Jazz at Jacaranda presents a very special line up of Jazz musical talents on Saturday, February 1st from 6pm to 9pm at Jacaranda House on Parliament Street in aid of Hurricane Dorian Relief for the Bahamas Humane Society.

Headlining the concert is Montreal-based, Bahamian Jazz songbird Anuschka Wright. She will be accompanied by an international line-up of musicians including from Italy: Massimo Colombo on piano and Tommaso Starace on saxophone; and from Toronto is Anthony Michelli on drums. Musical Director is Bahamian jazz musician Adrian D’Aguilar who will be joined by talented Bahamian jazz musicians including Tino Richardson, Lamont Gibson, and others. Tickets are $125 per person and includes buffet dinner and wine. Space is limited, so please book your tickets now.

For tickets, please email: jacarandanassau@gmail.com.

CLICK HERE for event page.

2020 marks the centennial of women’s suffrage, a milestone in U.S. history when women succeeded in gaining access to the political process with the right to vote. Despite the passage of the 19th amendment, it took decades for women of color to gain this basic right. Even today, vast numbers of women remain disenfranchised and excluded from the political process.

To honor this milestone, the ReflectSpace gallery along with the Glendale Commission on the Status of Women in Glendale, California opens a new exhibition tonight entitled Access: A Century After Women’s Right to Vote which invited five contemporary women artists including Bahamian artist and educator April Bey. The exhibit examines the past 100 years of women’s rights through the work of these artists, and considers the role of women today and their access to positions of power.

A prolific artist, Ms. Bey is internationally exhibited and is a full time educator at Glendale Community College. For Access, Ms. Bey will be showing brand new work addressing the suffrage movement.

“The series introduces us to the planet Atlantica, Bey’s home planet and also home to visionaries, Womanist Matriarchies, Earth analysis, black thought, and queer adventures in design. Atlantica is a joyous AfroFuturist meme and also a serious paean to women’s resilience in the face of colonialism, specifically black women who are expected to be sovereign and robust while at the same time assumed to be inept and emotionally weak when leadership roles are sought. Made in another universe that parallels, critiques, celebrates and satirizes our own, Atlantica occupies exploited space, offering up a fictitious world where labels are non-existent and we are allowed to float within our self-defined identities.

“Afro Futurism, Afro Surrealism and an examination of colonialization and post-colonial ramifications are explored. West African knock-off Chinese wax fabric is hand sewn into works to reference and connect British and Dutch colonial tactics with active Chinese neo-colonialism taking place in most of Africa and the Caribbean. The work examines the artist’s duality in culture, having grown up in The Bahamas and with American family and how this impacts her observation of Earth within this narrative of Atlantica as a safe space in space.”

Bey tackles issues of Black empowerment and feminism using oil paint, wax fabric, and epoxy resin. Her bold and layered work challenges and redefines stereotypes about women and feminism and focuses on the resilience of women.

CLICK HERE for exhibition’s event page.
CLICK HERE for April Bey’s website.

Although Hurricane Dorian had brought [parts of The Bahamas] to its knees, a team of women led by Bahamian actress Leslie Vanderpool managed to put a local institution of culture back on its feet.

by Alessandra De Tommasi (Story translated from Italian)

Quattro hands, each of a different color, skim the ocean water and surrounding a piece of land, an archipelago, emerging from the depths. The simple yet evocative image of the poster of the 16th edition of the Bahamas International Film Festival , which took place a few weeks ago in the capital, Nassau, represents much more than a work of art. It is in fact the testimony of a small great miracle.

The film event - which has boasted guests of the caliber of Sean Connery, Johnny Depp and Lenny Kravitz over the years - usually takes place in October, but in early September 2019 some of these enchanting islands were blown away by the hurricane. Dorian, one of the most powerful ever shot down in the area. So the event was canceled, buried along with many hopes of local revival. The population faced daily emergencies and culture became one of the last items on a long list.

The founder, the former actress Leslie Vanderpool , however, did not give up, and with a female team she decided to challenge fate and try, moving the appointment in a hurry in December. Without funds, locations and even a photographer, she has put this flagship of the community back together, overcoming any resistance – and she has met many – even at the government level. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article at Iodonna.

Oasis Furniture extends footprint to Bahama Hand Prints in Eleuthera

Two Bahamian women-run creative companies work together to showcase talents in design.

by Natario McKenzie

When Brooke Phillips-Pyfrom flew back to The Bahamas after college, there was only one certainty in her future.

“A big feast of conch salad, followed by a short stint in my father’s business to assuage all the years of sports academies and higher education,” Phillips-Pyfrom said. “I never dreamed it would turn into this.”

This, as she puts it, is a nearly 10-year journey that took her from managing the business, Phillips Sailmakers & Awning Manufacturers on East Shirley Street in Nassau—to growing its spin-off, Oasis’ outdoor furniture division, into an indoor furniture, home décor and gift store with its own location in Sandyport.

Now, less than three years since Oasis opened that western location and just months after Jennifer Treco joined the company as in-house designer, the women-run business is opening in its third location, collaborating with another women-run business, Bahama Hand Prints in Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera.

“When Alannah (van Onselen) and her husband, David and their three children moved back to her home in The Bahamas in 2018 after 10 years in David’s native South Africa, they purchased Bahama Hand Prints. Alannah immediately threw herself into building on the legacy that had made the screen print fabric famous and recognizable around the world for more than half a century,” said Pyfrom. [...]

CLICK HERE for full story at Eyewitness News.

Baha Men’s Isaiah Taylor elevated

by Shavaughn Moss

Isaiah Taylor, leader of the Grammy-award winning Baha Men will be awarded the Ronnie Butler Lifetime Achievement Award when the 2020 Elevation Awards are held later this year.

It’s an award Taylor said means a lot to him, and not because he’s receiving an award, but because he said there are always people that are just as worthy of and can receive the award.

“It’s also good to know that all the work you put in, that someone notices,” said Taylor who also added that it was great to be alive to receive it.

“Anytime someone gives you a candy you learn to appreciate it, because they didn’t have to give it to you. When I got the call, I was shocked,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it, but I honestly do appreciate it.”

Andrew “Drew” Harmony Gardiner III, co-founder and president of The Music Project and Artist Cave International will be bestowed with the Trailblazer Award. Tim Daniels, founder and organizer of SoundWaves will be given the Culture Award at the Elevation Awards.

Among the nominees, Bahamian gospel hip hop artist Najie Dunn leads the list of awards nominees with five nominations – Male Artist of the Year, Gospel Artist of the Year, Hip Hop Artist of the Year, Gospel Song of the Year, and Gospel Music Video of the Year. [...]

CLICK HERE for full list of nominees at The Nassau Guardian.

Airbnb wants to send five people to take a sabbatical in The Bahamas

by Stacey Leasca

It’s time you take a break from your regularly scheduled life and take a sabbatical instead. And Airbnb is here to make that happen.

Airbnb and the Bahamas National Trust, an NGO that protects 32 national parks in the country, just announced their new joint offering, the Bahamas Sabbatical. With the sabbatical, the two organizations are offering five lucky participants the life-changing opportunity to take time away from their normal lives to live in an ecological oasis. In a statement, the two organizations explained that the sabbatical is a way to help restore the islands after several devastating hurricanes, as well as a way to remind travelers that the islands are back and open for business.

“The Bahamas is open for business and while we work to restore parts of the archipelago devastated by Hurricane Dorian, the vast majority is ready for visitors,” Eric Carey, executive director of the Bahamas National Trust, said in a statement. “Partnering with Airbnb is an incredible opportunity to help further preserve our culture and resources and share our diverse country and the Bahamian way of life with the world.” During the sabbatical, the participants will work alongside local experts on traditional practices in agriculture, ethical fishing, and coral reef revitalization. [...]

CLICK HERE for full story at Travel + Leisure.

by Ian Bethell Bennet

More than 50 years after the popular vote established a change in the way business has been done in The Bahamas, we continue to see a small voice speaking loudly against the national interest. The natural environment has become a casualty in the race to development. The company and plural vote may have been eradicated, but the field has not been leveled. Art truly captures this in stunning colour; we see our trajectory into the new decade and after hurricane Dorian’s decimation of our way of life in this tropical paradise.

Lemero Wright’s “Mystery in the Mangrove” (2019, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60 in.), one of the works in the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas’ newest exhibition “Refuge”, which opened on December 19, 2019 and closes March 29, 2020, is a spectacularly magical exploration of much of the emotion we must be feeling in the wake of Dorian. His work sets the stage of the decimation of the natural environment through the loss of mangroves that assist in protecting the coast and even in-land communities from the sea’s incursion into the land, as well as providing a nursery for the valuable sea life so many come to The Bahamas to witness for themselves.....

........The natural environment is front and centre in the Bahamian image, yet so little is truly seen, and little has been done by the state to change this. As sea-level rise threatens our homes and lives, we still do what Roshanne Minnis highlights in “Holiday Splash” (2016, soft pastels, 18 x 24 in.), where two young boys frolic in the sea on a holiday, probably not Majority Rule Day because it is out of season for most Bahamians to swim or frolic during January, but that could be most any other “summer” holiday.

Dorian took this joyful part of the cultural ethos of Bahamianness and changed it so that Lavarrick King’s “The Fear of Being Swept Away” (2019, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 in.) speaks to a new(er)-re-found fear of the water. Perhaps we need to call it a respect for the ocean. The ocean gives and takes. It is the bringer of life to these islands and rocks, the bringer of commerce, through rum running and wrecking, and the taker of life through hurricanes and storm surges of tsunamis. Our natural beauty is also a threat to our existence. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article at The Nassau Guardian.