The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) welcomed a full house on Monday, February 2, 2015, when local and international visitors turned up to hear NAGB guest, Dean of Yale College and Professor of African American Studies, History and American Studies Jonathan Holloway speak. The talk came as part of the February programming for the Seventh National Exhibition (NE7), Antillean: an Ecology.
The NE7 opened on December 11, 2014 and incorporates the work of 52 literary and visual artists who respond to the dynamics of social codes around race, class and the economics of privilege in The Bahamas. Influences like citizenship, migration, slavery, religion and the creolization of the Caribbean and wider world are explored through the works as well as a complementing series of discussions, of which Holloway's talk was a part.
The Yale dean's area of specialty is post-emancipation United States social and intellectual history. On the evening, he discussed the ways curators, as historians, have attempted to identify and give meaning to concepts that have historically been considered beyond knowing or not worth worrying about, such as race. Honing in on the black Atlantic world, he revealed the challenges that curators have faced when thinking about the significance and social impact of racial absence. Racial absence refers to the literal absence of people of color in Atlantic historical art and sites, except as persons in positions of servitude who might be easily overlooked or dismissed.
Contrasting this widespread tendency with the works in Antillean: an Ecology, Holloway acknowledged the NAGB's departure from "traditional narratives".
"I think it's always important to have shows like this, especially in a place like the National Art Gallery that had a traditional narrative," explained Holloway. "These traditional narratives don't include everybody; in fact, they do a lot of work of excluding people. So to have a show that tells a different story, especially in a traditional space, I think is incredibly important."
Picking up on the NE7's capacity to impact the way many people - both from The Bahamas and abroad - consider or think about race, Holloway acknowledged the level of discomfort some visitors might feel among the works.
"I think it's going to upset people, and that's totally fine," he said. "It's going to challenge them, and some of those will be upset.
"Others will say, 'I've never thought about this before', and they probably never have thought about it before. And for those people, a certain portion will just go back to living their lives like nothing happened, and others will stop to think the next time their minds start travelling down a certain route. So I think this is a perfect example of how art can be transformative. I think it's pretty wonderful."
It was precisely this kind of reaction that NE7 Co-curators Holly Bynoe and Michael Edwards were hoping for when putting the exhibition together. ARC Magazine Founder Bynoe and COB Professor Edwards put out a call to Bahamians and members of the Bahamian Diaspora in early 2014 for works responding to common perceptions of race, class and economics.
"A large part of the show is to interrogate these kinds of perceptions we have. I think it's important for people to understand that we're all part of this cultural matrix... And the role of the artist is to challenge these perceptions, to reframe them, to re-constitute and retell a different kind of narrative," said Edwards.
Antillean: an Ecology will be on display at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas until May 10, 2015. For more information on future talks in the NE7 programming series, visit the NAGB online at nagb.org.bs.
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