According to...

Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Dr. Ian A. Bethell-Bennett is Dean of the Faculty of Liberal and Fine Arts in the School of English Studies at The University of The Bahamas. He has written extensively on race and migration in The Bahamas, cultural creolisation and gender issues. His writings often speak to the curative and transformative properties of art to bring beauty, peace and healing to communities.

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Owning our image

Radical
reclamation
of self

by Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Images have always been controlled by those in power. They have been used to represent us in particular ways that we usually have no control over. During slavery, blacks were depicted in a specific manner, and black women were always rendered either as workhorses, conniving thieves, jezebels, or wanton women, who could not control their bodies.

These women belonged to slave masters and mistresses who abused them, as we can see in a text like The History of Mary Prince, a slave narrative that communicates Mary’s experiences in Turks Island, London, and on a salt farm in the southern Bahamas. Mary is allowed to speak as an enslaved African woman to forward the abolitionists’ agenda to end slavery. The story was carefully ‘controlled’ or ‘managed’ so as not to come across as too strong for public consumption and thereby to upset people’s tranquility.

Enslaved women were always trying to provoke their master’s sexual desires because they were vixens. According to many sources such as the masters’ wives and other upstanding folks in the colonial community, who saw the danger of blacks stealing the heads of otherwise good and noble white men. Thomas Thistlewood’s journals say otherwise, however; they demonstrate how the overseer was carrying on with these ‘terrible women’ while they were blamed for their animal-like desires. This image and perception continues today and it is a representation of black women, especially black, Caribbean women who are shown to be hyper-sexualized and lascivious. [...]

CLICK HERE to read full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Bahamian artist launches Go Fund Me campaign to raise funds for her last
year of studies

So many of us understand the struggle of trying to scrape together a means to attend university abroad, particularly when it comes to the arts and trying others to understand how vital our creative communities are to producing and understanding Bahamian culture. In this spirit of support, we’d like to ask our art community at large to help out—no matter how big or small.

Veronica Dorsett is an emerging artist from Grand Bahama, currently finishing up her bachelor’s studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. She’s in her last year, and if you can offer any assistance at all, please flex those philanthropy muscles!

Courtesy of the NAGB.

CLICK HERE to give generously to our fellow artist.

Considering the African culture

Not forgetting the Asue.

Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

Haitian-born, Bahamian artist Jeffrey Meris opened his project ‘Asue: 20/20’ in the Project Space Room of the NAGB on Saturday, January 21, and it drew a sizable crowd who came out to see how the word “Grace” would be interpreted. We often forget grace, and rather focus on the hard punishing kind of Christianity that is all about cruelty and refusing love, unlike the honest message of Christianity to give love and acceptance to all.

‘Asue 20/20’ explores the much-disparaged part of our culture that has allowed so many blacks to survive the cruel hardship of slavery and colonialism. Meris combines the commonplace with the not so commonplace; the odd, almost forgotten parts of our lives. He underscores the dichotomous reality of technology that brings us closer together, while simultaneously distancing us when we are congregated in the same place. It has also removed so much of our tactile lives from us. Many of us no longer feel the need to interact with those around; we do not see others as we walk consumed by our mobile devices that dictate events and guide our physical journeys, even when Google maps is often totally wrong and does not know that one road does not run straight through an area. We are almost unable to exist without the smarts of awareness and local tacit knowledge, but we do not realise the extent to which the local has been eclipsed by the distant, now close.

Meris’ exhibition is an interesting eye on what we are losing – trust and community – and what we are gaining –distance and technological connectivity. At the same time, during the talk, he expressed how his mother put her children through school by selling peanuts, dark roast, medium roast or light roast. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Nassau Guardian.
CLICK HERE for photos of the opening at the NAGB Facebook page.

NAGB Artwork
of the month

Curtain call for the colonial
in Sanford Sawyer’s studio photographs

by the NAGB

Itchy white lace, decorative candles, pristine stockings, crisp gloves and fine gold chains. These three little brides — being married to the good Christian church they inherited as newfangled Bahamian post-colonial subjects, are a vision of all that is respectable and good and expected of a Bahamian of this time. Taken in 1978 by Sanford Sawyer, one of a few memorable Over-the-Hill photographers during the pre and post independence years, this image speaks volumes for what might seem so commonplace to us.

Pictures for a christening or any such ceremony are common, and many of us are the subject of staged photos throughout our lives – particularly as children. It is part of the Bahamian every day and ironically helps to show the mundane in spite of how produced these images are. This image is one of the lesser-known, and less visible parts of the National Collection – unless of course, you had the chance to see ‘Developing Blackness’ when it was shown at the NAGB in 2008. Curated by Krista Thompson Ph.D., the show contained work by Sawyer, as well as other photographers of the era including Cleveland Eneas, Antoine Ferrier, the aforementioned Sawyer, and Maxwell Stubbs, some of whom worked through 2008.

Why then would these images be considered artworks forming part of our National Collection when they are so clearly relics and memorabilia of someone’s personal collection? How is something so seemingly commonplace worthy of such scrutiny, devotion, and scholarship? [...]

CLICK HERE to read full article in The Nassau Guardian.

The Divine Venus series explores the actual resilience of women as they navigate through high-impact experiences of the body, psyche and demands of womanhood. I’m fascinated in the ironic hypocrisy that lays in the expectations of women and in my case—black women to be sovereign and robust while at the same time inept and emotionally weak/unpredictable.

This work acts as a series of portraits of real women who were interviewed while in Ghana, West Africa and from whom each fabric was purchased from. These women sell knock off Chinese wax fabric (Hitarget) smuggled in through Benin and Nigeria because the wax fabric produced in their country can no longer be afforded by everyday people. The elite in Ghana—often foreigners—are the only consumers of Ghana made fabric while the women smuggle in Chinese fabric so they can maintain the fashion and culture of Ghana.

Each fabric coincides with these women most of whom wanted to be anonymous but their stories are uniquely powerful. Strips are hand-sewn as armor over the Venus of Wilendorf eventually creating a deity worth worship.