Its foundation announced in 1996, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) was officially opened on Monday, 7 July 2003, which means that it is still a youth as art museums go, still engaged in defining its identity. I envision for it a plum role, ready for the plucking from a fertile tree of a people richly endowed with creativity. The Gallery can be an important builder in the development of people and nation, employing a diversity of creative impulses of artists, exotic and indigenous to “story” The Bahamas, providing a mirror to prompt Bahamians to take a deeper look inward and bear even greater fruit.

The Architecture of Loss: Memorials, Memento Mori, and the Man from Milton Street

12 November 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. “i learn urgently | the architecture of loss | then find you again.” ― Warsan Shire. Lavar Munroe’s “Memorials” series is an exercise in the architecture of loss, of remembering, and the residue of life we leave long after we are physically gone from this world. A parachute, a hand-made urn, and flowers are an unlikely pairing but help to braid together the strands of the story of a man’s life, but they also offer us a thread between worlds, between countries, between lives, and between times. Munroe–proud of his upbringing and regular reunions with the Grants Town community where he still holds a studio–spends much of his time these days travelling. Not unlike the parachute shown in “Return: The Magic Flight” (2018), he is uprooted, but he often finds his way back to the solid soil of this historic settlement in Nassau. The “nation’s navel” that is Bain and Grants Town have produced a number of historically significant figures in Bahamian history, and Lavar is well on his way to being a key fixture in Bahamian art history for years to come, if his current 10 year survey at the NAGB (with the proud and proclamatory title “Son of the Soil”) is any indication.

The Long Eye of Culture: A Mash Up, a Hybrid

7 November 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Bahamian society and culture are already deeply creolised and vibrant, so why not make every effort, take every chance to show who we are? In the 1980s Barbadian calypsonian Gabby performed ‘Jack’, and people laughed. In the early 2000s Bahamian performer K. B. sang ‘Dey Sellin’, and people laughed. In fact people criticised him for exaggerating. ‘Dey sellin’… culture captures what we do not see. Oral and aural culture deliver serious critical visions and versions on what a go on, as the calypsos of the Trinidadian ‘Trinity’ Mighty Sparrow, Shadow and Chalkdust made critical often blistering interventions in all matters of national concern. Today, we hide from this kind of cultural richness or defame it. In “Apocolypso”–first published in 2004 and recirculated in 2013–Christian Campbell highlights the shifting tides and sands of Bahamian landscape and the accompanying cultural erosion and erasure.

From the Collection: “The Bussett and the Monkey” (1991) by Amos Ferguson

5 November 2018 Articles

The musical stylings of Bahamian favourite Phil Stubbs, no doubt inspired by the Nat King Cole classic, in this story of the monkey and the buzzard, speak to fable, myth and reality. Amos Ferguson was also quite clearly inspired by this story, as we see in his painting “The Bussett and the Monkey” (1991), currently on display in central Andros as part of the NAGB’s Inter-Island Traveling Exhibition “TRANS: A Migration of Identity”.

The Case for Lavar Munroe: The Son of Soil

30 October 2018 Articles

By Jhanée Rowena Finlayson In order to understand the work of the critically acclaimed artist Lavar Munroe, you have to

“The Story of “ETA”: Blue/Green Ragged Island” Ideation in Art and Design

24 October 2018 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Art and design, though they seem to make strange bedfellows, work hand in glove, and, along with literature, carve out space for exceptional spatial and design shifts that move people into new possibilities. The 2018 iteration of the annual regional collaborative project “Double Dutch” titled “Hot Water,” combines the work of Plastico Fantastico (PF) and Expo 2020 team from University of The Bahamas. The teams spent a week travelling to and from Ragged Island researching what it might look like to rebuild in stronger and more resilient ways in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The project combined students and faculty, as well as members from PF and we interviewed committee and community members and spent hours and then days creating and distilling ideas for the exhibition. What finally stands in the Ballroom of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is weeks of contact and ideation, with that, a lot of experimentation to see how best to construct and meet new demands.

Murky Histories and Futures: “Digging Upward in the Sand” (2018) by Plastico Fantastico

23 October 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Forward, onward, digging upward in the sand, together. The 2018 “Double Dutch,” the 7th in the series of paired exhibitions, brings us questions on the future, on climate change, on what it means to govern a chain of 700 islands, and on what it means to lose an island’s culture from lack of infrastructure and intervention. “Digging Upward in the Sand” (2018) by the Plastico Fantastico Collective, stirs up these queries, worries, and troubling presents for us.

Strange Darknesses: Lavar Munroe’s sinister fantasy creatures in the “specimens” series.

8 October 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. They may appear to be things of fantasy, with their glittering feathered wings, beads, embellishments, and horns adorning those who look to be less than the usual hooved suspects, but Lavar Munroe’s “Specimens” series find their footing in the real world through their presentation, and indeed through their representation. By investigating through fantasy and myth the repercussions and implications of the waves of colonialism on this landscape, first with Columbus, but also alluding to British colonialism with the museum-style classifications and taxonomies of these fair and strange imagined beasts, Munroe’s “specimens” give us a moment to really think beyond the horrific impact on humans and into the broader ecology of The Bahamas.

“Who the Hell Do I Think I Am?” (2012) by Margot Bethel

1 October 2018 Articles

By Natalie Willis. Writer, artist, craftswoman, gallerist, designer, filmmaker, potcake lover, and any other number of titles and markers possible. How do we begin to identify ourselves? Artist is a simple enough term, easily applicable to whoever might be involved. But when we get into craftsman or craftswoman, things get a bit more tricky. Margot Bethel fits into all of the above, in addition to being a master carpenter ( or should we say carpentress?), and her work in the current Permanent Exhibition at the NAGB delves into this idea of gendering and binary, and playfully hints at its futility in the world.