Revisiting an Eye for the Tropics Archives - National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

William Sweeting’s “Two Natives at the Gate” (1971): As seen by our youth.

5 February 2018 Natalie Willis

By Nakoa McKenzie, Student at C.R. Walker Secondary High School. Introduction: The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas prides itself on having a healthy and robust community outreach programme with high schools, especially those in our community. Every semester we work with schools to find students to partner with, especially those who have an interest in the arts and cultural initiatives. This extends to work-study opportunities, building and reinforcing how relevant research and data management is with regards to development and strategy. We give students the opportunity to thoroughly integrate with the NAGB team for a week or two – the time remains flexible- and during the first two days of observation, they have an idea of a more significant way in which they’d like to contribute.

Searching for Empathy: Revaluing self in relation to others

16 October 2017 Natalie Willis

By Dr. Ian Bethel Bennett. Where is our empathy? Empathy is our ability to understand other people’s experiences and to provide some support, either from afar or from nearby. We understand, or so we claim, that Black Lives Matter; we get the idea that Black and Latino youth have different experiences in the United States than most white children.

The Culture of Space: Places for Art

28 August 2017 admin

By : Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

The post office stands at the top of Parliament Street on East Hill street, a monument to 1970s development. It stands now condemned. The Churchill building stands condemned, much like the Rodney Bain Building on the verge of Parliament Street Hill on the way to the post office. Condemned buildings populate the city of Nassau. The shift has been rapid; from a thriving colonial backwater settled by administrators and Loyalists to a post-colonial shadow of colonial rule, to a derelict city of decay. This shift has been enormous.

What’s in the frame: Tourism, art, installation and rebuilding the old whore of a body

15 August 2017 Natalie Willis

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett. Frames capture or remove things, images, objects, people for or from the public eye. The frame of the photo can bring something into sharp focus, or it can reduce that same thing into an abstraction in the fore or background and highlight something else. One image usually metaphorically represents an entire discourse and political, economic and socio-cultural paradigm, a way of thinking about enslaved bodies and their relation to consumer politics, that is to say, discourses of otherness and sexualisation.

Balancing Act: Heino Schmid’s “Temporary Horizon” (2010)

19 June 2017 Natalie Willis

By Natalie Willis.Heino Schmid’s practice can perhaps be described as slippery or amphibious – and it’s not so much to do with the water, as it is to do with his fluidity in dealing with the bounds of what we believe to constitute drawing, sculpture, painting as separate genres – the proverbial lines in his practice become blurred. This movement between the medium and the means is why “Temporary Horizon” (2010) was chosen for the current Permanent Exhibition, “Revisiting An Eye For the Tropics” on display at the NAGB.

Ferguson’s Fantastic Dragon: Blending the imagination with the biblical

15 May 2017 Natalie Willis

A fire-breathing hell-beast, a scaly winged thing of fantasy – sometimes good, sometimes dangerous and greedy: Dragons. Not a staple in the established subject matter for Amos Ferguson, but nonetheless a treasure in the National Collection, an entity worthy of having an epic flying reptilian guarding it for sure. Ferguson’s “The Dragon” (1991) is an outlier for a lot of reasons. While his usual practice includes references to biblical scenes, Bahamian folklore, and more often than not, Bahamian scenery – with the iconic titles painted in Bahamian vernacular that act as a mirror for our particular language traditions, this piece doesn’t quite typify his practice.

Beauty in Bain Town: How does Over-the-Hill fit into the Bahamian picturesque?

8 May 2017 admin

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.

Creating Thinking Spaces: Opportunity to think, opportunity to build, opportunity to grow.

24 April 2017 Natalie Willis

The University of The Bahamas and the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas have created an open space for group discussion that allows students to benefit from the offering of both spaces. This relationship allows culture to truly be highlighted. As much as we talk about culture, we often disconnect our experiences from talk. These lectures are designed to promote thought and unshackle minds blinkered by a dysfunctional system designed to create workers without a sense of self, or an identity that can transcend the 9 to 5 and the 21 by seven of the mundane.

The Eye of the Storm: Preservation and destruction

26 October 2016 admin

Winslow Homer’s ‘Hurricane’ captures howling winds of the storm in The Bahamas, however, the image, though teaming with meaning and feeling, does not capture the magnitude of today’s super storms. These so-called superstorms bring with them devastation and trauma of epic proportions. The visual produced in Homer’s painting remains haunting and provides an interesting couple for the Gulfstream painting, and After the Hurricane, Bahamas as it shows a man shipwrecked on a desolate island.