Jean Fouquet – Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (c1452), Collection: Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp In this final post on my recent visits to several Belgian museums, I turn my attention to some of the larger art museums in Oostende, Brussels, and Antwerp (although I already discussed the Ensor Year exhibitions at the... Continue Reading →
Travel Report: Revisiting Belgium’s Art Museums – Part 2
Jan van Eyck - Portrait of Margareta van Eyck, 1439, Collection: Groeninge Museum, Musea Brugge (Photo: Veerle Poupeye) In a previous post, I introduced my recent museum tour in Belgium, in February, and commented on the initial exhibitions for the James Ensor Year. In this post, I take a closer look at the museums I... Continue Reading →
Some Reflections on The Face of Us and the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Exhibition Programme
Oliver Myrie - Facing Us, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 162 x 145 cm (Image Courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica) When The Face of Us was announced by the National Gallery of Jamaica as an upcoming juried exhibition, mid last year, I was admittedly skeptical. The recent curatorial debacles of the populist, dramatically uneven... Continue Reading →
81° West: Cartographic Explorations in Contemporary Caymanian Art
Installation view of 81° West (with work by, left to right, John Reno Jackson, Linda McCann and Bendel Hydes, and, in front, Davin Ebanks) This article originally appeared in two parts in the Monitor Tribune. Part 1 Recently, I travelled to the Cayman Islands for several professional projects. One of these was the exhibition 81°... Continue Reading →
Influence, Appropriation, and Plagiarism
Alberto Korda - Guerrillero Heroico (1960, in its original form) Recently, there have been a number of high-profile lawsuits, internationally, that revolved around the practice of appropriation in art – the use and interpretations of existing images by other artists. One involved the 1984 Orange Prince painting by the American Pop artist Andy Warhol which... Continue Reading →
The Power of an Image
Giovanni Marrozzini - President and Secretary of a New Farmers’ Cooperative Created with Microcredit, Abam village, Cameroon, 2010 For some years now, a remarkable black and white photograph of two older black women, dressed in work clothes and each brandishing a machete, while holding hands, has been circulating on social media. That the women are... Continue Reading →