Double Dutch Archives - Page 2 of 2 - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

Unpacking Identity with Joiri Minaya

24 November 2017

The sixth iteration of Double Dutch “Re: Encounter,” featuring the works of Dede Brown and Joiri Minaya, starts to address how important it is from a curatorial perspective to provide opportunities for artists, who are looking for ways to mitigate the sense of frustration that they feel within their practice, by allowing a moment to experiment. The following is the first in a two-part series of long-form Q+As that seeks to expand upon both projects. We connect with Joiri Minaya, a Dominican-American multi-disciplinary artist whose work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement.

(Un)Monumental: How do we re-contextualise historic sculptures for contemporary life?

30 October 2017

As we have seen in “Re: Encounter” artists can often speak to the idea of the monumental both in size and in content. Dede Brown presents ambiguous humanoid busts, absent and cut out of wood and masonite, which are suspended from the ceiling – perhaps un-monumental in their own way. Playing into this in a different respect, Joiri Minaya presents us with a monumental wall of stretchy fabric that spans the width of the ballroom, but also gives us a series of postcards depicting a proposal for artistic intervention on the Christopher Columbus monument that sits at the front of Government House, making good use of both sides of this double-meaning of the word.

Re-Encounter: Thoughts of a Mad Mind

23 October 2017

So much of our lives is defined by our relationship with space and indeed with water, or a space that is not a space, but is actively always churning and redefining itself and its boundaries. We engage at a new level now as boundaries mean little, except for the new and ever-increasing global boundaries that allow capital flow but insist on barring the flow of people. We live in a time of shifting and yet unchanging spaces.

Gendered norms and deconstruction: The body, the image and the ability to speak out for self.

2 August 2017

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett.As The Bahamas moves into a new administration, 50 years of Majority Rule and over 40 years of independence have done little to remove the boundaries around free expression and positive self-imaging. Basking in its Victorian properness, as long as it is useful, the tourist destination boasts a particular image of Caribbeanness that is acceptable and palatable to the population because they have been taught to accept it.

Gender and the Dream: Confronting Stereotypes in Black masculinity.

25 July 2017

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

The dream sold is of young men being told that they are prosperous, only to realise that they are imprisoned in a tangled web of failure or underachievement. Young men from the inner city, once the thriving home of Blacks–forced by segregation and reduced circumstances to live in particular parts of town–is cast as the worst place in the country, a place that only produces criminals.

Cultivating connections: NAGB brings regional artists into the conversation

23 May 2015

With its eyes set on uniting the members of the region’s visual art scene for the advancement of the Caribbean as a whole, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) will be launching the inaugural Double Dutch project to do just that. The Double Dutch project is an ongoing commitment to exhibit the works of two artists – one from The Bahamas and the other from another nation in the region – in a two-person show at the NAGB. Each iteration of Double Dutch will be exhibited for two months with two projects occurring annually during summer.