On tonight’s Blank Canvas, host Amard Rolle (the NAGB’s Executive Assistant) is joined by MAC Treasurer, Susan Garcia & Board Member, Katarina Jacobson along with Bahamian Conference Hosts, Ulrich Voges of Central Bank Art Gallery and Katrina Cartwright of the NAGB to talk about the upcoming MAC 2023 Conference being held in The Bahamas.
By Kevanté A. C. Cash. A laid-back woman comes from the behind the building to greet me upon hearing the call of her name. She is stationed on the benches of the National Art Gallery’s back porch overlooking the Sculpture Garden – just above the newly opened Amphitheatre named “Fiona’s Theatre” – that opens to Hospital Lane. Sporting a cool summer dress in the middle of Bahamian fall, she says she was “soaking up the sun and catching up on messages” while waiting for my arrival. She is Sasha Dees, a Dutch independent curator, festival and theatre producer and arts writer, currently doing research across the Caribbean. “The research that I’m doing is actually not a part of anything. It’s really in my interest. So, what happens is there’s a mid-career grant – the governmental visual art fund – that’s there for artists but also people working within the arts like curators, writers and so on to take some time off to do something they always wanted to do but never found the time or had the money to do. “So, often it was more so museum workers giving themselves a chance to take a sabbatical to maybe write a book or do more research on a subject that’s within the museum. It’s very rare for people like me to get the grant because I’ve always worked independently but when I thought again, I figured – ‘There still might be a possibility.’”
On Thursday, June 15, starting at 7 p.m. the NAGB will hold a conversation on the evolution of the built environment in The Bahamas with George V. Cox, Pat Rahming and Teran Nicholls in support of “George Cox: The Unseen Structure” through the lens of John Cox currently on view through July 9th, 2017.
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.