Barrington Watson – Athlete’s Nightmare II (1966), Collection: NGJ

The Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition runs from December 6, 2015 to March 5, 2016. Here is another text panel from the exhibition:

This gallery focuses on the artistic representation of two archetypal figures with particular resonance in postcolonial Jamaica: the athlete and the worker. In both instances, it is generally assumed that these figures are male and black, which further illustrates the extent to which the black male figure tends be represented in terms of its physicality.

While sports, and track and field athletics specifically, hold significant importance in Jamaican life, artistic representations of this theme are relatively rare and are limited mainly to official commissions, particularly in the form of monuments to Jamaican athletes and sports. The first such monument – Alvin Marriott’s The Jamaican Athlete (1962) at the National Stadium – represents a male runner, which confirms that the default assumed gender of the athlete is indeed male and it is only recently that there have been monument commissions to honour Jamaica’s female athletes.

Alvin Marriott – Banana Man (1955), Collection: NGJ

This exhibition features several works of art that provide alternative perspectives on the subject. Barrington Watson’s Athlete’s Nightmare II (1966), for instance, offers a haunting image of athletic failure – the inability to finish the race –that has broader implications as a representation of the precarious nature of masculinity. Omari Ra’s Race for Ben (n.d.) refers to the Jamaican-born sprinter Ben Johnson, who was publicly disgraced and stripped of his world records after it was discovered that he took performance-enhancing drugs – a sad tale of the enormous pressures that occur in the hyper-masculine world of top athleticism.

The figure of the manual worker, and particularly the black male worker, comes with even more baggage, because of its association with centuries of servitude and low social status. The artists of the nationalist school sought to wrest this image from its negative historical associations by representing the worker in a monumentalized, heroic form, for instance in Edna Manley’s Diggers (1936), Albert Huie’s Crop Time (1955), and Alvin Marriott’s Banana Man (1955). In these works of art, the workers are represented as proud agents of economic progress for the emerging nation, even though this obscures how socio-economic divisions are perpetuated in the process.

Albert Huie – Crop Time (1955), Collection: NGJ

Such imagery continued to resonate in post-Independence art, as can be seen in Eugene Hyde’s Banana Man (1960) and Jelly Man (1959), Vernal Reuben’s Construction Workers (1976), and Barrington Watson’s epic Fishing Village (1996). Other major themes in Jamaican art have, as can be seen elsewhere in this exhibition, been subjected to significant critical scrutiny by contemporary Jamaican artists, but only a few have tackled manual labour and its race and gender dynamics. Leasho Johnson’s satirical “banana men” works in the first gallery to some extent address this subject but we have not been able to secure any other suitable examples for this exhibition.

A. Duperly and Sons – Castleton Gardens (1901), Collection: NGJ

Explorations IV: Masculinities opens on Sunday, December  6. Read more about Gallery 5 in this six-gallery exhibition:

Once upon a time black male ‘cool’ was defined by the ways in which black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold … It was defined by individual black males daring to self-define rather than be defined by others.

― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003)

At first glance, style and fashion may seem like the most superficial of the themes that structure this exhibition, but this is deceptive, since it is also one of the most politicized sections. Style and fashion provide major channels for the definition and performance of masculinities but are also particularly prone to change, variable interpretations, and contestation. In the portrait of Benjamin and Mary Pusey (c1775) in gallery 2, for instance, the high status of the protagonists is reinforced by their mode of dress, but Benjamin Pusey’s powdered wig and stockings, while once markers of high male status, would today be regarded as effeminate. Cosmo Whyte’s interpretation of the iconic photographs of the archetypal “badman” Ivanhoe Martin from The Harder They Come, which is on view in gallery 3, derives from an image that epitomizes “rude boy” swagger and poignantly illustrates the oppositional, subversive potential of style.

Osmond Watson – Johnny Cool (1967), Collection: NGJ

Two early photographs in this gallery – a 1901 view of Castleton Gardens by A. Duperly and Sons and the portrait A Jamaican Negro (c1908-1909) by Sir Harry Johnston – shed light on the sartorial politics of black Jamaican men in the early 20th century. The nattily dressed, suited black figure in the centre of the lush tropical foliage in the Duperly photograph disrupts anthropological conceptions of “the native” by introducing the figure of “the dandy” – it speaks to a changing social environment and the emergence of a black middle class. A Jamaican Negro, on the other hand, appears to represent a male servant, who in a strong marker of low status is barefooted, although the man’s confident air powerfully challenges that status. The incongruous “feminine” element of the printed fan in his hand also reminds of the subversive drag of Belisario’s Koo-Koo, Actor Boy in gallery 1. The spirit of cool, confident defiance is also evident in Osmond Watson’s iconic Johnny Cool (1967), a youthful portrait of one who may well be a “rude boy” in the making. Johnny Cool has a contemporary counterpart in Marlon James Jabari (2007), although this portrait also captures major changes in Jamaican youth culture that move away from prescribed Jamaican identies: an adept of anime, Jabari wears a Japanese school uniform jacket.

Ebony G. Patterson – Untitled II (Khani and Krew) From the Disciplez Series (2009), Private Collection

Ebony G. Patterson’s blinged-out collages from the Khani + di Krew (2009) series and Peter Dean Rickards’s Proverbs 24:10 (2008) take us to the contemporary and decidedly oppositional world of Dancehall, and its male dancers. Rickards’ mesmerizing, slow motion video captures the graceful poetry of the dance movements and frames the dancers’ individual performances as moving rituals of self-actualization, seemingly suspended in time. Patterson is the artist who has most consistently interrogated the gender contradictions in contemporary Jamaican culture and her “gangstas” reflect the feminised, flamboyant male aesthetic in Dancehall, which stands in contrast with its hyper-masculine and often homophobic rhetoric. Most of her subjects have bleached faces, a practice which is both aspirational, as it amounts to a generally futile attempt to ascend into the race-colour hierarchies, and oppositional, as it flouts middle class values about black self-affirmation. The visual codes of masculinity, race and class, as expressed through fashion and style, are also a major theme in the paintings of Phillip Thomas. His two canvases – Mr Chin, Yuh Fish Sell Di Right Ting and Nuh Mix Di Original, both from 2015 – reduce these codes to their bare essentials, with a few carefully placed disruptions such as the shocking pink Afropik, and he subtly and ironically connects this essentialized imagery to prevailing (and arguably failing) concepts about nationhood.

Wade Rhoden – The Calling (2015)

This section of the exhibition would not be complete without reference to fashion photography, represented by two photographs by Wade Rhoden, a young Jamaican photographer whose edgy style crosses the boundaries between fine art and fashion photography. The Calling (2013) and the related image Untitled (2013) represent prevailing male body ideals in the fashion industry, which are often as unattainable as the body ideals in female fashion photography. The imagery in these photographs also exists in an unexpected and provocative dialogue with the heroic, idealized body-focused depictions of black masculinity of the nationalist school, such as the work of Edna Manley, Alvin Marriott and Archie Lindo in galleries 2 and 3.

Rose Murray – Seated Boy (1975), Collection: NGJ

The Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition opens today, Sunday, December 6. Doors will be open from 11 am to 4 pm. The opening function starts at 1:30 pm, with Dr Michael Bucknor as guest speaker. DJ Biko is providing music today. As a continuation of our blog posts on the exhibition, please read more about the theme of Gallery 6: Fathers, Brothers and Sons:

One of the most pervasive negative stereotypes affecting (black) Jamaican masculinity pertains to fatherhood: the absent, irresponsible father who fails his children and provides a negative role model for his sons. It is no doubt for this reason that images of black fathers and children are rare in Jamaican art, while images of motherhood are quite common. Two examples are featured in this gallery: Leonard Morris’ Mountain Folk (1953), which was originally in Edna Manley’s collection, and Rose Murray’s Rasta Father and Child (1975), which documents the emphasis on positive father roles in the context of Rastafari. Murray’s Seated Boy (1975), a portrait of a young Rastafarian boy, does not include a father figure but implies his presence. Greg Bailey’s Recruits (2014) represents a troubling counterpoint, pertaining to how the absence of positive male role models draws young boys into the culture of gangs and guns.

Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds – Father Abraham (c1955), Larry Wirth Collection, NGJ

While images of fatherhood are as such rare, there is no shortage of artistic depictions of patriarchal figures, family, and homosocial interaction (and homosocial here refers to non-romantic and non-sexual interactions among men, although the term is also used to describe similar interactions between women). Such works shed revealing light on Jamaican cultural practices and value systems and, specifically, the life world of Jamaican men. Kapo’s Father Abraham (c1955), for instance, speaks about the relevance of biblical notions about patriarchy with which the artist, who was a Revivalist leader, surely identified. Similar conceptions of patriarchy can be seen in the work of Everald Brown, who was an elder in the local Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the patriarch of a small, but artistically very active family-based church group. Family, in its extended sense, is a significant theme in the work of both artists and often focuses on male family relationships. Brown’s mystical Ethiopian Apple (1970) features his sons drumming around a hybrid figure – half human and half Otaheite Apple – which may be a self-portrait of Brown and an evocation of His Imperial Majesty. Kapo’s Trouble Not (1964) is a powerful image of brotherhood and male solidarity, which provides shelter against the outside world. Roy Lawrence’s Game (1974) has a similar quality and represents a closely-knit group of men (or boys) who are involved in a game of dice, obviously gambling for money, and the game represents an intense moment of homosocial interaction.

Everald Brown – Ethiopian Apple (1970), Collection: NGJ

Alvin Marriott’s Boysie (1962), finally, was created in the year of Jamaica’s independence and represents a handsome young man. His nickname alludes to his position in a family context, as somebody’s son.

Alvin Marriott – Boysie (1962), A.D. Scott Collection, NGJ

Greg Bailey – Recruits (2014)

The Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition, which was curated by O’Neil Lawrence, opened at the NGJ on Sunday, December 6, with Michael A. Bucknor as the guest speaker. We are pleased to present the first part of Dr Bucknor’s opening remarks – the second part will be published on Wednesday.

I must thank the National Gallery through its Executive Director, Veerle Poupeye and its Acting Senior Curator, O’Neil Lawrence, for inviting me to offer some introductory remarks on the occasion of the opening of the 4^th in the series of the National Gallery’s “Explorations”exhibitions. In Jamaica, we have a saying that “Cock mouth kill cock” and I think that my scholarly mouth has gotten me into trouble. I must first declare that I am not a critic or practitioner of the visual arts. However, their choosing me to do this opening might be related to the work I have been doing quite recently on Jamaican masculinities. In 2013, for example, I co-edited a special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature on “Masculinities in Caribbean Literature and Culture” and was grateful to O’Neil for allowing the use of one of his stunning photographs for that issue. Then last year I co-edited, another special issue on Caribbean Masculinities for Caribbean Quarterly and Veerle contributed a piece on Ebony G. Patterson’s work. So they were both familiar with my work in masculinity studies. These special editions were aimed at exposing some of the work being done by cultural critics in the fairly recent field of masculinity studies, but perhaps also to reveal what work is still left to be done.

O’Neil Lawrence – Untilted II (Broken Reliquary series (2010) – this work is not included in the Masculinities exhibition

Perhaps, I should say a little bit more about my own interest in masculinity studies. My entry into this field of research was (in part) influenced by what I discovered in Jamaica in the late 1990s when I returned from graduate school in Canada and began teaching at UWI. I noticed the increasing number of murder-suicides done by husbands, common-law male partners and boyfriends, who would sometimes murder the children, the wife or female partner and then would take their own lives. These events revealed Jamaican masculinities as bathed in blood and veined in violence. This bothered me. Here is an example of the typical newspaper report on these incidents and this one is as recent as May 16, 2015:

The Manchester police are investigating the circumstances surrounding a case of suspected murder/suicide involving a 23-year-old security guard and the mother of his child. Police believe the security guard …first used his licensed firearm to shot and kill…the mother of his infant child, then turned the gun on himself. Police said the tragedy, which flowed from an argument over alleged infidelity, occurred at about 10:30 pm Thursday night … in Melrose Mews in Mandeville. (Jamaica Observer).

William D. McPherson and Oliver – Photograph of Gordon’s Scourged
Back (1863) – this photograph is not included in the Masculinities exhibition

As indicted in this Jamaica Observer news report, much of the outrage that ends in this kind of blood bath is linked to a Jamaican man feeling rejected, “dissed” (disrespected) and discarded by his female partner who chooses to exchange sexual favours with another man. Cuckolding the cocks-man in Jamaica seems the highest form of violation that requires the woman paying the ultimate price of losing her life. When we hear of such incidents, we have to wonder: Is violence too much a defining feature of Jamaican masculinity? Murder suicides, gang warfare killings, scammer executions, homophobic violent attacks and murders, and vicious assaults, including rape, of women and children seem to mark Jamaican masculinities as a violent rite of passage. One chilling art work in Gallery 6 of this exhibition is the work by Greg Bailey entitled “Recruits” where four young boys (who seem to resemble each other) are brandishing wooden play guns and positioning them as weapons. One of the little boys seems dubious about the activity and holds the wooden gun in the rest position and looks off to someone in front of them (camera man) or the director of this play activity. His limited participation provides a reminder that not everyone will follow wholeheartedly the script of macho masculinity that is nurtured in a culture of violence. Too often, the alternatives to this type of masculinity remain in the minority. In this exhibition, there is no image from our slave past much like the well circulated image of the African American runaway slave Gordon with the tapestry of trauma embroidered on his back. Yet, as the work of O’Neil Lawrence reminds us in his series “Broken Reliquary” (by the way, none of that work is featured in this exhibition), there is history of violent trauma for black men that continues today.

Vermon “Howie” Grant – Dance Hall Artiste (2014), Collection: NGJ

Yet, while this exhibition might not feature such graphic images of violence to the black man’s body, thereby, focusing on physical violence in a re-traumatizing ritual of the museum or art gallery visit, the exhibition raises some philosophical questions about the terms on which traditional conceptions of Jamaican masculinities are often grounded. Ideas of the naturalness, innateness and never-changing character of Jamaican masculinities are interrogated in this exhibition and, in this way, discursive violence and its philosophical underpinnings are taken to task. The way in which the curator has set up the pieces in conversation within individual galleries and across the six galleries establishes a complex of crossings for our viewership. Though there are the distinct sections: “Sexual Bodies” and “Beyond the Normative,” “Power and Status,” “The Male Body as Icon” and “Precarious Masculinities,” “The Athlete and the Worker,” “Style and Fashion” and “Fathers, Brothers and Sons,” there are some cross-connecting tropes throughout the entire exhibition. Throughout this exhibition, we can take for granted that the black male body is the surface on which masculinity’s discursive script is most often written. For example, Vermon “Howie” Grant’s “Dancehall Hall Artiste” (Use image if possible) in which the central figure of Vybz Kartel has made his skin a canvass, so that he is as “pretty as colouring book” illustrates my point. Here in a meta-artistic moment, art making art its subject—that is the “oil on plyboard” piece features Vybz Kartel whose body art is part of the subject of Grant’s art work, and so, our attention is drawn, especially in this exhibition, to the ways in which black body is written on constantly to anchor ideas about masculinity. The three main cross-codes, then, that I want to turn my attention to is (1) cross dressing or dress as cross-connecting motif, (2) cross-referencing across time and (3) the central trope of the cross-species.

Ebony G. Patterson – The Observation (Bush Cockerel) – A Fictituous History (2012), still from video installation

I want to begin by drawing attention to the video installation in Gallery 1 by Ebony Patterson because it helps to make all the major points I want to make. I should note in passing that Ebony Patterson has had a sustained engagement with the issue of Jamaican masculinity and also has brought the world of popular music, dancehall culture especially, into visual art.[i] (This cross-current of dancehall in contemporary visual art, I will return a little later in the talk.) There have been several responses to this piece in its various incarnations. From his viewing of this installation at the National Biennial 2012, Kei Miller, for example, highlights the inconclusive nature of Patterson’s gender reflection in this piece: “I am grateful that Ebony G. Patterson has not yet concluded her fascinating exploration of not-quite-male/not-quite-female bodies. And the work does not seem anxious for conclusion.” For O’Neil Lawrence, this inconclusive stance represents ‘the fluidity of societal constructed gender roles” (14) and, in this way, “plays games with our assumptions about male/father and female/mother roles and appearances,” as Veerle Poupeye suggests in the exhibition catalogue (20). I also want to direct our attention to the setting of this gender game, which seems to be an outdoor (not fully garden of Eden), what the artist calls bush. One gets the sense that some of the flowers did not grow naturally in the environment, that they were inserted or the image photo-shopped and, thereby, this artifice raises issues about what we claim to be natural. The equation of naturalness with the normative is one idea that I think is challenged by this work—exposing both the natural and normative as constructed ideals. In this regard, she seems to recover the excess portion (rather than the minimalist fashion) of dancehall dress—the wigs, the flamboyant colours, the feathers to frame the two adult figures, what Lawrence calls “two imaginary, androgynous bird-human hybrids,” where the naturalness of femininity or masculinity or family structure is unclear and where the natural is revealed as always being cloaked in our constructions of it. We can make the natural mean what we want it to mean. Our gender meanings are imposed, not innate, are made up and agreed upon ideas, not natural and these roles are not static, they can change over time.

Dr Michael A. Bucknor is Senior Lecturer, Public Orator and Head of the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Endnote:

[i] The claim for the revolutionary potential of dancehall culture in respect to masculinities is not to deny that dancehall lyrics are often homophobic and seems hostile to alternative expressions of masculinity. This is the paradox of dancehall in all its complexity.

Marlon James – Vogue (2012)

We now present part II of the December 6, 2015 opening speech by Dr Michael A. Bucknor for the Explorations IV: Masculinites exhibition. For part one, please click here.

Anchoring the idea that gender, as Judith Butler and others have pointed out, is a matter of performance, costuming the body is part of the performance paraphernalia that we use in our attempt to consolidate gender norms. (ASIDE: You know, I should have worn the pink shirt today with the flamboyant cuff on the sleeves, rather than this conservative blue one to make that point. Or perhaps wearing the conservative blue, but expressing less than traditional views about masculinity might also make the point. Let me now adjust this traditional costume by putting on this red scarf.)

Isaac Mendes Belisario – Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy (Sketches of Character) (1837), Aaron & Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

It seems that dancehall culture is well aware of the role of the costume to changing identities and appropriating images of the self that one wants to project in this postcolonial world where, for some, the one thing they have agency over is their own bodies. The attendant values of competition and innovation that seem to dominate dancehall music also feed upon this ability to transform identity and provide a ready language for [Ebony] Patterson’s gender interrogation; yet, these two values also help to expose the “fabricatedness” of identities and the unnaturalness of the normative. Dress as connecting motif inspires us to consider the costuming of the body in Patterson’s work in relationship to Marlon James’s photography in “Vogue” (2012) where the gender is created through costuming—flamboyant cross-dressing as is also seen in Belisario’s “Koo, Koo or Actor-Boy (1837), where the masquerade of Jonkonnu crosses not only gendered identity, but race as well as class. From Jonkonnu to Dancehall, these artistic portrayals suggest how costuming the body is a performance that enacts and troubles gendered identities.[i] In Gallery 2 we see how clothing (and positioning of) the body determines class, status and economic privilege or lack thereof in Phillip Wickstead’s “Portrait of Benjamin and Mary Pusey” (c1775) which can be viewed in relationship to the 1908-1909 Sir Harry Johnston’s photograph, “Jamaican Negroes” or the 1901 A. Duperly and Sons’ “Castleton Gardens,” both in Gallery 5.

Philip Wickstead – Benjamin and Mary Pusey (c1775), Collection: NGJ

A. Duperly and Sons – Castleton Gardens (1901), Collection: NGJ

As I close this talk, I want to make two more brief comments about crossings in this exhibition. The conversations across Jamaican history mentioned before are evident throughout the entire exhibition. Cross-referencing is a curatorial premise! We cannot help such cross-referencing in say Gallery 1 between Archie Lindo’s Untitled (1950) photograph of the arched back of a naked black man’s body photographed in the private space and Wayne Rhoden’s “Jamar” whose subject with naked back exposed is photographed on the more public space of a beach. There are also resonances and dissonances in Gallery 3 with all the aroused black men featured, from Edna Manley’s “Negro Aroused” 1935, to Christopher Gonzales’ “Man Arisen” 1966 and the 1980s-1990s work by Omari Ra entitled “Triumph.”

Edna Manley – Negro Aroused (1935), Collection: NGJ

Less obvious cross reading might also take place between Leasho Johnson’s Banana series in Gallery 1 which uses the hypersexual phallic image of the banana to interrogate and make fun of the Jamaican’s man’s phallic preoccupation and Kapo’s diminutive phalluses in most of his carvings and other art works including “Copeland Boxer” (Dillinger) whose power is in his arms (Gallery 4). This cross-reading reminds us that Jamaican manhood need not be defined in terms of phallic power nor even in the possession of powerful arms as in the photograph of an assertive masculinity not limited by the power of one’s limbs in Varun Baker’s 2013 “Journey 6” in Gallery 3.

Varun Baker – Journey 6 (2013), Collection: NGJ

Kapo’s work also helps me to make the last point which is about cross-species references in this exhibition. Kapo’s “The Angel” (Winged Moon Man) engages a conversation with Patterson’s “androgynous bird-human hybrids” (Lawrence) as well as Milton George’s “Pages from a Diary” whose figures are a mysterious mix of human, animal and masquerade that suggests the power of mythology and the imagination to project new visions of masculinity.[ii] The human/bird motif for example helps us to appreciate the idea of the nurturing man as in Edna Manley’s “Man With Wounded Bird.” I want to end this discussion by making the claim that acts of the imagination provide a nation with its most powerful expressions of freedom and the freedom to chart new paths or in the words of David Scott to “fashion futures” for Jamaican masculinities. This “elastic imagination”[iii] is central to what this exhibition of Jamaican visual artistes has shown. In the words of Patricia Powel, a Jamaican novelist who has been focused on Jamaican masculinities:

But the thing about writing, …the thing about tapping into the creative source, is that … we are tapping into a source that has a lot more compassion and a greater vision of what we are and can become.”

(‘A Search for Caribbean Masculinities”)

Edna Manley – Man with Wounded Bird (c1934), Collection: NGJ

Dr Michael A. Bucknor is Senior Lecturer, Public Orator and Head of the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Endnotes:

[i] See Kei Miller’s ‘Maybe Bellywoman Was on ‘Di Tape’” Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophesies in which he suggests that cultural practices such as the Jonkonnu are informed by queerness.

[ii] See Kei Miller’s notion of the relationship between mythology and “an elastic imagination” (Writing Down 104).

[iii] Ibid

The following notes were contributed to the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition catalogue by its curator, O’Neil Lawrence. Masculinities opened on December 6, 2015 and continues at the National Gallery of Jamaica until March 5, 2016.

While I feel privileged to have been part of all the exhibitions in the National Gallery’s Explorations series, co-curating the first, Natural Histories, with Nicole Smythe-Johnson, the second Religion and Spirituality with Veerle Poupeye and curating the third Seven Women Artists, the current edition, Masculinities, is somewhat different to me. It is different not because its thematic concerns are particularly unique amongst the concepts explored in previous Explorations exhibitions, but because the theme is related to my own academic work, on subjects in which I have a strong personal investment.

My recently concluded Master’s thesis looked at the convergence of constructions of masculinity, eroticism, exoticism and the black male body in the photography of Archie Lindo – whose work is included in this exhibition. Explorations IV: Masculinities however, goes significantly beyond the necessarily narrow focus of my thesis, as the concepts and realities of Jamaican masculinities are quite complex. Because of this, the exhibition is organized around eight thematic concerns that we hope will take into consideration the breadth of the topic: “Sexual Bodies”; “Beyond the Normative”; “Power & Status”; “The Male Body as Icon”; “Precarious Masculinities”; “The Athlete & the Worker”; “Style & Fashion”; and “Fathers, Brothers & Sons.”

There is, naturally, significant overlap between these themes, as none of them exist in isolation. Many of the works in this exhibition could have been shown under more than one of the exhibition’s thematic headers and many other artists and art works could have been included, although this would have resulted in an exhibition of an impractical size. The themes and selections are meant to act as provocations for further thought, research and debate on what is a topic of enormous complexity and social significance, rather than as any definitive or exhaustive statements. I am in this essay presenting my own notes on these themes and the key selections I have used to represent them but this catalogue publication also features introductions to each thematic section, contributed by Veerle Poupeye, that provide slightly different and more detailed perspectives on the works on view.

“Sexual Bodies” – “Beyond the Normative”

Jamaican perceptions and attitudes towards masculinity have been informed by social anxieties about the expected roles of men and the most acute anxieties pertain to the male body and male sexuality. Jamaican concepts of masculinity seem particularly challenged by the varied ways in which the typical male gaze can be reversed and the works in what is therefore arguably the exhibitions’ most provocative gallery are grouped under the dual themes “Sexual Bodies” and “Beyond the Normative.” Though part of the accepted canon of nostalgic Christmas images, Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Koo, Koo or Actor-Boy (1837) is as transgressive as it is familiar. The cross-dressing figure challenges both the prevailing socio-racial norms of the plantation era as well as the hyper-masculine imagery that had been associated with the black male body, in depictions of the enslaved and newly emancipated. The Actor Boy finds its contemporary counterpart in Vogue (2012) by Marlon James, whose more sexually provocative, counter-normative gender performance poses a direct challenge to contemporary Jamaica’s seemingly unassailable sexual and religious mores.

Leasho Johnson’s work parodies, questions, and critiques contemporary popular culture’s generally accepted expressions of gender-normative behaviour. The cartoon characters in his provocatively titled Boney Boney Ripe Banana, Me and the Monkey Man (Hugging up) and Brace, all from 2013, straddle decidedly phallic images of bananas in a critique of the hyper-sexuality and homophobia within Dancehall. Milton George’s Pages from my Diary (1983) provides a seemingly celebratory depiction of the sexual relationship between a man and woman but also reverses the expected dynamic, giving the woman a more assertive and at times threatening and aggressive role. The fluidity of societally constructed gender roles is also explored in Ebony G. Patterson’s video installation The Observation (Bush Cockerel) A Fictitious History (2012). The choreographed interactions of the two imaginary, androgynous bird-human hybrids, in relation to each other and their offspring, problematize the preconceptions surrounding parental gender roles.

“Power & Status”

The portrait of Benjamin and Mary Pusey (c1775) by Phillip Wickstead represents the epitome of power and status in the Plantation period. The signifiers of wealth and worldliness – expensive fashionable clothing and furnishings, art, and a globe representing travel and experience – populate the painting. The gender and racial hierarchy of the period is also represented by the dominant, central positioning of Benjamin Pusey, whose wife is in his orbit, with the reticent, enslaved black servant, the farthest away from the centre of power, in the background. Marvin Bartley’s Tragedies of Zong (2007) offers a stunning counterpoint to the body politics inherent in the Wickstead portrait. The infamous maritime tragedy is recontextualized by stripping away the signifiers of wealth and status, representing the slave ship’s captain Luke Collingwood who, though the central figure in the work, becomes simply another nude body amongst the slaves he threw overboard to their deaths. Edna Manley’s Prophet (1935), in contrast, references the social and political empowerment of the black Jamaican populace – with the default depiction of such empowerment being male – demonstrated by leadership figures such as Marcus Garvey; and yet this is, paradoxically, envisioned totally in terms of his physicality.

As with the Wickstead painting, the attire and posture of Paul Bogle (?), in a circa 1865 tintype photograph which has become his de facto official portrait, denotes the status and respectability of the photograph’s middle class subject. This image quickly gained purchase in the public imaginary and superseded not only the controversies of origin but all other representations of Bogle and the Morant Bay uprising, as it embodied the aspirations of the poor and disenfranchised. The style and fashion represented in Vermon “Howie” Grant’s Dance Hall Artiste [sic] (2014) are also a mechanism by which masculine hierarchies are maintained: the jewellery of Bounty Killer and the tattooed and bleached face of Vybz Kartel, in particular, speak to the various ways in which Dancehall represents aspirational tendencies but also defiance of middle class norms.

“The Male Body as Icon” – “Precarious Masculinities”

Potentially the most iconic representation of the Nationalist era, Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused (1935), like Prophet in the preceding gallery, mobilises the nude black male body as a repository for the aspirations of a movement. While this conforms to the traditional European concept of the “heroic nude,” the black male body is also objectified and exposed to the gaze of the outsider in a potentially problematic way, as it re-inscribes some of the racial perceptions it ostensibly seeks to challenge. Albert Huie’s The Island (1972) provides a more critical perspective on this contradictory objectification and poignantly represents the touristic exoticisation and exploitation of the island, represented by a reclining black male figure who is assaulted by camera-wielding tourists. Archie Lindo’s Irish Moss Gatherers (c1950), though a lesser known work, also represents the Nationalist movement’s thrust to articulate a Jamaican identity based on the image of the black, working class man, but reflects even more pronounced contradictions. The photograph monumentalises the male body in a way that emphasizes and objectifies its masculine traits but the manner in which the men are subjected to the “gaze” also suggest a homoerotic subtext. The photograph also appears to subvert normative gender roles, since the composition references the art historical precedent of the Three Graces, an archetypal female image in the Western tradition.

Several examples in this section more actively challenge normative masculinities. The hyper-masculine image of Ivanhoe Martin from the 1972 Jamaican “bad man” epic The Harder They Come is combined with Anancy the trickster in Cosmo Whyte’s diptych Ginal (2014), which thus explores two of the more popular archetypes of male Jamaican behaviour – the bad man, or rude boy, and the trickster – that challenge normative constructs about respectable male leadership. Varun Baker’s Journey 6 (2013) poignantly challenges the connection between physicality and masculinity. The photographs subject, Joshua, a quadruple amputee, demonstrates quite dramatically just how precarious the concept of masculinity could be if it is solely tied to physicality but also that attitude is even more important.

Masculinity and heteronormative sexuality are often seen as being one and the same – especially in Jamaica – and men who do not conform face denigration and possible violence. The dead fish (which are a reference to the Jamaican slang describing homosexuals), which are juxtaposed with drowned men floating on the surface of the surreal, seemingly toxic neon orange sea in Leasho Johnson’s Lost at Sea II (2015), are demanding that the viewer take stock of the destructive outcomes of homophobia.

“The Athlete & the Worker”

The “athlete” and the “worker” are important figures in Jamaican life, and are usually assumed to be male, and also appear as iconic subjects in Jamaican art, in ways that invite further discussion on the complexities and contradictions of these constructs. There is, for instance, a curious ambivalence towards the male body, specifically the nude male body, in Mallica Kapo Reynolds’ oddly emasculated Copeland Boxer (Dillinger) (1970). While the boxer figure is robust and looms large over the painting’s viewers, his proportionately small penis goes counter to how masculinity is normally construed in the popular imaginary. The diminutive penis may represent an attempt at modesty on the part of the artist, but Kapo has been quite uninhibited in his depictions of male and female sexuality in other art works, and the question arises why the figure is represented in the nude, since this is not a conventional mode of representation for boxers. The vision of the athlete is also hardly celebratory in Barrington Watson’s Athlete’s Nightmare which depicts an uncertain, unresolved result to a particularly contested run.

Albert Huie’s Crop Time (1955) is an archetypical image of the worker, male and female in this instance, but given Jamaica’s history of slavery and present day realities of labour exploitation, it is a surprisingly uncritical celebration of physical labour as a nation-building activity from the Nationalist era. Banana Man (1955) by Alvin Marriott parallels the vision of Huie’s Crop Time, but there also seems to be strong sexual innuendo in the sculpture, with the suggestive way in which the figure he holds the phallic stem of the bunch of bananas. One is left to wonder if the sexual connotations are accidental or deliberate. Eugene Hyde’s Jelly Man (1959) may seem to represent another archetype of the physically powerful, industrious Jamaican worker but his supplicant posture and the hollowness of his smiling, mask-like face also allude to the poverty that continues to exist amongst the working classes. John Wood’s Fisherman (1943), presents another image of poverty, signified by the man’s ragged clothing, but the directness of his gaze provides a challenge to the viewer and his dignity seems self-contained and unassailable.

“Style & Fashion”

Style and fashion are important considerations in the construction and expression of gender identities, even though these are often stereotyped as female preoccupations. Amongst the lush vegetation of A. Duperly and Sons Castleton Gardens (1901), a particularly well dressed black man stands in the centre. Self-possessed and assured, he represents the emergence of a black middle class, and challenges the demeaning anthropological representations of black masculinity that predated and still persisted during the period. The same self-assured defiance is found in Osmond Watson’s Johnny Cool (1976), who presents a cool, collected and well-dressed posture of “rude boy” confidence. The protagonists in Ebony G Patterson’s Untitled II, III and IV (Khani + di Krew from the Disciplez Series) (2009) address similar issues but also allude to Dancehall’s homophobic, hyper-masculine and contradictorily feminized aesthetic. Their bleached faces (a trend formally exclusive to women and poor gay men) and “blinged out” style act as challenges to the standards of good taste and black self-affirmation of the Jamaican middle classes. Peter Dean Rickards’ Proverbs 24:10 (2008) acts as a poetic tribute to the male dancers in the Dancehall and the use of slow motion in the video poignantly depicts the self-affirmative ceremony that is the dance. The changing nature of gender dynamics in fashion is also embodied in Wade Rhoden’s The Calling (2013). The photograph is a stunning display of the athleticism of his models but also reminds that the unattainable standards of beauty and bodily perfection that are the norm in female fashion photography also obtain in male fashion photography.

“Fathers, Brothers & Sons”

This final section of the exhibition focuses on the representation of male family relationships, in the literal and more extended sense, the latter referring to the homosocial (or platonic) relationships and interactions among men that are widely accepted in Jamaican society, despite the anxieties about homosexuality, for instance in the field of play and recreation. The rarity of imagery depicting men with their children makes Leonard Morris’ Mountain Folk (1953) a significant portrayal of Jamaican fatherhood. Prevailing notions about absentee fatherhood are also challenged in Rose Murray’s depictions of Rastafarian fathers and children, reminding that Rastafari has provided an alternative of strong father roles in the popular culture. Her Seated Boy (1975) depicts a young Rastafarian boy who is leaning against a painting that literally predicts a positive future for him as a “young lion.” The type of guidance being offered to the young boys in Greg Bailey’s Recruits (2014), on the other hand, is questionable as their play-acting, using pieces of wood to represent rifles, in our current social context immediately makes one ponder which side of the law they will end up on. The more convivial environment of Roy Lawrence’s The Game (1974), in the final example I am citing here, represents one of the traditional arena’s in which men try their luck and test their skill against each other, namely the game of dice, with dominoes being another.

In closing, it is my hope that this exhibition will lead to productive debate on how notions about masculinity operate in Jamaican society, and how this is in turn represented in art and other cultural expressions. Quite naturally, there is a lot more to be said but what is presented already offers a very rich array of possibilities for debate and further exploration.

O’Neil Lawrence is Senior Curator (acting) at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

The National Gallery of Jamaica is inviting submissions to its Digital exhibition, which will open on Sunday, April 26, 2016 and run until July 4, 2016.

Digital media has arguably been the fastest growing field in contemporary visual art and an area of major innovation and experimentation, with many applications in related areas such as music videos and fashion photography. In photography, which has become a dominant medium in contemporary art, digital photography and printing are now the norm. New possibilities emerge constantly, for instance in the field of 3D printing. The Caribbean has been no exception and many younger artists are engaging and exploring new media such as animation, GIFs, video installations, digital illustration, computer graphics, web based art, and so forth. This exhibition celebrates digital art forms in all digital media, from digital photography to multimedia installations, produced by artists based in the Caribbean and its diaspora and also encourages the development and recognition of such media in the Caribbean context. From the submissions received, up to thirty will be selected by the National Gallery’s curatorial team to be shown in the Digital exhibition. An illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published.

Eligibility: Open to artists resident in the Caribbean and Caribbean nationals residing elsewhere. There are no restrictions of age. Collaborative submissions involving more than one artist are permitted.

Guidelines:

• Artists may submit a work, a small body of work, or a project (such as an installation proposal) in any digital media, including but not limited to:
  • Digital photography, printed or projected
  • GIF
  • Video and animation (including music videos and short films)
  • Digital illustration and computer graphics
  • Web-based art
  • 3D printing
• Submissions should include: a professional resume; an artist’s statement; a short, illustrated description of the work(s) or project submitted, including technical specifications; and equipment and technical support needs (if relevant).
• The National Gallery will not be responsible for the cost of, or organizing the production and delivery of the accepted submissions to the exhibition and this is the sole responsibility of the selected artists. Likewise, the selected artists will be solely responsible for the the collection of their entries at the end of the exhibition.
• In the case of installations, the selected artists will be responsible for mounting the work, albeit in consultation with the NGJ curators and on the agreed timeline.

Equipment: The National Gallery will provide equipment if and where it is able to do so.  Artists may opt to provide their own equipment. Please note that technical feasibility is part of the selection criteria and that this includes availability of equipment.

Submission: Only digital submissions will be considered, no actual work should be sent to the National Gallery of Jamaica prior to notification of acceptance. Please email your entry to: info@natgalja.org.jm and place “Digital Exhibition Submission” in the subject header. Large files should be sent via a file transfer system (such as Dropbox or Wetransfer), using the same email address for notification purposes.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, February 27, 2016, 4 pm local time.

Selection:

Selections from the submissions received will be made by the curatorial team of the National Gallery, consisting of Executive Director Dr Veerle Poupeye, Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence, and Assistant Curator, Monique Barnett-Davidson. The following selection criteria will be used.

• Aesthetic and technical quality
• Innovation
• Feasibility

The National Gallery reserves the right not to accept or exhibit submissions. All decisions of the curatorial team are final.

Notification of artists: Artists will be notified whether their entry has been accepted by Friday, March 13, 2016.

Deadline for delivery of accepted entries: Friday, March 27, 2016, 4 pm local time – no extensions will be given and any work not submitted by this date will automatically be excluded from the exhibition. Installation pieces are to be installed by the artists or their appointed representatives on a timeline to be communicated to them by the National Gallery.

Closure of exhibition: Artists are required to dismantle (where relevant) and collect their artworks and any equipment they own within two weeks after the closure of the exhibition, or by July 17, 2016, 4 pm the latest. The National Gallery will not be responsible for any work or equipment left after that date and may dispose of same at its sole discretion.

Queries: For any queries pertaining to this project, including availability of equipment, please email: info@natgalja.org.jm and place “Digital Exhibition Query” in the subject header, or call 1(876)922-1561 or -3 to the attention of the Curatorial Department.

Edna Manley – The Prophet (1935), Collection: NGJ

In what is, at least for now, our final post on the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition, which continues until March 5, 2016, we present an excerpt of the catalogue introduction written by Veerle Poupeye, the NGJ’s Executive Director. Masculinities was curated by Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence.

Masculinities is the fourth in the National Gallery’s Explorations series of exhibitions, which has thus far featured Natural Histories (2013), Religion and Spirituality (2013-14) and, most recently, Seven Women Artists (2015). Smaller versions of the latter two exhibitions have also been shown at National Gallery West in Montego Bay, where Seven Women Artists is presently on view.

The Explorations series, which is open-ended by design, interrogates the history of art and culture of Jamaica, by examining what we consider to be its big themes and issues. The series invites our audiences to be part of that process, by asking questions and by encouraging debate rather than to prescribe answers. For each Explorations exhibition the curatorial approach is tailored to the subject, as this allows our team to experiment with various curatorial models and strategies for audience engagement and to develop our curatorial capacity and vision in the process. The lessons learned in the process help us with rethinking how we develop and exhibit our permanent collections and also inform our approach to other exhibitions. The general curatorial model used for the Explorations series is conversational and whether curated by a single curator or by a team, the conceptualization, selection and design of each exhibition involves a significant amount of brainstorming with our curatorial department and other stakeholders. In doing so, we aim to provide and invite multiple perspectives and we do hope that the conversational spirit of this curatorial process carries over into the reception of the exhibitions.

Varun Baker – Journey 6 (2013), Collection: NGJ

Seven Women Artists was the first Explorations exhibition to focus on gender (although gender was a consideration in the Religion and Spirituality exhibition) and looked at the debates and social dynamics that surround women’s art in the Jamaican context. Masculinities takes a different approach and explores how masculinities – and the use of the plural is deliberate – have been represented in Jamaican art and visual culture, from the Plantation era to the present. In doing so, the exhibition also explores how masculine roles and identities, and the perceptions that surround them, have evolved in the Jamaican context, on their own terms and in relation to female roles and identities.

Masculinity is a big and important subject in Jamaica, in light of the debates about the “crisis of masculinity” with regards to father roles; domestic and sexual abuse; crime and violence; feminism and female empowerment; and sexual and gender diversity. Sociologists have argued that masculinity has always been in crisis, since “manhood is widely viewed as a status that is elusive (it must be earned) and tenuous (it must be demonstrated repeatedly through actions)” (Bosson and Vandello 2011) – hence the concept of “precarious masculinity.” The biological facts of maleness may seem comparatively straightforward and secure (although these, too, are in fact quite complicated) but it is now widely understood conceptions of masculinity are socially negotiated and performative, as are gender roles and definitions generally. About the performative nature of gender, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler has argued: “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.” (1990, 127)

Colin Garland – End of and Empire (1971), Collection: NGJ

Conceptions of masculinity vary significantly over time, place and socio-cultural context, in ways that defy fixed definitions and simplistic male-female binaries. Even what is considered as normative masculinity in a particular context has far more complexity than is usually acknowledged. Masculinity is thus not a precarious but clearly defined status, as the first quote in the previous paragraph may suggest, but is subject to variable and competing interpretations – and in the postcolonial Caribbean these contrary dynamics are amplified by the histories of race and class.

The Masculinities exhibition explores how these issues are (at times inadvertently) expressed and represented in Jamaican art, in works of art that have iconic status but also in others that are less known. The exhibition is organized over six galleries and into eight overlapping themes: “Sexual Bodies”; “Beyond the Normative”; “Power and Status”; “The Male Body as Icon”; “Precarious Masculinities”; “The Athlete and the Worker”; “Style and Fashion”; and “Fathers, Brothers and Sons.” The curatorial essay by O’Neil Lawrence, which can be found elsewhere in this catalogue, elaborates on these themes, and on the artists and works selected, but I need to emphasize one major commonality: the majority of works in the exhibition focus on the male body. This is not a coincidence, since the male body serves as a potent symbolic vehicle to perform, affirm and contest conceptions of masculinity, not only in its artistic representations but also in daily life and visual culture. Since the exhibition explores how masculinities are represented in Jamaican art, its main focus is on black masculinities and, therefore, the contentions that surround the black male body, whether it is as a site of resistance, empowerment, victimization or exploitation, or a combination thereof. The exhibition is thus as much about race as it is about gender.

Marlon James – Jabari (2007), Collection: NGJ (in acquisition)

While Masculinities is, at least to our knowledge, the first exhibition of its kind in Jamaica, there have been exhibitions on similar themes elsewhere. Chief among these was the ground-breaking and controversial 1994 exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition’s curator, Thelma Golden, argued that “[o]ne of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century is the African American male, ‘invented’ because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male’s existence.” (19) We invite you to consider how this statement may apply to black masculinities in the context of Jamaica and Jamaican art, which has a history that is related but also substantially different from African American history.

Works Cited

Bosson, Jennifer & Joseph Vandello. “Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression” Current Directions in Psychological Science, April 2011, 20: 2, 82-86.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in The Judith Butler Reader, edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004)

Golden, Thelma. Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.

The National Gallery of Jamaica’s Last Sundays programme for December 2015 is scheduled for Sunday, December 27, 2014, from 11 am to 4 pm.

Visitors will have the opportunity to view the recently opened Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition, which explores how concepts of masculinity have been represented and articulated in Jamaican art. The exhibition, which was curated by Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence, features works of art from the colonial era up to the present and in a variety of media, by Isaac Mendes Belisario, A. Duperley and Sons, Edna Manley, Albert Huie, Archie Lindo, Osmond Watson, Ebony G. Patterson, Phillip Thomas, Marlon James and many others. Also on view is a selection of Recent Acquisitions and most sections of the permanent exhibitions will also be open, and provide a wide-ranging overview of Jamaica’s artistic and cultural history.

In what is now an established Holiday Season tradition, the featured performance on Sunday, December 27 will be by the award-winning Nexus Performing Arts Company and will start at 1:30 pm. The Nexus Performing Arts Company was formed in 2001 by Hugh Douse, Artistic Director, voice tutor, singer, actor, conductor, songwriter, and a former Director of Culture in Education. The group has a broad musical repertoire that draws on Gospel, Negro Spirituals, Semi-classical, Popular music including Reggae and show tunes, African and Classical music of the European and African traditions. The performance by Nexus will take place in the exhibition galleries, presented as a musical tour, with selections inspired by specific works in the Masculinities exhibition.

Admission on Sunday, December 27 will be free and free guided tours will be offered. The gift and coffee shop will be open for business and contributions to the donations box are welcomed. Revenues from our shops and donations help to fund programmes such as the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition and our Last Sundays programming.

Isaac Mendes Belisario – Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy (Sketches of Character) (1837), Aaron & Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

On this glorious, sun-filled Christmas morning, we would like to invite you to reflect for a moment on the rich cultural significance of the Holiday Season and Jamaican traditions such as Jonkonnu and Grand Market. Christmas-time activities have been a source of inspiration for many artists in Jamaica, starting with Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Sketches of Character (1837-38), which depicted Jonkonnu and related masquerades during the Emancipation period.

Christmas is traditionally spent with family and for us at the National Gallery the Holiday Season is normally a busy period, with many persons visiting, often in the company of family members. This includes members of the Jamaican Diaspora who are visiting for the Holidays – we welcome them home and are delighted that many use the opportunity to reconnect with their Jamaican heritage.

Osmond Watson – Jonkonnu (1970), Collection: NGJ

We have a lot to offer this Holiday Season. In Kingston, we have the Explorations IV: Masculinities and Recent Acquisitions exhibitions and, of course, our permanent exhibitions, which include Belisario’s Sketches of Character. Our Last Sundays programme for this month is on Sunday, December 27 and features what is now an annual Holiday tradition: a performance by Nexus Performing Arts Company. This year’s performance will consist of a set inspired by the Masculinities exhibition and takes the form of a musical gallery tour. Doors are open from 11 am to 4 pm and the performance starts at 1:30 pm. Admission is, as always, free on Last Sundays.

At National Gallery West in Montego Bay, we have on view Seven Women Artists, a smaller but equally engaging version of the exhibition we showed in Kingston earlier this year.

Isaac Mendes Belisario – Red Set Girls, and Jack-in-the-Green (1837), Courtesy of The Hon. Maurice W. Facey and Mrs. Valerie Facey collection

Our Holiday Season Opening Hours are as follows:

National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston: we will be closed for the following public holidays: Christmas, Friday, December 25; Boxing Day: Saturday, December 26; New Year’s Day: Friday, January 1. Regular opening hours apply on the other days – Tuesday, December 29 to Thursdays, December 31, 10 am to 4:30 pm, Saturday, January 2, from 10 am to 3 pm. We will also be open on Sunday, December 27, from 11 am to 4 pm, for Last Sundays. Regular opening hours resume on Tuesday, January 5.

National Gallery West, Montego Bay: we will be closed on Christmas, Friday, December 25 to Monday, December 28 and also on New Year’s Day, Friday, January 1. Regular opening hours, 10 am to 6 pm, apply on December 29 to 31. Regular opening hours resume on Saturday, January 2 (Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm).

Make it an art- and culture-filled Holiday Season and visit us often in 2016! And of course we look forward to seeing you on Sunday, December 27, for the annual Nexus performance.

Wishing you and yours peace, love, happiness and prosperity for 2016 and a wonderful Holiday Season,

The National Gallery of Jamaica Team

Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds – Silent Night (1979), Collection: NGJ

The National Gallery of Jamaica is excited to announce that its premier child art programme, Saturday Art-Time, will be hosting a six-week workshop series for children, entitled The Super Six Workshops. The series will be held at the National Gallery every Saturday from January 30 to March 5,  2016,

Saturday Art-Time – which has been active since 2009 – is one of the National Gallery’s most successful museum education programmes and consists of a range of gallery-based art workshops for children 8 to 15 years old. The programme was designed to foster visual art expressions by children and encourage them to think and speak intelligently and critically about artworks. By utilizing the National Gallery’s permanent collection as a reference point for assignments, the students also learn much about Jamaican visual arts and culture. During its existence, Saturday Art-Time has also created and facilitated opportunities for participating child artists to exhibit their artworks, particularly in the Art’iT exhibition series.

The Super Six Workshops will take place every Saturday from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm and will focus on one of two exciting topic areas: an Introduction to Basic Printmaking for participants aged 8 to 11 years old and Basic Animation for participants aged 12 to 15 years old. For further information, please contact the National Gallery of Jamaica at 922-1561/3 (Flow landline), or 618-0654/5 (Digicel fixed line). Emailed queries should be sent to info@natgalja.org.jm. Registrations forms for the workshops can be downloaded here or you can collect them at our offices at 12 Ocean Boulevard, Kingston. You can also find and ‘Like’ the National Gallery of Jamaica as well as the NGJ Education Department fan pages on Facebook. See you there!

The National Gallery of Jamaica’s Last Sunday programme for January 2016 is scheduled for Sunday, January 31, 2016, from 11 am to 4 pm.

Visitors will have the opportunity to view the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition which opened in December. The exhibition explores the various ways in which concepts of masculinity have been represented and articulated in Jamaican art. The exhibition, which was curated by Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence, features works of art from the colonial era up to the present and in a variety of media, by Isaac Mendes Belisario, Harry Johnston, Edna Manley, Barrington Watson, Archie Lindo, Marcia Biggs, Leasho Johnson, Phillip Thomas, Peter-Dean Rickards and many others. Also on view is a selection of Recent Acquisitions from the last few years and most sections of the permanent exhibitions will also be open, providing a wide-ranging overview of Jamaica’s artistic and cultural history.

The National Gallery is pleased to welcome another emerging young songstress to its Last Sundays programme. Shenae Amoye Wright, who is better known as Shae, started her musical journey at the tender age of 6 singing in church. Since then she has grown musically and since 2011, has found a creative outlet performing background vocals for reggae artists such as Junior Kelly, Cocoa Tea and now performs regularly on tour with Protoje and Indiggnation. Her very own blend of soulful reggae music can be found in her recently released a single Give Love a Try and the mix of covers and original music she will perform on January 31. Shae will soon be launching her solo career.

Admission on Sunday, January 31 will be free and free guided tours will be offered. The gift and coffee shop will be open for business and contributions to the donations box are welcomed. Revenues from our shops and donations help to fund programmes such as the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition and our Last Sunday programming.

Barrington Watson signs autographs for art students after his October 13, 2011 lecture at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

The National Gallery of Jamaica is deeply saddened by the news that Jamaica master artist Professor the Honourable Barrington Watson, O.J., has passed away yesterday, January 26, at age eighty-five.

Barrington Watson – Conversation (1981), Collection: NGJ

Barrington Watson – or Barrington, as he is popularly known – was born in Hanover, Jamaica, in 1931. He was educated at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London and attended several other major European art academies, including the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. He returned to Jamaica in 1961 and quickly rose to prominence as a major artist in post-Independence Jamaica. Along with Eugene Hyde and Karl Parboosingh, he established the Contemporary Jamaican Artists’ Association in 1964 and he was from 1962 to 1966 the first Director of Studies at the Jamaica School of Art (now part of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts), where he introduced the full-time diploma programme. He subsequently also acted as a visiting Professor at Spelman College in Atlanta. Barrington chaired the Bank of Jamaica art collection in the mid-1970s and operated several art galleries: Gallery Barrington, which has existed in several incarnations since 1974, and the Contemporary Art Centre, which was active from 1985 to 1998. His home in the parish of St Thomas, Orange Park, is recognized as a heritage site. It is part of a former coffee plantation and it has since he bought the property in 1968, served as the location of his main studio and a meeting place for artists and art lovers.

Barrington Watson – Washer Women (1966), Collection: NGJ

Essentially an academic realist, Barrington explored a wide range of themes and genres in his work, including history painting, genre, portraits and self-portraits, nudes, erotica, the landscape and the still life, ranging from the intimate to the epic and all interpreted with his unique painterly sensibility. Barrington insisted on being recognized as an artist first and as a Jamaican artist second but most of his paintings were inspired by Jamaica and its people and he produced some of the most iconic images in Jamaican art history, such as Mother and Child (1958-50) and Conversation (1981) in the National Gallery of Jamaica Collection. Although he is best known as a painter, Barrington was also an accomplished draughtsman and printmaker.

Barrington Watson – Athlete’s Nightmare II (1966), A.D. Scott Collection, NGJ

Barrington executed several major commissions, including the mural The Garden Party (1975) and the installation Trust (1975, with Cecil Baugh) at the Bank of Jamaica, and the mural Our Heritage (1974) at Olympia in Kingston. He executed many official portraits, including those of past Prime Ministers of Jamaica, of Martin Luther King (1970) at Spelman College, and of former Commonwealth Secretary-General and UWI Chancellor Sir Shridath Ramphal at the University of the West Indies – Mona (1992) and Marlborough House in London (1995). His work is well represented in the National Gallery of Jamaica Collection, with masterworks such as Mother and Child (1958-59), Washerwomen (1966), Athlete’s Nightmare II (1966), Conversation (1981) and Fishing Village (1996), and he is featured in many other public, corporate and private collections in Jamaica and internationally.

Barrington Watson – Mother and Child (1958-59), Collection: NGJ

Barrington Watson received many awards and accolades during his lifetime. These include the national orders, the Order of Distinction, Commander Class, in 1984, the Order of Jamaica in 2006, and the Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal in 2000. The National Gallery of Jamaica honoured Barrington with a major retrospective in 2012, which was curated by the then Chief Curator Dr David Boxer and guest curator Claudia Hucke and presented as part of the National Gallery’s Jamaica 50 programme.

Barrington Watson – Barbara (c1962), Aaron and Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

The National Gallery’s Chairman, Mr Peter Reid, lauded Barrington for his outstanding contribution to the development of Jamaican art, as an eminent artist and art educator and as a role model to many artists in Jamaica, the Caribbean and the African diaspora. He stated “Barrington is a true national icon and we will treasure his artistic legacy for many generations to come.” The National Gallery’s Executive Director Dr Veerle Poupeye added: “Barrington Watson was a defining figure in post-Independence Jamaican art and his work reflects the spirit and imagination of Independent Jamaica. He was instrumental in the professionalization of the Jamaican art world and an outspoken and influential voice in the development of modern art in Jamaica.” Barrington Watson served on the National Gallery Board for several years.

The Board, Management and Staff of the National Gallery of Jamaica pay tribute to Barrington Watson, as one of Jamaica’s greats, and extend their heartfelt condolences to his wife Doreen, his children Janice, Raymond, Basil, Bright and Shauna-Kay and his other family members and friends.

Barrington Watson at his Eastwood Park studio in 1967

Further to our tribute to Prof. the Hon. Barrington Watson, O.J., who passed away on Tuesday, January 26, we have mounted a special display of some of Barrington’s key works from our collections, namely: Mother and Child (1958-59), Self-Portrait (1962), Barbara (1962), Dancer at Rest (c1962), Washer Women (1966), Conversation (1981) and Samantha’s World (1962). Works by Barrington from our collections can also be seen in the A.D. Scott Galleries, which presently feature his Portrait of A.D. Scott (1970) and Michael and Fidel (1977), both from the A.D. Scott Collection, and in the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition, which features Triangle (1972, A.D. Scott Collection), Athlete’s Nightmare II (1962, A.D. Scott Collection), Portrait of the Rt. Hon. Michael Manley (1975), and  Fishing Village (1996, Aaron and Marjorie Matalon Collection).

The National Gallery’s programme for Last Sundays on February 28, 2016 will feature Tribe Sankofa with Black Bodies and two exhibitions, Explorations IV: Masculinities and Tribute to Barrington Watson.

Black Bodies is a performance ritual that tells the stories and honours the memories of four Jamaicans (Vanessa Kirkland, Jhaneel Goulbourne, Michael Gayle and Mario Deane) killed by the Police or while in Police custody, combined with a tribute to several African-Americans who have died under similar circumstances in the US. The second half of Black Bodies will be a staged interpretation of an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.

Tribe Sankofa performs Black Bodies

Black Bodies, the brainchild of Fabian Thomas, who also directed it, features Tribe Sankofa. Tribe Sankofa is a performing arts collective comprised of a vibrant and eclectic cadre of multi-talented performers who are combining their artistry to add an exciting new dimension to the performing arts landscape of Jamaica and the rest of the world. Thomas, who is the Founder/Artistic Director of the collective, describes their niche as “spoken word/poetry, soulful song-styling uniquely blended with other visual and performing arts”.

Sankofa performs Black Bodies

The National Gallery’s Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition is part of an open-ended series of exhibitions that examine major themes and issues in Jamaica’s art and visual culture. Masculinities explores how masculinities, and the use of the plural is deliberate, have been enacted and represented in works of art from the 18^th century to the present, which are presented in dialogue with each other. Masculinities will close on March 5.

Barrington Watson – Athlete’s Nightmare II (1966), A.D. Scott Collection, NGJ

Visitors will also be able to view a special tribute exhibition to Barrington Watson, who passed away on January 26. This tribute, which was recently expanded and includes masterworks from the National Gallery Collection and loans from various private collections, will be on view until March 5.

Doors will be open from 11 am to 4 pm for Last Sundays on February 28 and the performance by Tribe Sankofa will start at 1:30 pm. As is customary, admission will be free and free tours and children’s activities will be offered. The gift and coffee shop will be open for business and contributions to the donations box are gratefully accepted. Revenues from our shops and donations help to fund programmes such as the Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition and our Last Sundays events.

Barrington Watson – Dancer at Rest (c1962), Collection: NGJ

The Jamaican Master Painter Barrington Watson passed away last month. Here is part I of the two-part post based on Veerle Poupeye’s essay for the 2012 Barrington Watson retrospective catalogue. This essay places Barrington Watson in the context of post-Independence art.

Barrington Watson’s Appeal

Most persons familiar with the Jamaican art world will agree that Barrington Watson is one of Jamaica’s most popular and acclaimed artists.[1] This is supported by the high market value of his work and the enthusiastic and loyal support he has garnered from major Jamaican art patrons and collectors. Watson has also received significant official recognition and was in 2006 bestowed the Order of Jamaica, the highest national honor ever given to a Jamaican visual artist other than Edna Manley, who held the Order of Merit. Watson’s appeal reaches across Jamaica’s social boundaries, beyond the social class that typically supports fine art, and masterpieces such as Mother and Child (1958) and Conversation (1981) are among the most popular works of art in the National Gallery collection.

The question arises exactly why Barrington Watson’s work has such strong appeal. Other than its obvious artistic merit, there is his capacity to produce powerfully iconic and highly relatable images – Mother and Child (1958) and Conversation (1981) key among them. Even his less iconic work strongly appeals to Jamaican cultural sensibilities, however, and to gain fuller understanding of why this is so, it is necessary to see his work in its broader social and cultural context, particularly of the ideas about art and the artist that have emerged in postcolonial Jamaica.

Barrington Watson – Washer Women (1966), Collection: NGJ

Art and Independence

The years around Independence were, as the artist and critic Gloria Escoffery has argued, characterized by a combination of great ambition and sometimes naïve idealism.[2] The period was marked by the advent of a new generation of artists, most of whom had studied abroad and returned to the island eager to contribute to the development of Jamaican art and to national development, generally. Arguably the three most influential among them were Karl Parboosingh, who had studied in Paris, New York and Mexico; Eugene Hyde, who had studied in California; and Barrington Watson, who had studied in London and several continental European academies. They were also pioneers where they studied: Watson had been among the first black students at the Royal College of Art – Frank Bowling from Guyana was another. These young artists returned home with new ideas about art – high modernist in the case of Parboosingh and Hyde and academic-realist in the case of Watson – and had an ambitious, cosmopolitan outlook which challenged the more insular tenets of earlier nationalist art. Their subject matter was still recognizably Jamaican but they combined this with formal experimentation, a preference for monumental scale that transcended the modest “living room formats” used by the nationalist school, and a more critical and demanding attitude.

Karl Parboosingh – Cement Company (1966), A.D. Scott Collection, NGJ

Predictably, there were tensions between these ambitious young artists and their artistic elders – the pioneers of the nationalist school – and this went beyond mere aesthetic differences. Watson stated in a 1984 interview that the older artists “were in a different mould, and they were already established and not prepared to make the big breakout in the way we were”[3] and:

The Edna Manley, the [Junior Center director] Robert Verity and that lot were doing a really good job in the arts before [but it] had something like a colonial approach to it in a sense. It was [a] sort of ‘giving a break to a talented youngster’ type of thing […] They patronized a lot of the artists and kept them at a certain level, unfortunately or inadvertently, by this kind of patronizing approach.[4]

Watson and his colleagues were not interested in obtaining any “from the top down” patronage but in self-empowerment – and it is implied, as black postcolonial artists – and they were quite successful in becoming outspoken public figures that functioned as cultural icons and self-sufficient entrepreneurs.

Eugene Hyde – Good Friday (Casualties, 1978), Collection: NGJ

Watson, Hyde and Parboosingh asserted themselves as professional artists and made unprecedented public demands about the support Jamaican society should provide for their work. They were the principals of the Contemporary Jamaican Artists’ Association (CJAA) which was active from 1964 to 1974 and which was a key forum for the redefinitions of Jamaican art that were taking place at that time. Watson was in 1962 appointed as Director of Studies of the Jamaica School of Art and Craft which he, in a move that reflected a more assertive commitment to notions of high art, renamed the Jamaica School of Art, thus dropping the “craft.” He transformed the previously informal, part-time school into a full-time institution with a four-year diploma curriculum, modeled after the then English art school system.[5] This further contributed to the professionalization of the arts and better equipped graduates for further studies abroad.

The ideas and preferences of this post-Independence generation however resulted in art that could be construed as elitist and “foreign” and a departure from the indigenizing, nation-building agenda of the nationalist school – the American art critic and Haitian art promoter Seldon Rodman dismissively described Eugene Hyde’s work as “perfectly indigenous to Madison Avenue”[6] – but this new generation was more proactively involved in bringing their art into the public domain. Self-promotion was a factor in these initiatives but the idealism of the CJAA members was genuine. They wished to create art that would be meaningful to the new, progressive Jamaica and to stimulate new thinking, shifting the focus of local art production from the affirmative to the critical. Hyde stated in 1964:

[The] artist needs to be aware of public interest. This doesn’t necessarily mean compliance. In fact one wishes there was more counter-reaction to the artist from the public. It is hard to describe just what we’re seeking, but it is a kind of friction, a sort of force, one against the other, which the artist must have, if he is not to exist in a vacuum.[7]

Not surprisingly, the post-Independence generation actively was actively involved in public art projects. Parboosingh, who was a student of David Alfaro Siqueiros, produced his first of many murals in 1956, on the theme of the Jamaican coffee industry, for the Ministry of Agriculture.[8] Eugene Hyde and Barrington also produced several mural paintings, such as the latter’s Our Heritage (1974) mural at Olympia.

Barrington Watson – Barbara (c1962), Aaron and Marjorie Matalon Collection, NGJ

New opportunities were also created by the economic expansion in mining, manufacturing and tourism, and the associated bout of office and hotel construction, which facilitated mural commissions and corporate art collections. The artists’ demands for active patronage from the private and public sector contributed to a proposed law that a set percentage of the cost of public buildings should be spent on art.[9] Organizations such as the Bank of Jamaica, which moved to a new high-rise on the Kingston Waterfront in 1975, established a major art collection in response. Barrington Watson chaired the central bank’s initial acquisitions committee and was the author of several of its initial commissions, such as the mural-size painting The Garden Party and the mixed media installation Trust, which was produced in collaboration with the ceramicist Cecil Baugh. The 1960s also saw the appearance of the first major private art collectors in Jamaica and the young artists formed close associations with them. This included A.D. Scott, a civil engineer, and the young entrepreneur Aaron Matalon, who headed the Jamaica Manufacturers Association. Scott became the CJAA chairman and played an important role in that organization’s activities.

The professionalization and expansion of the Jamaican art world was also evident in the establishment of commercial galleries. The first major local gallery, the Hill’s Art Gallery had opened in November 1953 on Harbour Street in Kingston. The Hill’s Art Gallery sold a wide range of Jamaican art, including the work of mainstream artists such as Alexander Cooper, Osmond Watson and Eric Smith and self-taught artists such as Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds and Gaston Tabois, along with gift items and art materials. Tourists were still the primary buyers of Jamaican art but local patronage was developing. The guest speaker at the Gallery’s 10^th anniversary exhibition in 1963, the Gleaner editor Theodore Sealy, claimed that 40 % of sales were to local buyers and clearly regarded this as a notable achievement in the development of local art patronage.[10]

The Hill’s Gallery did not meet the modernist sensibilities of the new generation, however, and in 1964 the CJAA opened its own gallery, simply named the Gallery. It was the first modern gallery space in Jamaica, in which modernist conventions about how to display art were followed, and it more assertively targeted local patronage. The Gallery showed the work of its principals and of like-minded artists such as Kofi Kayiga (né Ricardo Wilkins), Milton Harley and George Rodney – all pioneers of abstract painting in Jamaica. The Gallery not only served as an exhibition space but also organized regular gatherings of artists and patrons, which provided a forum for the emerging artistic community. In 1970, Hyde opened his own gallery, the John Peartree Gallery, which provided space for young avant-garde artists such as David Boxer, who had solo exhibitions there in 1976 and 1979. Watson followed suit in 1974, when he established Gallery Barrington, although this gallery served primarily to expose his own work, and has operated several galleries since then. A.D. Scott established his Olympia International Art Centre in 1974, as an expansion of the hotel and apartment complex he had previously built near the UWI campus on the north-eastern outskirts of Kingston. In an effort to integrate art and life, Olympia housed his substantial collection, hosted occasional exhibitions and provided housing for some artists.

Our Heritage, 1974, at Olympia

As the name “the Olympia International Art Centre” suggests, the CJAA generation was not only interested in cultivating local patronage but wanted to see Jamaican art on the international stage and they clearly saw themselves as ambassadors of the modern, progressive image independent Jamaica was trying to project. Not surprisingly, it is during the 1960s that the first survey exhibitions of Jamaican art were toured in North America and Europe. The Face of Jamaica, which toured England and Germany in 1963 and 1964, was organized and vigorously promoted by the Jamaican Government and sponsored by Pott Rums, the importers of Jamaican rum in West Germany. The Art of Jamaica was shown at the Kaiser Center Gallery, in Oakland, California in 1964 and sponsored by the Kaiser Bauxite Company, and Jamaican Art, which featured the work of Albert Huie and Barrington Watson, was sponsored by the Royal Bank and Alcan, and shown at the latter’s headquarters in Montreal, also in 1965. These sponsored exhibitions illustrate the close association between the economic development efforts and artistic promotion at that time. Jamaican artists also started participating more proactively in major international exhibitions: Barrington Watson, for instance, was included in the Art of Latin America and Spain (1963) exhibition in Madrid, which featured 700 works from 27 countries, and participated in the 1967 Spanish Biennial in Barcelona, where he won the award for his painting Athlete’s Nightmare.

The CJAA generation not only wished to bring Jamaican art to the world but also wished to put the island on the map as an art destination. Parboosingh for many years tried to establish an international artists’ colony, initially in scenic St Mary and later in Port Henderson near Kingston, but was unable to rally enough public support to realize his plans – A.D. Scott’s Olympia concept was in part derived from these ideas and Parboosingh became the first artist-in-residence there. More intensive contacts were also fostered with the rest of the Caribbean, mainly by means of exchange visits and exhibitions, and many of these contacts were fostered in London, which had a fast growing Caribbean migrant population and had become a gathering point for artists and art students from the Anglophone Caribbean.[11] Aubrey Williams from Guyana and Erwin de Vries from Suriname visited Jamaica for extended periods from the late 1960s onwards and were close associates of Watson, Parboosingh and Hyde.

It is also during this period that the first professional critics appeared: the Polish expatriate Ignacy Eker, who later changed his name to Andrew Hope; the Jamaican playwright and later diplomat Norman Rae; and the poet Basil MacFarlane. MacFarlane wrote for the PNP organ, Public Opinion, while Eker and Rae wrote for the Gleaner. Interesting, their initial reviews of the work of the CJAA artists were hesitant and concerned with the “foreignness” of their work. Eker’s review of Barrington Watson’s first Jamaican solo exhibition at the Tom Redcam Library in 1961 rather scathingly stated that his pictures displayed “the mannerisms rather than the virtues of conventional British art” and accused him of “aesthetic nihilism.”[12] Rae’s review of the same exhibition was more complimentary but suggested that Watson, who had been trained to paint the “Northern light” of England, had difficulty capturing the light and tonalities of the Jamaican environment.[13] The artists and critics soon found common cause, however, and Eker, in particular, became a passionate advocate for Watson’s art and artistic vision in the 1970s and 80s.

As was intimated throughout the discussion thus far, the developments in the art world did not occur in isolation but were an integral part of the broader cultural, social and political changes that were taking place in Jamaica around Independence. The debates that shaped the art world reflected the emergence of postcolonial civil society in Jamaica, the development of the supporting infrastructure and policies was in keeping with the overall development vision that was being shaped in the political arena, while more vigorous private art patronage was made possible by the emergence of a new, politically and economically empowered professional class, whose ideals and aspirations were embodied in the work of the Independence generation artists.

Barrington Watson at his Eastwood Park studio in 1967

ENDNOTES

[1] This essay is adapted from sections of Veerle Poupeye’s doctoral dissertation Between Nation and Market: Art and Society in 20^th Century Jamaica (Emory University, 2011) – all rights reserved by the author.

[2] Escoffery, Gloria. “The Impact of Nationhood: The Art World in the Early Sixties.” Jamaica Journal 19, no. 3 (1986): 43-49.

[3] Waugh, Elizabeth. “Emergent Art and National Identity in Jamaica, 1920s to the Present.” Ph. D. Dissertation, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1987, 136.

[4] Ibid., 137.

[5] Strictly spoken, a full-time curriculum with a 2-year intermediate certificate followed by a 2-year diploma course, had already been introduced by Barrington Watson’s predecessor, the English painter Robert Sawyers, in the 1961-62 school year, but this programme was not fully implemented. It was superseded by Barrington’s more stringent diploma programme the following year, which produced the first formal graduates of the Jamaica School of Art (See: Poupeye-Rammelaere, Veerle. Forty Years: Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts. Kingston, Jamaica: Edna Manley School for the Visual Arts and National Gallery of Jamaica, 1990, 25).

[6] Rodman, Selden. The Caribbean. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968, 35.

[7] Gloudon, Barbara. “Art and the Public.” Gleaner, September 18, 1964, 3.

[8] This mural was funded by the Committee for Improvement of the Arts, an initiative of the Norman Manley administration, which also commissioned murals by other, older artists, such the ones Carl Abrahams produced for the Banana Board around the same time (See: “Personal Mention: New Mural.” Gleaner, May 17, 1956, 18).

[9] The law was never enacted and there are conflicting accounts about the actual percentage but Barbados is at the time of writing considering a 2.5 % requirement.

[10] Waugh, Op. Cit., 117.

[11] Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London: New Beacon, 1992.

[12] Eker, Ignacy. “Somewhere between Camden and Euston.” Gleaner, October (exact date unknown) 1961 (Barrington Watson scrapbooks).

[13] Rae, Norman. “Northern Light.” Gleaner, October (exact date unknown) 1961.

Barrington Watson – Self Portrait (1962) Collection: NGJ

The Jamaican Master Painter Barrington Watson passed away last month. Here is part 2 of the two-part post based on Veerle Poupeye’s essay for the 2012 Barrington Watson retrospective catalogue – Part 1 can be found here. This essay places Barrington Watson in the context of post-Independence art.

3. A Jamaican Master

Barrington Watson holds a special place among the Independence generation. As an academic realist, Watson’s work is more accessible than that of his CJAA contemporaries, which certainly contributes to his local popularity. His subject matter, furthermore, generally conforms to the norms set by the nationalist school and includes genre and history scenes and landscapes. Watson is also a sought-after portraitist, who has produced many official portraits, among others of Jamaica’s Prime Ministers. He is also known for his nudes and erotica, the latter of which was new and quite provocative in mainstream Jamaican art of the 1970s. The substantive difference between Watson and his nationalist predecessors was, however, that he represented his subjects in the “grand manner” of Western academism, with sweeping, theatrical compositions on large canvases, classically posed figures, and virtuoso drawing and brushwork. Watson’s popular appeal and assertions of high academic artistic status may, at first glance, seem like a contradiction but a closer look reveals otherwise.

Barrington Watson has not only been recognized as a Jamaican “Great Master” but has actively asserted himself as such. His illustrated book of short stories, Shades of Grey (1998) contains the story of a dream in which he encounters the 19^th century European great masters Manet, Degas, Monet, Cezanne and Renoir, who assure him that they have been watching his progress and regard him as one of them.[1] This may contradict the dominant view that postcolonial art derives its legitimacy from positioning itself against the “Great Western Tradition” but Watson counterbalances this in another short story, also based on a dream, in which he encounters the king of Ancient Benin who reveals that he is of royal blood and invites him to produce a bronze lion for his throne.[2] By means of these two imaginary endorsements, Watson thus claims his dual legitimacy in the “Great Traditions” of Europe and Africa. This dual allegiance is also evident in his artistic motto: “The light of Turner; The line of Ingres; The range of Rembrandt; The techniques of Velasquez; The emotion of Goya; and, my birthright of Benin.” He therefore does not question the construct of “high art” but assertively claims his place in its hierarchies, and in doing so asserts himself as a black “Great Master.”

Barrington Watson – Conversation (1981), Collection: NGJ

Not surprisingly, Barrington Watson has been one of the main critics of the National Gallery of Jamaica’s promotion of Intuitive art. This came to a head while the exhibition Jamaican Art 1922-1982, which was curated by the National Gallery Director/Curator David Boxer and its former Deputy Director Vera Hyatt, toured in North America through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) from 1983 to 1985.[3] The exhibition was positively received in North America, where it attracted approximately 117,000 visitors, but several critics expressed reservations about what they saw as the Eurocentricity of the mainstream.[4] John Bentley Mays of the Globe and Mail of Toronto, for instance, wrote: “The most intriguing paintings and sculptures here, however, are not the polished Euro-Jamaican descendents of [Edna Manley’s] the Beadseller, but the home-spun, punchy pictures of the self-taught Intuitives” (11).[5] Predictably, this did not sit well with some of the mainstream artists, Barrington Watson chief among them.

Watson’s views on the matter were mainly expressed in public speeches but he was supported in writing by the Gleaner’s Andrew Hope, who held similar views. Hope accused the National Gallery of having designed the exhibition “with the objective of demonstrating that our Primitives are superior to those painters and sculptors who have received formal training and were ‘contaminated’ by European influences”.[6] In all fairness to the Gallery, the Intuitives were not actually more prominently represented than the mainstream artists, certainly not numerically: the exhibition, which actually included Barrington Watson’s work, consisted of 76 works of which 27, or 36 %, could be classified as Intuitive.[7] It was however clear that the Intuitives more closely conformed to North American expectations about Jamaican art, as was evident in the critical response.

Barrington Watson’s insistence on the high art status of his work and his own status as a Jamaican Master can indeed be construed as a rejection of the Primitivist assumptions that have been externally imposed on Jamaican art. He reiterated this point in his October 13, 2011 lecture at the National Gallery and argued that that “Intuitive” was a euphemism for “Primitive.” As this author has argued elsewhere, the Intuitive art construct is indeed fraught with a major internal contradiction: on the one hand it elevates the Intuitives to a central position in the Jamaican art canons, a position which many of the artists so designated certainly deserve, but on the other hand it unwittingly perpetuates many of the characteristics of the Primitive art construct, especially the dependency on exclusive patronage and connoisseurship and the assumption that such art possesses greater cultural and artistic purity and authenticity.[8]

Barrington Watson – Out of Many, One People (1962), drawing

The uneasiness with the mainstream Western assumptions about what is legitimate and authentic in Jamaican art is not unique to Barrington Watson. Nor is it, for that matter, unique to the Jamaican situation: in Haiti, a group of artists who were disgruntled with the Centre d’Art’s international promotion of the Haitian Primitives in 1950 established the dissident Foyer des Arts Plastiques. They challenged the Primitivist typecasting of Haitian art and artists and instead articulated a modernist conception of Haitian art, albeit with less international acclaim.[9] In fact, the desire for high cultural status, on par with the “Great Western Tradition” – a status with had been denied by the cultural dynamics of colonialism and Western imperialism – has been a crucial, if inherently conflicted and contradictory part of the cultural dynamics of postcolonial Caribbean art – contradictory because it perpetuates the dominance of the Western art canons and hierarchies in the process. There is thus no contradiction between Barrington Watson’s popular appeal and assertions of high cultural status and the two are in actuality complementary: Jamaicans identify with his work precisely because it is identifiably “Jamaican” and classicizes its subjects in a way that transcends the stigmas of Primivitism. In this regard, Barrington Watson may well be the defining Jamaican artist of the post-Independence period.

This essay is adapted from sections of Veerle Poupeye’s doctoral dissertation Between Nation and Market: Art and Society in 20^th Century Jamaica (Emory University, 2011) – all rights reserved by the author.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Watson, Barrington and Elaine Melbourne. Shades of Grey. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1998, 90-99.

[2] Ibid., 50-58.

[3] Vera Hyatt had in 1980 left the National Gallery of Jamaica to take up a job with SITES as Registrar.

[4] Excerpts from the reviews were compiled and published by the NGJ in the brochure Jamaican Art 1922-1982 Returns. Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica, 1986.

[5] Ibid., 11.

[6] Hope, Andrew. “Gallery Guide.” Gleaner, March 31, 1986, 16. The exhibition was in 1986 shown at the National Gallery of Jamaica after the completion of its overseas tour and the cited comment was published at that time.

[7] Smith-McCrea, Rosalie. Jamaican Art 1922-1982 Returns. Kingston: National Gallery of Jamaica, 1986, 2.

[8] Poupeye, Veerle. “Intuitive Art as a Canon.” Small Axe, no. 24 (2007): 73-82.

[9] Poupeye, Veerle. Caribbean Art, World of Art. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998, 66-67.

The National Gallery of Jamaica is staging a panel discussion to accompany its Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition. This panel discussion will take place on Thursday, March 17, starting at 1:30 pm, at the National Gallery of Jamaica, and will be followed by a curatorial tour of the exhibition.

Moderated by Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence, the panel will include Lecturer in Sociology, Psychology and Social Work, Dr Moji Anderson; Gender and Social Research Specialist, Suzanne Charles-Watson; Lecturer in Anthropology (Qualitative research), Dr Herbert Gayle; and dancer and choreographer Kevin Ormsby. Using the various themes presented in the Masculinities exhibition as their contextual framework, the panellists will engage with the social and cultural issues explored within the exhibition, particularly with how masculinities are understood, enacted and contested in Jamaican society.

The Masculinities exhibition is part of the National Gallery’s Explorations series, which explores major themes in Jamaican art and the critical issues in Jamaican society these themes represent. The series also creates a dialogue between contemporary, modern and historical art produced in and about Jamaica, yielding new insights about Jamaican art and society in the process. Its current edition Explorations IV: Masculinities looks at the varied ways in which the concept of Jamaican masculinities have been represented, and at times challenged, within the visual arts.

The Masculinities panel discussion on March 17 is free and open to the public, as is the curatorial tour which follows after. The Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition was originally scheduled to close on March 5 but has been extended until March 26.

Since the last Sunday of March 2016 is Easter, and a public holiday, there will be no Last Sundays on that day. We will instead offer a special Sunday programme on April 3, the first Sunday in April. The programme for April 3 features a musical performance by Sherieta and four exhibitions. This includes Selections from the Permanent Collection, Recent Acquisitions and a small tribute exhibition to Barrington Watson. April 3 will also be the last chance to view the critically acclaimed Explorations IV: Masculinities exhibition, which has been held over and closes on that day.

A passionate performer with a powerhouse voice, Sherieta was a semi-finalist in the BBC’s 2007 The Next Big Thing competition. Sherieta tells vivid and deep stories through her songs. This she attributes to, “trying to figure out the answers to life’s most challenging questions.” Sherieta is a proficient songwriter who not only writes her own songs, but has penned lyrics for a number of Jamaican artistes including Etana (Warrior Love, Trigger), Tarrus Riley (Let Peace Reign), Marcia Griffiths (Beer and a Girl), and Romain Virgo (Beautiful).

Throughout her music career, Sherieta has worked and toured with several popular artistes and music personalities: Tarrus Riley, Duane Stephenson, Diana King, Gentleman, Donovan Germain, Mikie Bennett and Dean Fraser, to name a few. She has also recorded background vocals on thousands of songs, including local hits My Dream (Nesbeth); Never Give Up (Chronixx); Never Leave I and Gimme Likkle One Drop (Tarrus Riley); Don’t You Remember and System (Romain Virgo). She also did extensive work on the 2013 album New Day Dawn by German reggae artiste, Gentleman and featured in his 2014 MTV Unplugged TV show and subsequent tours in Europe in 2015.

Currently, Sherieta is promoting her latest single, The Last Time, on the Cold Heart riddim produced by Robert Livingston for Scikron/Big Yard Music which has been receiving strong support from local and overseas reggae DJs. She is in studio working on additional singles to be released throughout the remainder of 2016.

As is now customary for the National Gallery’s Sunday programming, the doors will be open to the public from 11 am to 4 pm and Sherieta’s performance starts at 1:30 pm. Admission and guided tours will be free. Contributions to our donations box are, however, much appreciated and help to fund exhibitions such as Explorations IV: Masculinities and our Sunday programming. The gift and coffee shop will also be open for business.

Last Sundays will resume on its normal schedule at the end of April. The next Last Sundays event will be on the April 24 and will feature the opening of the Digital exhibition, an exhibition of work in various digital media by artists living in Jamaica, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean diaspora.

The review of submissions for the upcoming Digital exhibition has now been completed and we are very excited to announce that submissions from the following artists have been accepted: Ewan Atkinson; Jacqueline Bishop; Kimani Beckford; Beverley Bennett; Sonia Barrett; Ruben Cabenda; Larry Chang; Robin Clare; James Cooper; Di-Andre Caprice Davis; Pablo Delano; Cecile Emeke; Luk Gama; Gregory Stennatt Gordon; David Gumbs; Versia Harris; Horacio Hospedales; Katherine Kennedy; Prudence Lovell; Kelley-Ann Lindo; Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow; Olivia McGilchrist; Shane McHugh; Patricia Mohammed; Richard Nattoo; the New Media and Process Class; Edna Manley College; Sharon Norwood; Jik-Reuben Pringle; Gabriel Ramos; Richard Mark Rawlins; Sheena Rose; Danielle Russell; Oneika Russell; Nile Saulter; Henri Tauliaut; Phillip Thomas; Dione Walker; Rodell Warner, Arnaldo James and Darron Clarke; and Ronald Williams.

The submission and review process was highly competitive. A total of 73 submissions were received and reviewed, of which 39 were accepted, in a variety of Digital media that include video and animation, short films, GIFs, digital photography, and digital illustration and painting.  The selected artists are based in Jamaica, elsewhere in the Caribbean, North America, Europe and China and Digital is the first submission-based exhibition staged by the National Gallery to be opened to Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora artists.

Digital is scheduled to open on Sunday, April 24, 2016.

[CREDIT: Digital Exhibition GIF by Stephanie Channer]