On this week’s NAGB’s Blank Canvas, your host Amanda Coulson speaks with two artists who have been supported early in their careers by the NAGB: Local artist Tessa Whitehead and Leasho Johnson.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Beauty, as we began two weeks ago, heals souls and allows us to come to a higher place where we feel more human, connected, communal and loved. Nature, green trees, and shade along roads allow us to walk in and explore the special areas and spaces around us. This exploration is seen in Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and in Tessa Whitehead’s work, the creek (2018) as beauty envelopes us in its natural form. When cement covers every inch of land, the soul is taken out of life. Singer Gloria Estefan’s Mi Tierra (1993), similar to Coulibri, the main location in Wide Sargasso Sea speaks of the loss, longing and nostalgia for a home that we have lost the deep connection to and the healing that comes from revisiting even if only metaphorically, metaphysically or through imagination.
By Blake Fox. Calling upon fear, surrender and angst, Tessa Whitehead presents us with an incredibly personal impression of her dreams, memories, and experiences in a transcendent series of figurative paintings in her first solo exhibition in The Bahamas titled “…there are always two deaths.”
Joining host, Amanda Coulson, on The Blank Canvas tonight are Tessa Whitehead, curator of the upcoming show at The D’Aguilar Art Foundation, entitled “Diversions” and participating artists Melissa Alcena and Sofia Whitehead.
This week’s “Blank Canvas” hosts part of the Bahamian contingent of delegates who attended the pan-Caribbean conference for art professionals, “Tilting Axis,” hosted this year at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. “Tilting Axis” is a roving conference, conceived by the NAGB’s own Chief Curator, Holly Bynoe (while she was still the publisher of ARC Magazine), and Annalee Davis, Director of the Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados.