Through a media partnership the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) features In Retrospect: 40 Years of the National Gallery of Jamaica. Here we feature the NGJ’s updates from the first three exhibits.
In Retrospect: 40 Years of the National Gallery of Jamaica – Minister Lisa Hanna’s Opening Speech
On Sunday, August 31, the Hon. Lisa Hanna, M.P., Minister of Youth and Culture, was the guest speaker at the opening of In Retrospect: 40 Years of the National Gallery of Jamaica, our 40th anniversary exhibition. the Minister’s opening remarks are below.
Minister Hanna (center) tours the exhibition with Senior Curator O’Neil Lawrence (right) and Assistant Curator Monique Barnett-Davidson (left). Photo courtesy of Oliver Watt.
“We have come a far way. Often in our haste to get on with the business of creating a better world, we do not take the time to just pause for a minute and to see the changes around us and the progress we have made as a government and as a people.”
“This year, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the National Gallery of Jamaica. When this Gallery began in November 1974, it was the English-speaking Caribbean’s first national gallery. Today it is the region’s oldest and largest national art museum. The recent addition of National Gallery West in Montego Bay has further added to the Gallery’s reach and size. That is progress!”
“Over its 40 years, the National Gallery has used art to tell the story of our people — how we see ourselves, how we project ourselves and how we understand ourselves. It is interesting to see how our artists have captured and interpreted the ways in which our ideas have evolved with modernity and the enhancing of our national confidence over the years. That is also progress!”
“We will use this anniversary as an occasion to look back at progress. We will examine the outstanding developments in Jamaican art over the years — and the role that the Gallery has played in the shaping of the unique Jamaican art character.”
“This exhibition, which I have the duty and honour to open today, consists of 131 works of art — only a fraction of the collection that we’ve built up in 40 years — but these works provide a wide panorama of Jamaican art history, spanning four centuries.”
Karl Parboosingh – Cement Company (1966, AD Scott Collection, NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
The exhibition features works from artists as diverse as Edna Manley, Mallica ‘Kapo’ Reynolds, Albert Huie, Barrington Watson, Karl Parboosingh, Carl Abrahams, Oneika Russell, Laura Facey, Maria LaYacona, Omari Ra, Cecil Baugh, Norma Rodney Harrack and David Boxer.
“I am very sorry that David Boxer wasn’t able to be with us today, but I especially wish to pay tribute to him. The National Gallery owes a special debt to Dr Boxer who was our Chief Curator for several years and who served the organisation for thirty-seven years in all. Without any fear of contradiction whatsoever, I will say that no one has been as instrumental to the development of the National Gallery as Dr Boxer and we thank him for his service.”
“Dr Boxer continues to serve. For the last year and a half he has been working on a special assignment at the Institute of Jamaica chronicling the development of Jamaican art. We expect that his publication, when completed, will become one of the seminal pieces on Jamaica art which will inform and influence generations to come.”
“As we look back at the last 40 years at the National Gallery, we see progress made. But we must also look ahead to the challenges and the opportunities. There is great benefit and potential in art which we must use to improve the quality of life of our people. I believe that access to art really does enhance one’s life.”
“So I gave a firm policy directive that the National Gallery must not only increase the number of exhibitions and attract new audiences, but must also ensure that it attracts younger artists and younger visitors.”
“And so over the last two years, we have taken deliberate actions to ensure that more Jamaicans have regular access to the collections at the National Gallery.”
“We introduced the Last Sundays programme, which has been bringing new audiences to the gallery in a relaxed, educational and entertaining setting.”
“In addition, we introduced the culture card programme for high school students giving them unprecedented access to cultural offerings, including the exhibitions at the National Gallery. The culture card programme was launched as a pilot last year in this room with 100 students from four high schools. It is now being evaluated in preparation for the national roll out.”
“The gallery has been increasing its engagement with younger artists and I was very pleased with the series of acclaimed and innovative exhibitions, including: Young Talent 5 and New Roots which focused on the work of young contemporary Jamaican artists.”
“As Minister, one of my proudest achievements at the National Gallery over the two last years has been the development and opening of the National Gallery West as our new and permanent branch at the Montego Bay Cultural Centre in St James. Through National Gallery West, we will bring the benefits of art, curated in this form to thousands more
Jamaicans. This is real progress.”
“But this is only the beginning. We have much more work ahead of us to encourage artists to produce works that inspire, perplex, delight, beautify and edify. And more than ever, we must encourage the development of the business of art for wealth creation and poverty alleviation. We must not leave our people’s economic security to chance!”
“And now, it gives me great pleasure to declare open IN RETROSPECT: 40 YEARS OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF JAMAICA.”
Ebony G. Patterson – Cultural Soliloquy (Cultural Object Revisited) (2010, Collection: NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
In Retrospect – Section 1: FOUNDATIONS
We continue the publication of the text panels in In Retrospect: 40 Years of the National Gallery of Jamaica, with the text panel for the first section of the exhibition, which looks at the earliest beginnings of our collection:
When the National Gallery opened its doors in 1974, a significant part of the Institute of Jamaica’s art collection was transferred to the new organization. According to our records, this comprised 237 paintings and drawings and 25 sculptures which thus became the Gallery’s foundational collection.The initial transfer consisted of modern Jamaican art only, starting with Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused (1935), but a group of pre-twentieth century works was later also transferred, in 1976, which now forms the core of the National Gallery’s historical collection.
Edna Manley – Negro Aroused (1935, Collection: NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
The artworks that were transferred to the National Gallery in 1974 not only says a lot about how the Institute of Jamaica went about its exhibitions and acquisitions—and most acquisitions were from exhibitions that were held at the Institute—but also helps to explain how the early National Gallery was conceptualized. Negro Aroused (1935) had been acquired by public subscription in 1937 as the first modern work of art to enter the Institute’s collection—its acquisition can be seen as the symbolic beginning of what later became the National Gallery. Before that, the Institute had acquired art mainly for its historical value, for instance for their portrait gallery, and furthermore made those decisions from a decidedly colonial perspective. This was challenged by the nationalist intelligentsia in the late 1930s, who pressured the Institute of Jamaica to become receptive to the emerging modern Jamaican school, and it is the resulting change in policy direction which generated the art collection that was eventually transferred to the National Gallery. The articles of association of the National Gallery mandated it to exhibit and collect the art that had come out of the 1938 uprising, which was a narrow and ultimately untenable mandate that was, as we will see in the next section, quickly challenged and expanded by its Director/Curator David Boxer, but it was consistent with the context in which its core collection had come about.
Carl Abrahams – The Grand Finale of the Tea Party (1959, Collection: NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
Generally speaking the Institute of Jamaica’s art collection was quite conservative and focused on representational art with iconic Jamaican themes but there were some exceptions that suggest that the Institute was in fact responsive to new developments in Jamaican art, such as the highly abstracted Eugene Hyde Croton in this section. It is also of note that the initial collection consisted mainly of painting and sculpture, as well as a few drawings, even though there were already well-recognized practitioners in other media, such as the ceramist Cecil Baugh and photographers such as Maria LaYacona. That these media and artists were not included in the foundational collection illustrated that the National Gallery was established with a conventional ‘fine art’ bias, which as other sections of this exhibition will illustrate was also subject to challenges and course corrections later on.
This section features some of the masterpieces that were part of this transfer, including Edna Manley’s famed Negro Aroused. Works that were transferred at that time are also featured elsewhere in this exhibition, since they were included in some of the National Gallery’s key exhibitions, and are labelled as such.
In Retrospect – Section 2: SEMINAL EXHIBITIONS
In the years following its establishment, the National Gallery staged three exhibitions that were instrumental in articulating a Jamaican art history:
Five Centuries of Art in Jamaica (1976) was the first major survey exhibition organized by the National Gallery, and included art from the 16th to the 20th century, in a first major departure from the Gallery’s original mandate to focus on the nationalist art that emerged from the 1938 uprising. The pre-twentieth century section of the exhibition did not include Taino art, because of the unavailability of significant artifacts in Jamaica at that time. It consisted entirely of colonial art, with no reference to any African-derived art forms from that period. This bolstered the underlying thesis, namely that Jamaican art had a longer history but that modern Jamaican art represented a necessary, nationalist reaction against the cultural repression of the colonial period.
The Formative Years: Art in Jamaica 1922-1940 (1978) documented the pioneers of the nationalist school. It was the first exhibition in which 1922 was used as the start date of modern Jamaican art—the three earliest art works included, Edna Manley’s Beadseller, Wisdom and Ape, each dated from that year—and the first to use the term Intuitive. In The Formative Years, David Boxer also refined his position on the relationship between pre-twentieth and modern Jamaican art and he wrote in the catalogue:
There is no painter, there is no sculptor from [before the twentieth century] we can point to and say: “This is a Jamaican artist; this is someone painting Jamaica and her people through Jamaican eyes.” Indeed, the true Jamaican artist is a product of the 20th century.
Five Centuries and The Formative Years also departed from the Gallery’s original narrow focus on ‘fine art,’ as in painting and sculpture, and included a few examples of photography, furniture design and, in Five Centuries, also ceramics.
Philip Whickstead – Edward East and Family (c1775, Collection: NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
The Intuitive Eye (1979) renamed the self-taught popular artists who had previously been marginalized as ‘Primitives’ as ‘Intuitives’ and, in a deep challenge to the prevailing hierarchies of Jamaican art, placed them at the centre of Jamaica’s emerging national canon. David Boxer wrote in the catalogue:
These artists paint, or sculpt, intuitively. They are not guided by fashion. Their vision is pure and sincere, untarnished by art theories and philosophies, principles and movements…Their visions, (and many are true visionaries) as released through paint or wood, are unmediated expressions of the world around them – and the worlds within. Some of them…reveal as well a capacity for reaching into the depths of the subconscious to rekindle century old traditions, and to pluck out images as elemental and vital as those of their African fathers.
This section, which comprises two galleries, features works that were included in these three exhibitions and also in the National Gallery’s two later surveys of Intuitive art, Fifteen Intuitives(1987) and Intuitives III (2006), as these two exhibitions illustrate the Gallery’s sustained involvement with this genre.
Koren der Harootian – Male Head (1937, Collection: NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
In Retrospect: Section 3 – JAMAICAN ART 1922-1982
Here is the third sectional text panel in the In Retrospect: 40 Years of the National Gallery of Jamaica exhibition, which continues until November 15.
The Jamaican Art 1922-1982 exhibition, which was a collaboration between the National Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, was the first and most ambitious survey of Jamaican art to tour internationally. The exhibition, which was curated by David Boxer and Vera Hyatt, consisted of 76 paintings and sculptures, many of which came from the NGJ Collection, although there were also loans from private and corporate collections. Between 1983 and 1985, it was shown at 11 venues in the USA, including the Inter-American Development Bank Gallery in Washington D.C., where it premiered, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. It was also shown at the Hart House Gallery at the University of Toronto in Canada and the National Museum of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. The exhibition had its final showing at the National Gallery in 1986, on its return to the island.
John Dunkley, “Back to Nature” (1939), oil paint on hardboard, 16 X 28 inches (1939, Collection: NGJ).
As the title suggested, the exhibition provided an overview of sixty years of modern Jamaican art and it was accompanied by a catalogue with an introductory essay by David Boxer, which provided an overview of Jamaican art from the Taino to the early 1980s. This essay represented the culmination of the art-historical narrative the National Gallery had been articulating since its establishment in 1974 and remains as a standard text today. It covers most major aspects of Jamaican art history, the narrative rests on two pillars, both of which have been controversial: one is the pivotal role of Edna Manley’s 1922 arrival in the island as the symbolic start date of ‘true’ Jamaican art; the other is the central role given to the Intuitives, with John Dunkley (whose Banana Plantation (c1945) was featured on the catalogue cover and also serves as the lead image for this present exhibition) and Mallica ‘Kapo’ Reynolds, who were both given equal prominence to Edna Manley.
Mallica ‘Kapo’ Reynolds – All Women Are Five Women (c1965, Larry Wirth Collection, NGJ). Photo courtesy NGJ.
Jamaican Art 1922-1982 attracted approximately 117,000 visitors and was reviewed in major newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. The reviews were almost unanimous in their praise of the Intuitives but several expressed reservations about the perceived Eurocentricity of the mainstream artists. John Bentley Mays of the Globe and Mail of Toronto 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.’ This deeply challenged local perceptions about artistic hierarchies and not surprisingly, the exhibition was lambasted by some members of the local art community. The Gleaner art critic Andrew Hope for instance wrote in 1986: ‘[T]he exhibition lacks a guiding intelligence and seems to have been thrown together 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.’ The debate about Jamaican Art 1922-1982 was the first major controversy around the National Gallery and, in essence, it was a battle for control over Jamaica’s dominant artistic canons and narratives and the Gallery’s role as a gatekeeper.
Read more on In Retrospect on the NGJ’s blog.