For a number of years now, the Institute of Jamaica, which is the parent organization of the National Gallery of Jamaica and other Jamaican museums, has been hosting an annual Heritage Fest, as part of the Ministry of Culture's Heritage Month observations. This is normally a live event but since the Institute of Jamaica and... Continue Reading →
Creative Iconoclasm: What To Do With Those Colonial Monuments? – Part 2
This is the second part of a two-part post. Part 1 can be found here. The Caribbean is replete with statues that represent similar ideas about White Supremacy and Colonialism. Some of these statues date from the Plantation era but others, such as the Columbus Lighthouse in Santo Domingo, which was unveiled in 1992, are... Continue Reading →
Creative Iconoclasm: What To Do With Those Colonial Monuments? – Part 1
This is the first of the two-part post. Part 2, which can be found here, examines the implications for the Caribbean. As an art historian and curator, I am supposed to be beholden to the preservation of art and my response to any incident whereby an art work is deliberately damaged or destroyed is expected... Continue Reading →
Caribbean Conversations: Phillip Thomas – Part I
This is the first part of an extended conversation with the Jamaican painter Phillip Thomas. Part two can be found here.Phillip Thomas was born in 1980, in Kingston, Jamaica. He holds a BFA in Painting in 2003 from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and an MFA from the New York... Continue Reading →
Ivanhoe Martin and the Hotel
I had lunch with a friend at the new AC Marriott Hotel today, because I wanted to see the art that was acquired for and installed in the lobby, which has received enthusiastic coverage in the local press. I had initially planned to write about it in the context of a more general post about... Continue Reading →
From the Archives: Ideas about Art and Postcolonial Society – Part 2
Here is part two of a two-part excerpt from my PhD dissertation "Between National and Market: Art and Society in 20th Century Jamaica" (Emory University, 2011). The excerpt is from the Introduction. Part one can be found here. (c) Veerle Poupeye, al rights reserved Partha Chatterjee has pointed out that the challenge facing anticolonial cultural... Continue Reading →