By Malika N Pryor. At the NAGB, we’d like to think that every special event we hold is one-of-a-kind. However, Friday April 6th, 2018 was particularly spectacular as it marked the naming ceremony and formal opening of Fiona’s Theatre. The only amphitheatre in New Providence, the bowl shaped auditorium is a part of a long and storied history that ties its earliest recorded use to its current purpose.
By Katrina Cartwright. The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is excited to announce the opening of early registration for its Mixed Media Art Summer Camp (MMASC). Now in its fourth year, the camp was started in response to the need for an arts focused camp after the FINCO Summer Art Workshop was discontinued. MMASC has been popular since its inception and has impacted the lives of over 300 students since 2014. The camp takes place between June 25th and August 3rd and is divided into two, three week sessions.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Our culture is as much about how we build, live and die, as how we speak, dress and eat, and George Cox, for me, embodied one of those shapers of Bahamian vernacular culture, simultaneously impacting high culture. How we live is as important as what we do and both influence the legacies we leave.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. We are locked in bodies that demonstrate a temporal fixity that is only such. This became more apparent to me on my first experience in Salvador de Bahia, where the material remnants of slavery and colonialism remained intact and on view, unlike in New Providence where most of the remains of slavery are either dematerialised, vanished and decontextualised. As “We Suffer to Remain” evidences, the coloniality of the postcolonial condition becomes even more poignant when expressed through a clash/confluence of arts. Art allows space for a dialogue that exposes the pasts and versions usually edited out by the passage of time, and the power of the state to redirect what was once empowerment discourses.
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, The University of The Bahamas. Can we conceptualise change? In our lessons, our lives, our schooling, have we been encouraged to examine a problem and to solve it? Have we been encouraged to dream big and produce along those lines? Usually, to ideate creatively, to innovate, to shift the cultural thinking or vision, we must think critically. This thinking makes some people uncomfortable, yet, this essential skill is wiped out in the Bahamian education system. We are also told that dabbling in art won’t pay the bills, however, to meet the demands of change, we must think creatively. Google, FaceBook, sustainable renewable cities, Worlds fairs, Disney World, are all creative building structures that use winds, the light and the landmass to cool, power, and illuminate are usually created in studios of creative minds that do not conform to linear thinking or conservative paradigmatic control.
By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Over the last few weeks we have been journeying through “Medium: Practices and Routes of Spirituality and Mysticism” and discussing linkages with the upcoming show “We Suffer To Remain”, an international collaboration between the British Council and The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Writing this piece from Dubai at the Chamber of Commerce conference for Latin America and preparing for Expo2020 the polemics of culture become more clearly abstracted. So much of our culture and life resides beneath the surface. From time to time it surfaces to be revealed in stunning works of art, vibrant crafts, suggestive and politically critical music, or just fried into a fried-dry piece of chicken. We overlook that we exist in culture and that our culture dictates how we think about who we are and how we respond to a crisis.
By Malika Pryor-Martin.
“TRANS: A Migration of Identity”, curated by The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas’ Community Outreach Officer Abby Smith and Assistant Curator Richardo Barrett, is the NAGB’s second inter-island travelling exhibition and will premiere in Eleuthera next week. The first, MAX/AMOS focused on the works, as compliment and contrast, of masters Maxwell Taylor and Amos Ferguson. It played with ideas of identity and memory, how one sees themselves and sees their country; all through the eyes of these two men.
By Natalie Willis
Continuing on last week’s interview, the discussion builds on the rest of the body of work that Anina Major is producing for “We Suffer To Remain”, an exhibition featuring “The Slave’s Lament” (2015) by Scottish artist Graham Fagen alongside three Bahamian artists, Sonia Farmer and John Beadle included. Major’s work and much of the exhibition deals with the legacies of slavery as embodied by us as post-colonial subjects. This week she speaks to that embodiment, to pain, and to what it means to inhabit a Black feminine body in relation to the ideas brought up by this exhibition as well as recent events in the country.
By Malika Pryor Martin.The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas first introduced its mural programme in 2015 as part of a revamped and revitalised summer camp programme. The murals would remain on view at the NAGB for one year before another artist and group of creative campers replaced it the following summer with new ideas and concepts. Makers, who are both members of the NAGB team and professional artists beyond our walls, contributed to the campus effort. It served as inspiration for hundreds of young people and as creative fuel for the participating artists.