The Minnis retrospective exhibition, titled "Creation's Grace", at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas is a fantastic walk through Bahamian visual and musical culture. It is a glimpse of what we are and where we came from and what we love. It showed, too, this family's cross-generational gift for capturing culture that is not adulterated by the recolonization of the Bahamian psyche.
In one space, a lifetime of exposure to art and the Minnis family can make a lasting impression on the Bahamian psyche. They have invested beyond millions in Bahamian culture, but the importance of that investment is quickly eroding. Yes, time moves ahead at a winged-chariot pace, but the damage that our un-remembering of the past is doing is simply criminal. What is fabulous about the exhibition - including the impressionistic realism of the watercolors of Harbour Island beauty, the comic fun-poking at political icons and the musical rendition of island life - is the capturing of the Over the Hill area. It showed it, not in a romanticized fashion, nor did it render it empty of life and value, as we are so tempted to do today; it presented rather as being alive, relevant and vibrant. It may have been blighted by its problems, but it created some of the most significant artists and Bahamians. Unlike those who claim themselves to be the most important figures in the country's history, it showed true people.
Over the Hill was not a world lost to possibility, as we so often render it today, nor was it a space empty of worth and easily bought for a dime. It was a community that thrived on its own self-awareness and consciousness. This self-awareness has mostly died today because it has been encouraged to die. Its replacement is a plastic feel-good copy of what we render as Bahamian.
The Minnis retrospective is an honest and invaluable journey through more than 40 years of national development. It shows the reality of young, unwed-motherhood with children in tow but also the pride in house and home, since vanished and replaced by a pride in car and clothes. It provides social commentary, both critical and comic, but also encourages us to strive to be our best. It is timeless in Eddie Minnis' depiction of the social problems of young Bahamian males: "He either in Fox Hill or..." holds cultural poignancy decades later.
The exhibition is timely, too, as its opening coincided with Edmond Moxey's death. Like Eddie Minnis, Moxey was a cultural icon, a man who perhaps saw beyond his time. The exhibition speaks to a need to remember that we have a culture of great worth. There are talented artists who capture our lives as they are, not for the pleasure of some outside gaze or vision of what The Bahamas should be as it develops into a painted copy of itself, sanitized and safe. Some of the artwork captures buildings, many of which were left to rot or be eaten by the worms of under-development, later turned into car parks and roads for progress to pass through on route to resorts, walled away from prying local eyes. How ironic that a man like Moxey, who was so much before his time, who celebrated the simplicity and realness of Bahamian identity and culture, who was destroyed by the power that devalued blackness but unrealistically elevated it to fragility and museum fossilization, should be mourned and heralded as a hero at the same time that the Minnis' cultural impact was being celebrated. Much like Moxey, Eddie Minnis lent a serious voice to black Bahamian life, to political critique and to encouraging Bahamian arts and culture. The Minnis family lends voice to the hidden culture exceptionally well, capturing multiple gazes of different real Bahamases that we who live here become blind to.
The exhibition pulled away the veiled covering that repeats that we are nothing but a cultureless backwater. This idea is far too prevalent in the 21st century young Bahamian psyche. The Minnis family shows how much we painted,drew and wrote, and that we could criticize the follies of old-time leadership through comedy. Simultaneously, the exhibition is a fabulous and poignant statement of the loss of culture that carnivalizes or cannibalizes us into tourist-imaged rap-steadiness.
The slice of culture that hangs on the walls of the national gallery is only the beginning of what we can hope will become a revival of true Bahamian culture. Yes, there is true culture. It is not the plasticized stuff that we trot out with whenever we want to perform who we are for the tourist gaze. The real culture spans a history of life in Long Cay, where one of the oldest churches in the country stands as a beacon to a pre-civilization that was almost destroyed by the change in power and that bears witness to the problem of falling from government's grace. Perhaps, better it fall from grace than be devoured by the greedy jowls of mass-developed tourism that seeks only to Happy Meal us all, and fit us into a cultureless world of tin can music and performed authenticity.
The exhibition offers color, texture, depth, music, voice, pain and pleasure of a people alive in themselves. How can we reinvigorate that life energy that was perhaps not so fast to sell itself to the savior promising trinkets as Columbus' men once did? We may sell ourselves for the $100 today, but tomorrow holds some serious bad belly after the ball. Eddie Minnis criticizes these problems with his music and his cartoons. How can we revalidate what the Minnis retrospective shows as being so much a part of our being?
The exhibition is a fabulous sliver of Bahamian life. Why can we not celebrate this culture and continue to present ourselves as we are and not as we think people want to see us? We must commend the years of dedication and incredible cultural wealth the Minnis family artists have endowed the country with.

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