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The Aesthetics of Debt: Double Consciousness and Vision in the age new a new modernity

24 September 2018

By Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett, University of the Bahamas. We usually think of aesthetics in two ways: either the aesthetic pleasure of a work of art or the aesthetics of a period, style or artist. Time has moved on, however, and we are now forced to contemplate differently: the juxtaposition of unrelated ideas/concepts fit into a frame that gives them another meaning or gives us pause.  It can be difficult to understand or grapple with the idea of oxymoronic contrast. However, in our daily lives we tend to witness the collapse of modernity in its premise of prosperity struck out by the super prosperous: the contrast between the local and the global. 

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The art of connectivity: Sinking our roots further down.

11 September 2018

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Caribbean peoples have cultural links and subterranean rhizomes–a mass of roots– that connect the region to a larger reality.  This is also articulated by Cuban poets and theorists like Nicolas Guillen and Antonio Benítez-Rojo.  The ethnomusicologist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz argues about transculturation and harmonious combined with deeply conflicting existences.  We often flatten culture out into its artistic expression, removing any life from it; putting it in a museum and extracting its marrow. We thereby tend to fossilise and remove understanding of culture and its unique link to the place, time and people.  So, Guillen, Ortiz and Glissant came up with understandings of culture that transcend limited material understanding.  We also remove the multiplicity of experiences and histories from culture because so much of history and culture is limited to the official version as told by the coloniser. 

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The Art of Living in the Tropics, Part Three: Silence

5 September 2018

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Culture is the art of living in a place that speaks of experiences, adaptation and resilience.  Culture is the unique expression of spatial and temporal identity or vice versa where a people perform life based on their history and geography.  As people are increasingly marginalised through the expansion of capitalist desire into the tropics, the art of living there shifts from a national or an indigenous-peoples-based art to art of magazines and design. How do these things meet so that peoples and their cultures can thrive alongside gated out-sourced post-nationalist communities? 

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Teachers’ Seminar at the NAGB jump-starts the new school year

5 September 2018

By Katrina Cartwright. Public School Math Teachers spend some time at the NAGB. The education department at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas fittingly began the new school year with a Teachers’ Seminar on August 21st -23rd that focused on teaching math through art and utilising the museum’s resources to enhance student learning. Over 65 junior high and high school math teachers from the public school system were in attendance as a part of their yearly summer professional development seminar.

The daily five-hour seminar incorporated a tour of the museum’s current Permanent Exhibition “Hard Mouth: From the Tongue of the Ocean,” a presentation on the techniques that can be used to integrate art and math and a series of activities that guided teachers through the various ways that the arts can be used to engage students in learning math. Each day ended with groups of teachers working together to formulate ideas that incorporated visual art into lessons that focused on a particular math topic.

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“When The Lionfish Came”: Tamika Galanis chimes in for the people of the reef in dangerously rising tides.

28 August 2018

By Natalie Willis. In Adelaide, there is a bell that has been ringing for at least a hundred years, but closer to two. Events, hurricanes, births and deaths, are all marked by the chime, and the proud denizens of this historic community for freed Blacks have, for generations, found themselves answering to its call. However, Tamika Galanis’ film, “When The Lionfish Came” (2015) is not a church bell…

It is an alarm.

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Double Dutch “Hot Water” Opens!: Climate change, Ragged Island and vulnerable ecologies explored.

27 August 2018

By Holly Bynoe.  ​​​​​​​The “Double Dutch” series supports the concept of bringing together local and regional artists, irrespective of where they are currently residing, to work with a group of ideas personal, political and otherwise crucial to the development of a contemporary Bahamian identity. These artists and collectives are often divided linguistically and geographically but are united by common historical, economic or practice-based conditions. For this reason, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) pilot project attempts to create and maintain ties throughout the Caribbean and its more extensive diaspora.

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