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For the closing event and finissage of the exhibition “We Suffer To Remain” -Sunday, July 29th–we are left to critically, crucially, question the work of language. “I suffer to remain, Saint of a wild mad Land”. The Caribbean has transitioned from this “wild, mad land” of disease and mystery into the tropical Eden we ubiquitously see in media today. But just what makes this place what it is? Who suffers to remain, and who are the saints and sinners? Sometimes it is easy to get lost in the cacophony of voices in the history of this region. In a place suffering from the silencing of so many, it is harder still to discern what voices are speaking – be they loud, soft, deafening, or a whisper. 

By Holly Bynoe.  On March 22nd through July 29th, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas presents the first of two historical surveys exhibitions that include works produced from 1856-1960 by visiting artists and expatriates, who were inspired by the then-colony’s landscapes, people, luminescence, coastlines and seas and bustling lifestyles. Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value draws from several familiar and a few new collections to detail the breadth and scope of how The Bahamas has been framed within the popular global imagination and the impact of the colonial and outsider gaze on the development of a historical understanding of the nation.

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. A few weeks ago, this question was asked in a column that focused on the death of legendary artist Sam Shepard.  Today, I ask this question again in the wake of Hurricane Irma’s devastation to the map of Bahamianness and Caribbeanness.  As a people who survived the reality and the legacy of slavery and resettlement, we do not take time to process our grief.  We do not sit and ponder! We do not have time.  Our lives are so often predetermined by external forces that are both visible and invisible to the eye that we are always moving.  What has occurred over the last two weeks is mostly invisible, aside from the obvious and daunting structural and spatial devastation we see on the surface. 

We are very much accustomed to seeing our islands in various forms of media, anything that can spread the image of our too-blue-to-be-true water. And it is true, we do have some of the most beautiful water on the planet (along with a number of other countries though, we mustn’t forget), and we are – according to certain NASA astronauts “the most beautiful place from space”. However, despite the natural beauty of our landscape, for almost 200 years we have been packaged up and sold as this pristine image that seems to be as clear-cut as our crystal waters.

Images can create wealth, or they can be used to create ideas of paradise that serve only to silence those who occupy the place of paradise.  Can we begin to use new art or contextualized images to tell a story that sells a place to the world that builds local and resident brands instead of disempowering them?

Scraped up from the beds. Uprooted. Carefully picked and collected. Transported by boat. Beaten. Sun-dried. Clipped and polished. Sold to the highest bidder. The sponge industry of the colonial Bahamas as represented in Jacob F. Coonley’s ‘The Sponge Yard’, an albumen print circa 1870, shows neat rows of sponges laid out to dry, to be clipped, to have the animal remains eroded away by hours in the sun