Bio

Veerle Poupeye is a Belgian-Jamaican art historian, curator and critic specialized in Caribbean art and visual culture. She lives in Kingston, Jamaica, and currently works as an independent curator, researcher, writer and cultural consultant.

Poupeye was educated at the Universiteit Gent in Belgium, where she obtained a BA and MA in Art History, and at Emory University in Atlanta, where she obtained a PhD in Art History and Cultural Studies. Her publications include Caribbean Art (1998, second revised and expanded edition 2022), in Thames and Hudson’s prestigious World of Art series, and Modern Jamaican Art (1998), which she co-authored with David Boxer, as well as various book chapters and exhibition catalogue essays on Jamaican and Caribbean art and culture. She has also contributed on these subjects to journals such as Small Axe, Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, Raw Vision, the Miami Rail, the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, the New West Indian Guide, and the Jamaican newspapers the Gleaner, the Observer, the Record and, most recently, the Monitor Tribune.

Veerle Poupeye has served as the Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica and had previously worked there as a Curator. She has been the sole or lead curator of more than 45 exhibitions, on Jamaican and Caribbean art, most of them for the National Gallery of Jamaica but also for other organizations in the Caribbean, North America and Europe, and she has collaborated on many other exhibitions. This has included such ground-breaking, critically acclaimed exhibitions as the 2014 and 2017 Jamaica Biennial, which she conceptualized and directed.

She has served as Coordinator of the Visual Arts program of the MultiCare Foundation, an inner-city development foundation, and as Research Fellow and Curator of the CAG[e] gallery at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. She has lectured on Caribbean Art, Western and Latin American Art History, Material Culture, Curatorial Studies, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics at the Edna Manley College and her teaching experience extends to the University of the West Indies-Mona, Emory University and New York University.

Her recent clients for consultancies, training and curatorial projects include the Barbados Museum and Historical Society; the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands; Scotiabank Jamaica; Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and the Caribbean Culture Fund.