Who are some Caribbean artists we should know about but may not?From an institutional perspective, there’s Amanda Coulson; Erica Moiah James, the first director and chief curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas; Krista Thompson; and Antonius Roberts. For the younger generation, there’s Kachelle Knowles, Cydne Jasmin Coleby, Steven Schmid, Jeffrey Marris, and April Bey. The list goes on and on. The cool thing is that the young ones are mostly female. There’s been a huge power shift.
What’s behind that shift?
I think it’s a broader societal scenario. When we first did studio pop-ups, we had six artists who naturally came together and they were all men. People would bring it up. They were like, “There are no women artists here.” I was like, “What?” I never even thought about it. There’s also a kind of ideological alignment, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with gender. There are people who think a certain way, and their practices are thriving.
What do you believe not enough people know about Caribbean visual art?
The curse and the blessing of The Bahamas is its thriving tourism industry. It is so strong that it has watered down the experience of many people.We sell an expectation to the world of who we are and how we define ourselves. Visual artists are beginning to kind of push back on that and to redefine identities, histories, memory, family, connecting, the ecosystem of experiences, and so on. They did it before, but they are really, really doing it now. We have all these really interesting artists who are not in the youngest generation, but are quite young. There’s Janine Antoni and people like Tavares Strachan and Lavar Munroe, who were both in the Venice Biennale.
Can you speak to the collection you’ve curated at Baha Mar?
We do have a very large collection of work at Baha Mar. We also have a partnership with Dawn Davies, who’s a local art collector. She is a Bahamian woman who has a very, very large collection — I think she’s got upwards of 1,800 pieces. We’re allowed to borrow works from her to put on display, but Baha Mar has also collected a significant amount of work to populate the property. We have upwards of a thousand original works. There’s art everywhere.
