The National Gallery of Jamaica’s Last Sundays programme for September 27, 2015 will feature the Young Talent 2015 exhibition and a performance by the Quilt Performing Arts Company.
Young Talent 2015 features ten artists under forty years old, namely: Greg Bailey, Alicia Brown, Katrina Coombs, Di-Andre Caprice Davis, Monique Gilpin, Domanie Hong, Howard Myrie, Richard Nattoo, Avagay Osborne, and Cosmo Whyte. Young Talent 2015 , which opened on August 30 and continues until November 14, is the sixth of what will from now on be a biennial series of exhibitions, which are designed to provide national exposure to new and emerging artists and to stimulate the development of Jamaican art in the process. Young Talent 2015 includes a healthy range of artistic media and practices, including new and more traditional media, such as GIF collages, fibre-based work and representational painting, which coexist productively as part of Jamaica’s contemporary art language. While some of it is also deeply personal, most of the work selected for Young Talent 2015 is explicitly or implicitly political—tackling challenging subjects such as gender violence, social dysfunction, power and marginalization, the politics of the body, and displacement and forced migration.
The award-winning Quilt Performing Arts Company has a mission to transform theatre by means of an exciting combination of different personalities, talents, emotions, experiences, visions, words and music – hence the company name, Quilt. Using “devised theatre” (or collaborative improvisation) as their main tool of expression, and under the leadership of Rayon McLean, the group’s main focus is to provide pieces with a strong social message that forces audiences to think and reflect, feel, laugh, and learn. For their performance on September 27, the company will be revisiting two pieces from their repertoire – Ancestral Spirits, which explores African-Caribbean ancestry, and Missing, which is about men who have been lost to society – and they will also improvise in response to works in the Young Talent 2015 exhibition.
As is now customary for Last Sundays, the doors will be open to the public from 11 am to 4 pm and the Quilt performance starts at 1:30. Admission and guided tours will be free. Contributions to our donations box are, however, much appreciated and help to fund exhibitions such as Young Talent 2015 and our Last Sundays programming. The gift and coffee shop will also be open for business.
