landscape Archives - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

A Choice Landscape: The Early Work of the Late Chan Pratt and How Art Practice Gets Shaped by the Environment

21 May 2019 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis. There are a few names that come to mind for us when we think of the quintessential, traditional, picturesque Bahamian landscape: Hildegarde Hamilton, Alton Lowe, Eddie Minnis, Dorman Stubbs, Ricardo Knowles, and the well-collected (but not quite always at the forefront of our minds), Chan Pratt. Landscape painting is quite a contentious genre of painting for The Bahamas and certainly for the rest of the Caribbean region, and this is for good reason. The colonial photography and postcards and paintings of days-gone-by were instrumental in framing and re-shaping the region as an idyll for tourist consumption, and this growing industry would later become the backbone and difficult foundation of many Caribbean economies.

Beauty and Loss in Tessa Whitehead and Chan Pratt’s Work: A Death Foretold, yet Not Dying

20 May 2019 Natalie Willis

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, The University of The Bahamas. Beauty, as we began two weeks ago, heals souls and allows us to come to a higher place where we feel more human, connected, communal and loved. Nature, green trees, and shade along roads allow us to walk in and explore the special areas and spaces around us. This exploration is seen in Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and in Tessa Whitehead’s work, the creek (2018) as beauty envelopes us in its natural form. When cement covers every inch of land, the soul is taken out of life. Singer Gloria Estefan’s Mi Tierra (1993), similar to Coulibri, the main location in Wide Sargasso Sea speaks of the loss, longing and nostalgia for a home that we have lost the deep connection to and the healing that comes from revisiting even if only metaphorically, metaphysically or through imagination.

Reconnecting to the Divine Feminine

13 May 2019 Natalie Willis

By Blake Fox. Calling upon fear, surrender and angst, Tessa Whitehead presents us with an incredibly personal impression of her dreams, memories, and experiences in a transcendent series of figurative paintings in her first solo exhibition in The Bahamas titled “…there are always two deaths.”

When We Are Like the Trees

18 February 2019 admin

Stories When We Are Like the Trees Letitia Pratt · 18 February 2019 “You who are so-called illegal aliens must

Potter’s Cay: Markets and the importance of public spaces

18 April 2018 Natalie Willis

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.

“Traversing the Picturesque: For Sentimental Value” – The Colonial Gaze

19 March 2018 Natalie Willis

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.