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By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. Beauty surrounds us. Waters flow over us.  Sands, pink, grey, white, beige provide support for life.  Mangroves with their gaseous smells and nursery roots, sustain coastal health as they prevent full-on impact from storm surges and hurricanes. Art provides a salient view into these natural beauties and the past, as it also imports past ideas into the present.  It inspires and it heals.  In the early days of tourism in the colony, people came to be healed in the balmy tropics The Bahamas offered.  Some in turn captured and marketed this. Others were here and transported the feeling of the space to other shores through their visual and literary experiences.  The Bahamas is known for its natural beauty: the way the sun strikes the waves and refracts into the eye of the beholder.  This natural beauty is fragile, though it seem everlasting.

As part of the exhibition “We Suffer to Remain” at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (22 March – 29 July 2018), LUX Scotland presents a film series that brings together a selection of artists’ moving image work from Scotland, the UK and the greater African diaspora, with titles drawn from the LUX collection. We Suffer to Remain engages with the complex intersectional histories across Scotland and the Caribbean to make sense of the vestiges and trauma of slavery, featuring work by Bahamian artists Sonia Farmer, Anina Major and John Beadle alongside Graham Fagen’s installation The Slave’s Lament (2015), commissioned by Hospitalfield for Scotland + Venice at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

By Natalie Willis. We have a long history of looking in The Bahamas, in the idea of being seen. We were the chain of limestone that 40,000 Lucayans and Arawaks saw as home as they weaved their way north through the islands. We were Christopher Columbus’ misplaced Indies, setting his eyes on a lucky second-best that he claimed for Spain – thus beginning the “New World” and our written history. There were the hungry eyes set on plantation profit – and the hungry eyes of those forced to do that work. Then there were the thousands of eyes afterwards, in and out of the space in blinks and in boats that came to see just what “paradise” looked like. Those eyes were turned on us.

By Malika Pryor Martin. The very first Friday Night Live! took place at the NAGB on April 27th and proved to be a hit with our New Providence community in spite of the rain. Activities and events included a drop-in workshop, special tours, drawing in the galleries, a special on memberships, delicious food provided by POW and Cassava Grille, and although unfulfilled (thank you, bad weather), a live performance by Willis and the Illest.

The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas is celebrating the Chinese year of the Dog with a call for Potcakes. Would you like to share your experience of observing, owning or knowing a potcake Bahamian artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, video, textile, installation and mixed media. The potcake is a staple of life in The Bahamas. It’s presence not only speaks to the fragility of how we care for living things but also the strength and fortitude of these resilient animals who become a part of our lives. For ages, the Potcake has been seen as an icon and signifier of Bahamianness, and even though the word is shared in other Caribbean countries, there is a unique relationship developed between the canine and the wider community.

By Malika Pryor Martin. Thanks to the support and partnership of the Central Bank of The Bahamas, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is pleased to announce limited free bus service for primary and secondary school tours! At this time, the offer is available to all government schools in New Providence. “The Magic School Bus” Initiative, as it is affectionately titled, will facilitate the visitation of more than 800 students to The Bahamas’ preeminent arts institution.

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas .  “Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value” provides an invaluable view into the way the islands have been visioned for decades.  It is a unique and important show that serves as a historical and current window into a perspective that adds value to our discussions and to how we see ourselves.  Working in tandem with “We Suffer to Remain”, both shows provide an incredibly fruitful and open discussion for the cultural materialism and intermateriality cross-materiality that allows deeper and broader understanding of where we live and how we live here. The latter show deals with the loss of tangible and intangible cultural heritage of slavery through erasure. The periphery, the colony where the history physically took place has gutted its memory through a process of deletion and writing over. 

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 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 Natalie Willis

The last in our series of two-part interviews with the artists of “We Suffer To Remain”, this week we speak to Scottish artist Graham Fagen on having his work not only as the starting point of this series of exhibitions on “Difficult Conversations”, but also on having his work brought to the Caribbean context to which it refers. “The Slave’s Lament” (2015) is a moment for us to consider the realities of this Trans-Atlantic history in contemporary contexts, and now that we’ve seen Bahamian responses with our national artists responding to this work, we take a moment to consider Fagen’s perspectives in our space.