All posts tagged: Natalie Willis

We Lost Two Cultures That Day: Hurricane Irma and the Loss of Cultural Material

19 September 2017 Article

By Natalie Willis. It’s easy to think of culture as being purely in the hands of the people: it’s in our mother tongues, our food, our dance and architecture. And, in many ways, it is. But it also leaves a residue, it sticks to our spaces and buildings and trees and forests and oceans, so that when our elders pass on, they leave just a tiny bit of themselves around for us to remember what we come from and we build upon that. With this in mind, and with heavy heart, we must look to the implications of Irma and her aftermath. Both Inagua and Ragged Island were deemed uninhabitable this week and it is important to look at the full extent of what that means… We lost two cultures.

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Reporting From Rome: The Care in Curating

1 August 2017 Highlights

By Natalie Willis. Three weeks of Italian summer and being surrounded by art professionals sounds like a dream, and in many ways, of course, it is. From the “shallow” things—like eating gelato for breakfast (which, I’ll have you know, is entirely civilised)—to the deeper stuff, of discussing intense readings around the purpose and history of curatorial practice and being able to view Caravaggio paintings in resplendent old buildings, the Goldsmiths ‘Curating The Contemporary’ summer art intensive, hosted at the British School at Rome, was an education, and in ways I had not anticipated. I was supported by the Charitable Arts Foundation as well as The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas to embark on this journey of professional development that would prove to also be one of intense personal development

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Beauty in Bain Town: How does Over-the-Hill Fit Into the Bahamian Picturesque?

8 May 2017 Article

Bain Town is a space of much notorietythese days, as a number of historically freed slave villages on the island have grown to be, but it wasn’t always so, and there is certainly a need to celebrate the history of these areas and the sense of community and pride amongst those who remember how different the place was merely a few decades ago. So many of our major artists in The Bahamas came from Over-the-Hill, perhaps most notably our beloved Maxwell Taylor, and embracing the greatness that comes out of these communities is important.

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