Currently browsing: Exhibitions

By Natalie Willis. In this week’s interview we hear from Sonia Farmer on her contribution to “We Suffer To Remain”, an exhibition opening later this month that moves around ideas of slavery, time and memory, and how we begin to unpack and deal with these legacies. Farmer is a writer, visual artist, and small press publisher who uses letterpress printing, bookbinding, hand-papermaking, and digital projects to build narratives about the Caribbean space. She is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a small and independent press in Nassau which produces handmade and limited edition chapbooks of Caribbean literature and promotes the crafts of book arts through workshops and creative collaborations. The title for the exhibition comes from Farmer’s book produced for this show, “A True & Exact History”, which will be displayed alongside fellow Bahamian artists John Beadle and Anina Major works, as well as the work of Scottish artist Graham Fagen with his project from the 2015 Venice Biennale, “The Slave’s Lament”. Farmer moves us through not just the language written within the book itself, but around the art of bookmaking itself and how she crafts language to unpack the question of who we–as a country and as part of the Caribbean region–allowing to voice our histories.

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett. Tie a black piece of cotton around the child’s wrist, Don’t walk outside at night without covering the child’s head, Be careful how you come into the house at night, Wipe your feet off well. Cover the mirrors with cloth, Open the house if the coffin comes by, let the spirit travel through, Rosemary helps keep away bad-minded things… To our mind, these are all local lore.  To many, these are discredited as they are lumped together with Obeah and dismissed as ‘evil, black, Dark and African.’  Our double-consciousness denies the survival or the importance of such cultural elements as Asue, Lodges, Burial Societies, Friendly Societies, all of which allowed our spiritual and physical survival during and after slavery.

In the fall of 2015, NAGB director Amanda Coulson gave a directive: We must take art to the Family Islands, starting with Grand Bahama. So, Community Outreach Officer Abby Smith got down to the business of developing an exhibition that would also be an act of community and cultural affirmation – using the National Collection. With Assistant Curator Natalie Willis, herself a Grand Bahamian, the two co-curated the museum’s first inter-island exhibition – “MAX/AMOS: A Tale of Two Paradises”.

By Amanda Coulson.For the last decade, the Caribbean has been slowly garnering more and more international attention: “Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art,” (2007; Brooklyn Museum, NY), “Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions” (2011; Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C.), and “Caribbean Crossroads of the World,” (2012, The Studio Museum, Museo del Barrio and The Queens Museum, NY) have brought work from the region into the spotlight through broad, collective shows with varying degrees of success.

By Natalie Willis.Regional engagement is key to developing the arts ecology in The Bahamas. This historic hurricane season has shown us that the Caribbean is far stronger united than apart, and that we must look to our archipelagic family of island-nations to support us when the rest of the world might not quite feel so compelled. The Double Dutch series of exhibitions is our way of extending that notion of camaraderie and union, the coming together of different artists to show how we are a Caribbean full of places that, while similar given the history, still hold very unique practices and cultures and ideas of self. This newest iteration of the playful, two-person show brings Dede Brown into the fold as our Bahamian contingent, known for her vivid and beautiful material explorations in space (think: the aluminium flamingos at the airport), and paired with her is Dominican-American artist Joiri Minaya and her intriguing explorations into identity and Otherness.