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The NAGB takes the ITE to Grand Bahama

1 April 2019

By Katrina Cartwright. The Inter-Island Travelling Exhibition brings an intense week of activities to the second city. On April 2nd, 2019 the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas’ Inter-Island Travelling Exhibition (ITE) lands in Freeport, Grand Bahama, bringing with it an extensive community outreach agenda inclusive of our public mural programme, free workshops, a curator’s talk, school visits (primary and secondary) and donations of museum literature for art teachers, schools and public libraries. The NAGB was last in Grand Bahama in 2016 with “Max/Amos”, which was showcased at the Charles Hayward Library. Now in its fourth year, with a new exhibition, “Trans: A Migration of Identity”, the NAGB team is taking the travelling exhibition to our second city, where it will be on display at the Rand Nature Centre from April 5th – 26th, 2019.  

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Considering culture: More than a smile

27 March 2019

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. The art of expression is as much a part of culture as is the art of weaving or straw work, yet we often overlook this.  When someone says, “I ga beat you into next week,” the local colour is present, but the violent subtext is usually edited out. In Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, philosopher, and essayist Sylvia Wynter’s work “We must learn to sit down together and talk about a little culture” (Jamaica Journal, 1968) we see the commodification of art and culture.  Yet, we have apparently progressed to the post-independence point where most pre-independence problems are ignored or cured by the shift.  But the exploration of sitting down together demonstrates that we have not moved beyond the problems nor have they disappeared. Violence and violent dispossession remain realities, often ignored.

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Talking to the Dead: Tamika Galanis’ repatriates materials from the Alan Lomax archive and brings them home.

25 March 2019

By Natalie Willis

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 

“Homecoming: Talking to the Dead” by Tamika Galanis becomes an answer to a much older question. Galanis’ work, in her careful, tender sifting-through of the Alan Lomax archive (consisting of a host of images and sound from his expedition to The Bahamas in 1935) at the Library of Congress became a response to Lomax’s curious call and questioning nearly 100 years ago. A Library of Congress Fellow, Galanis may be best known to some as “the lady with the shirts” – those Lignum + Tingum tees that serve up Bahamian dialect and lists of local flora and food – but for others she is far, far more – an artist, researcher, documentarian, and a seeker of truth. Coming across materials from this collection while she was undertaking her graduate studies, Galanis saw a letter from Lomax reporting his findings from his time in Nassau back to the Library of Congress (LOC), the start of her time following this thread that would lead her to a surprising connection to Zora Neale Hurston.

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The God Self: Lessons on Self-Love from Emerging Artist Cydne Coleby

19 March 2019

By Kevanté A.C. Cash, NAGB Correspondent. At first glance, through a narrow lens, one could be offended by the works of emerging artist Cydne Coleby supported in the National Exhibition 9 (NE9) “The Fruit and The Seed”. Crafted with a “slight sense of narcissism”, interwoven with themes of erotic imagery, Coleby addresses the self – the God self, that is. She conducts a session of “soulversations” – moments in time allotted for self to do the work of loving and healing from past traumas and pains through her series “A God Called Self”.  

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Tender Seedlings: Anina and A.L. Major Reflect on Pain and Love in the Bahamian Diaspora

18 March 2019

By Natalie Willis. Art and language, be it in literature, poetry, or song, have perhaps always gone hand in hand. It makes sense of course, because really what we’re getting down to in artwork or in words is communication – often with one being used to describe or illustrate the other. It’s a happy collaboration, and so too was the collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Anina Major and her flesh-and-blood family A.L. Major. The two came together to produce Seedling (2018) for the NE9 “The Fruit and The Seed,” a work incorporating cohesively all manner of material – ceramic, wood, digital clocks, a newly sprouted dilly tree, and the words of poetry and phone calls overland and oversea. The work – part artistic laboratory experiment and part poetic becoming – gives us a way to think on the struggles of identity of the Bahamian emigre.

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The Island Repeated: Toni Alexia Roach’s Patterned Approach to Confronting the Past

13 February 2019

By Natalie Willis. The land we live in feels like a repetition. We are a repetition of limestone rocks across shallow seas. We are repetitions of faces across families. We repeat the things we learn in school and church and wherever else – many times without critique, and, most disconcertingly, we repeat the same models of power–mainly paternalistic–from hundreds of years ago. This is at the heart of what Toni Alexia Roach gets to in her work for the “NE9: The Fruit and The Seed.” We look at the visual repetitions – palm tree after palm tree, and beach after beach – but we also see that these images are not symbolic of the place we live in, of the Caribbean, they are symbolic of the very idea of the Caribbean picturesque.  

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