C O N C E R T :

Nassau Music Society presents:
Quartetto di Cremona

TOMORROW:
Saturday, January 21st
At 7:30pm
St. Andrew’s Kirk, Princes Street
• • •
Sunday, January 22nd
At 5:30pm
St. Paul’s Church Hall, Lyford Cay

The Nassau Music Society is thrilled to bring to Bahamian audiences the wondrous sound of the Quartetto di Cremona string quartet of Italy along with the amazing viola of Ambra Albek in 2 exciting performances. Five world-class strings players perform on the same stage on Saturday 21st January at 7:30 pm at the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Princes Street and on Sunday 22nd January at 5:30 pm at St. Paul’s Church Hall. Come enjoy a glass of wine and great classical music. A different programme will be played at each concert so please plan to attend both.

Tickets are $30 (for Music Society Members) $35 for Non-members and $10 for Students. Box Offices are Logos Bookstore, Harbour Bay Shopping Centre and Custom Computers, Cable Beach. Call 322 7427 today to reserve your tickets.

CLICK HERE for more info or visit our Facebook page here.

Work of Bahamian artist to be featured in Ohio exhibition

Hudson Fine Art of Hudson, Ohio will be featuring the work of Bahamian artist Keith Wisdom in their February 2017 art exhibition.

Wisdom’s work showcases vibrant use of color which clearly arises from a Caribbean sense of color, rhythm, cultural identity, and sensibility. His artwork has been featured in a variety of venues from Artisan’s Gateway Gallery on Paradise Island to The Uumbaji Art Gallery located at Kent State University. Hudson Fine Art gallery will carry his diverse artwork from abstract acrylics on canvas to geometric colored pencil on paper.

CLICK HERE to visit Hudson Fine Art website.

Look. Listen. Live.

A place for artistic and cultural expression.

by Ian Bethell-Bennett

The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) has created a show we call the National Exhibition, now on its eighth run. This year, the event that opened on December 15 and 17 2016 has also been installed at a satellite location – Antonius Robert’s Hillside House Gallery. It would have also been presented at PopopStudios had Hurricane Matthew not done his dastardly deed in October. The NE8 offers local artists and artists of the diaspora a space to express their ideas and thoughts, concepts and theories, but does not earn income. The artists do not sell work at the NE8, as the space is expressly to show and provide a voice for local art, artists and cultural practitioners.

It is an investment in the national development of the arts and Bahamian culture. A part of this year’s exhibition is work by Nassau-born, North Carolina-based artist Tamika Galanis, who examines the danger of cultural loss we are facing as a country that grapples with huge cultural and structural violence. We talk about exceptional violence because the state responds to the street violence as if it were an exception, though, much of it arises in responses to the state’s imposed structural violence on the bodies pictured in the work.

Galanis has two parts to her work; one is a photographic display of transformation as we speak and the other is an installation of 3D printed hybrid coral heads. Both aspects of the work trouble the waters and take a significant step in discussing what we as a people are not discussing: the real danger of national loss concomitant with climate change or what we call global warming that encompasses sea level rise of massive proportions as well as freak and dangerously strong and devastating storms, as embodied by Matthew and Joaquin, and the man-made dangers of violence [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Building regional allyship

by The National Art
Gallery of The Bahamas

One of the great joys and privileges of working in the art field is the necessity of travel to meet colleagues, see exhibitions, do studio visits and, most importantly, create the networks necessary to support our artists. In the Caribbean region, this is even more important since we are — by our natures as island nation — more apart than together in terms of a regional identity. Exchanges — between artists, curators, writers and other professionals — are an incredibly important way to continue increasing one’s professional knowledge and also to disseminate information on what is happening in one’s home country to the outside world.

It was a delight, therefore, when The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) was invited by The National Art Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) to be a participant as a selector for its upcoming biennial, giving us the opportunity to do research into contemporary artistic production in Jamaica, learn more about their history and development as a national institution, and forge closer bonds with our colleagues.

Firstly, it is always interesting to compare and contrast one’s institutional history with that of one’s peers. The National Gallery of Jamaica was founded in 1974 in Kingston and is the oldest and largest public art museum in the Anglophone Caribbean. Having started out in an historic home, Devon House (not unlike NAGB’s Villa Doyle), the challenges of a domestic space proved difficult to manage and it moved, in 1982, to an unused department store of modern and spacious design. It currently has a massive 30,000 square feet of exhibition space (compared to NAGB’s 4,500 sq.ft), not including its annex, NGJ West, in Montego Bay (3,500 sq.ft) [...]

CLICK HERE to read full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Scotiabank partners with UB for its 2017 ‘Everything Bahamian’ calendar

by Rachael Allahar

Scotiabank partnered with the Visual Arts Department of the University of The Bahamas (UB) to bring their 2017 calendar theme of ‘Everything Bahamian’ to life in twelve captivating images. Through the partnership, UB submitted a portfolio of images produced by Visual Arts students and twelve images were selected for inclusion in the 2017 Everything Bahamian Calendar. In addition to awarding the winning students, Scotiabank also presented a donation to the ongoing work of the Visual Arts Department of UB.

Over and above having their work featured in the calendar, the winning students were profiled, awarded for their contributions and given copies of the calendars for their portfolios and to share with loved ones. Senior Manager of Marketing for Scotiabank, Leah Davis, expressed gratitude to UB, “We are excited to build on our existing partnership with UB and so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with such talented young artists. At Scotiabank, we focus our efforts on how we can help support our communities in the most meaningful way. We are proud of this partnership with the University and the opportunity to help young people become better off, specifically in areas like arts and education” [...]

CLICK HERE for full article on The Bahamas Weekly.

‘Queen of Junkanoo’ Christina Fernander commended

Christina Fernander, chairman of the One Family Junkanoo group, was called the ‘Queen of Junkanoo’ by Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture the Hon. Dr. Daniel Johnson during a press conference at the Ministry’s offices, January 16, 2017 to introduce her as the first female leader in Junkanoo, and the first female leader to win a parade after One Family finished first in the 2016 Boxing Day Parade and then second in the 2017 New Year’s Day Parade.

Courtesy of The Bahamas Weekly.

by Ben Davis

On Friday, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the president of the United States. As a protest of the “white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, militarism, and oligarchic rule” that have surrounded his campaign, a variety of artists and critics, including me, have signed a call for an Art Strike on that day.

Now, if you are the kind of person who doesn’t believe the present reflects a particularly marked heightening of “white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, militarism, and oligarchic rule”—or does, but would rather this conversation be somehow kept separate from art—then this post is not for you.

This post is for people who agree with all this, but find the Art Strike call divisive, controversial, irrelevant, whatever. Let me say that, were I in a different mood, if I thought the situation were different, I could myself write a criticism of the idea of an “art strike.” [...]

CLICK HERE for full article at ArtNet.
CLICK HERE to visit the J20 Art Strike website.

The tangled debate over art-world protests

From museums to Meryl Streep, the discussion around culture creators’ responses to Trump often misses the point.

by Spencer Kornhaber

The culture industry’s response to Donald Trump’s election has largely consisted of different ways of saying “no.” Celebrities have refused to play his inauguration. Meryl Streep methodically blasted him at the Golden Globes. Hamilton’s cast greeted Mike Pence by informing him of their fears. And artists are considering a national strike on January 20th.

The discussion around such efforts has shown some of the typical—if muddied—ways people talk about the arts intersecting with politics. On the right, a common theme is that celebrity protests are only going to ensure Trump’s re-election by making his supporters feel condescended to. On the left, cultural anti-Trump efforts are being taken as examples of the kind of bold truth-telling Democratic operatives should mimic. Both frames prize electoral impact—policy influence now, voter persuasion for 2018 or 2020—over all else. Which is a strange way to think about art, a form of communication that exists to do what other forms—political, commercial, journalistic—can’t [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Atlantic.

Trump team plans to eliminate National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities

The budget in the works by the Trump team allegedly calls for the complete elimination of the NEA and NEH, plus the privatization of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

by Jillian Steinhauer

The Hill has gotten a first look at the federal budget in the works by President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team, and it is, to put it mildly, brutal.

In an effort to reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years, the plan calls for the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In addition, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would be privatized.

The NEA’s current budget is $146 million, which, according to the agency, represents “just 0.012% … of federal discretionary spending.” The NEH also has a budget of $146 million. The CPB receives $445.5 million. By comparison, the budget for the Department of Defense is $607 billion [...]

CLICK HERE to read full article at Hyperallergic.