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By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Bahamian society and culture are already deeply creolised and vibrant, so why not make every effort, take every chance to show who we are?  In the 1980s Barbadian calypsonian Gabby performed ‘Jack’, and people laughed.  In the early 2000s Bahamian performer K. B. sang ‘Dey Sellin’, and people laughed. In fact people criticised him for exaggerating. ‘Dey sellin’… culture captures what we do not see.  Oral and aural culture deliver serious critical visions and versions on what a go on, as the calypsos of the Trinidadian ‘Trinity’ Mighty Sparrow, Shadow and Chalkdust made critical often blistering interventions in all matters of national concern.  Today, we hide from this kind of cultural richness or defame it.  In “Apocolypso”–first published in 2004 and recirculated in 2013–Christian Campbell highlights the shifting tides and sands of Bahamian landscape and the accompanying cultural erosion and erasure. 

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.’”

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Art and design, though they seem to make strange bedfellows, work hand in glove, and, along with literature, carve out space for exceptional spatial and design shifts that move people into new possibilities. The 2018 iteration of the annual regional collaborative project “Double Dutch” titled “Hot Water,” combines the work of Plastico Fantastico (PF) and Expo 2020 team from University of The Bahamas.  The teams spent a week travelling to and from Ragged Island researching what it might look like to rebuild in stronger and more resilient ways in the wake of Hurricane Irma.  The project combined students and faculty, as well as members from PF and we interviewed committee and community members and spent hours and then days creating and distilling ideas for the exhibition.  What finally stands in the Ballroom of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is weeks of contact and ideation, with that, a lot of experimentation to see how best to construct and meet new demands.

By Katrina Cartwright. This October, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) brings a little spookiness and a lot of fun with a special Halloween-themed Friday Night Live! (FNL!) on Friday, October 26, starting at 6:00 p.m. Powered by ALIV, the third iteration of FNL! gives us a “Night at the Museum” where there will be art, food, lots of mystery and tricks and treats—all to be enjoyed in the course of just one night.

By Natalie Willis. An interview with Travolta Cooper on his plans for screenings and finding his “true north”. The NAGB free film series is back for fall! From the spooky to winter-heartwarmers, we have got you covered. This week, we chat with Travolta Cooper – yes, that really is his name! – who will be curating this new season of screenings. The premiere opens with the terrifying classic, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) this Thursday October 18th at 7:00pm in Fiona’s Theatre at the NAGB. First, here’s more on the mind selecting these great bits of cinema for us.

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. 

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? 

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.