The Ferrin Contemporary Gallery at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) is pleased to present Nature/Nurture, a group exhibition of twelve contemporary female artists, including Bahamian artist Anina Major, invited to explore the influence of gender and its impact on their practice.

This timely exhibition explores these ideas that range from direct interpretations of the natural world to more abstract notions, such as the construction of gender and the endowed role of women within their personal and professional careers. Works in clay range in form from individual vessels to composed still lifes and figural and abstract sculpture.

Gallery director Leslie Ferrin chose a group of twelve female artists whose works and careers provide a range of diverse perspectives related to age, cultural identity and work being done in contemporary ceramics. Considering the impact that the #MeToo movement is having on all professions, Ferrin asked the artists to pause and reflect on the role gender plays in their artistic practice and to consider the nurturing experiences that have shaped them.

Ferrin writes, “A renewed awareness and galvanizing commitment for change is surging through American cultural and academic institutions, organizations and businesses of every sort, exposing the crying need for structural change; specifically, the advancement of equality for artists of all genders and elimination of sexual harassment, wage discrimination and other forms of sexism that continue to affect the lives of women, transgender and non-binary individuals. As part of the movement to reverse and rebalance with new priorities and opening doors, it is crucial to offer opportunities to artists who have been historically marginalized.”

Exhibition will be on view until March 28, 2020.

CLICK HERE for full text on the exhibition at Ferrin Contemporary.
CLICK HERE for Anina Major’s website.

Marian Goodman Gallery now represents Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan

The Marian Goodman Gallery of New York, Paris and London has recently announced its representation of Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan whose multidisciplinary practice is centered on the intersections of art, science, and politics. Born in Nassau in The Bahamas in 1979, Strachan earned his BFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2006, and currently divides his time between New York City and Nassau.

Known for creating work that grapples with subjects ranging from aeronautics and astronomy to deep-sea exploration and extreme climatology, the conceptual artist made international headlines in 2006 after he traveled to the Alaskan Arctic to extract a 4.5 ton block of ice, which he then shipped via FedEx to his birthplace in The Bahamas. The ice was exhibited in a specially designed, solar-powered freezer chamber in the courtyard of his elementary school.

Other ambitious projects include Orthostatic Tolerance, exhibited over a four-year period, from 2008 to 2011, the work incorporates photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation which document Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia, as well as his experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC)—whose mission the artist claims is “getting The Bahamas involved in the global exploration conversation.”

Strachan, who recently served as an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute as well as at the Allen Institute, has been featured in numerous solo and international exhibitions including the Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans; Biennale de Lyon; and the Venice Biennale, and has received a various awards including the Frontier Art Prize, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant, the Tiffany Foundation Grant, the Grand Arts Residency Fellowship, and the Alice B. Kimball Fellowship.

In 2013, for the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale, Strachan was given the commission for the inaugural Bahama pavilion. Curated by Jean Crutchfield and Robert Hobbs, Polar Eclipse traced the 1909 polar expedition of Robert Peary and Matthew Alexander Henson, who became the first explorers to reach the North Pole. While Peary became famous for the feat, Henson, an African American, was essentially excluded from the fame. In conversation with Artforum about his research for the project, Strachan said, “Extreme physical and cultural discomfort, and the achievement of a goal in a hostile environment: In some sense my work at The Bahamas’ pavilion is an attempt to negotiate these ideas within an art-making practice. You could say there’s a recurring theme of loss and invisibility in my work.”

Story courtesy of ArtForum Magazine.

CLICK HERE for The Marian Goodman Gallery.

Bahamian artists curate and showcase artwork in San Francisco exhibition

The Luggage Store, a non-profit artist-run multidisciplinary arts organization in San Francisco CA, was honored to work with Bahamian artist and curator Tavares Strachan of Isolated Labs (NY) to co-present overmydeadbody, an exhibition of photography, video, sculpture, and paintings by four artists who explore ways in which the body is both the instrument and site of an existential battle for relevance in a world mediated by built tools and technology.

The exhibition attempts to address several concepts such as “the body as battle ground”. As we reflect on the social, cultural and political landscape, the conditions bodies exist in and bodies themselves, including the way in how we understand them has changed.

The work of two other Bahamian artists were prominently featured in this 4-person exhibition – Jeffrey Meris and Christophe Thompson.

Jeffrey Meris

Jeffrey Meris’ sculptural work considers the impacts of naturalization, (dis)placement and racial interpellation while seeking spaces of transcendence. Through a lens that is both personal and collective, Meris’ work positions the immigrant in a space of identity flux.

In Weight, (2019) a white sculpted head (of the artist) is kinetically shaved down in a most disturbing way.

Jeffrey Meris’ work concerns the schism between his birthplace of Haiti (Ayiti) and country of residence, The Bahamas. Meris earned an A.A in Arts and Crafts from the College of The Bahamas, a B.F.A in Sculpture from Temple University, and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris lives and works in New York and is from The Bahamas.

Art Class in the Garden of the Groves annual art exhibition

On March 8th, German born, Grand Bahama-based Angelika Siska’s ‘Art Class in the Garden of the Groves’, in Freeport, Grand Bahama held their annual exhibition opening of paintings inspired by David Hockney, the renowned British artist born in 1937. The exhibition opening was a special highlight of the Garden this year as the grounds are still recovering from Hurricane Dorian.

Fifteen artists attended Siska’s class, now in its 12th year, and for the first time, a living artist was chosen as inspiration. Hockney’s work from the past 10 years was especially liked, work he had created after he returned to his childhood home in Yorkshire, UK.

Last year, Hockney held a huge retrospective exhibition last year at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and to support this exhibition, his ideas about painting were documented and published in various formats. The student artists were able to study and glean inspiration from Hockney’s authentic ideas directly from the artist’s words themselves.

The artists who participated: Virginia Cafferata, Lorine Miller, Thea Albert, Eva von Albedyhll, Cali Veilleux, Suzanne Baker, Jo Morasco, Susan Jensen-Sweeting, Rose Mary Voakes, Kay Hardy, Allison Crow, Yu Chen and Hannah Brand.

by Pam Burnside

The Visual Art Department at the University of The Bahamas (UB) will present a group exhibition entitled “Process & Material” for this year’s Transforming Spaces (TS2020). Curated by Assistant Professor Heino Schmid, the exhibition will be displayed in the Franklyn R. Wilson Graduate Centre and include works by present students, faculty and recent alumni.

As the title suggests, the exhibition hopes to engage with the audience in terms of the diversity of creative methodologies and application of traditional media in the growing landscape of visual art in The Bahamas. As the leading tertiary institution in the country, UB’s Visual Art Department is consistently re-engaging with its students to help facilitate burgeoning ideas about what it means to be a practicing visual artist as well as creating an embryonic environment that challenges and assists with the execution of those ideas.

by Dessane Lopez Cassell

MIAMI / On a recent Saturday night in Little Haiti, Miami, a group of musicians, dancers, and onlookers paraded their way down Northeast Second Avenue, the main drag of the neighborhood, which for decades has been home to a vibrant community of Haitian and other Caribbean-descended folks. The crowd swayed and danced to the rhythmic sounds of bright red and white vaksen (cylindrical trumpets, typically made of bamboo) and percussion, enjoying a performance-cum-parade by local band Rara Lakay, which performs in traditional Haitian rara style every third Friday of the month at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. Joyous and exuberant, this performance was a little different than usual, organized as part of the Third Horizon Film Festival, a small but mighty annual showcase of “urgent new cinema from the Caribbean, its diaspora and beyond,” now in its fourth edition.

As the festival’s associate director Monica Sorelle noted to Hyperallergic, “Rara, and Rara Lakay in particular, are an essential part of Little Haiti, and it felt important to finally fold them into the festival and further assert their presence, especially as we’re witnessing the concurrence of their displacement with the residents and businesses from the neighborhood.”

For Sorelle, who grew up in Miami and is a filmmaker in her own right, collaborating with Rara Lakay emerged from a place of consciousness about what it meant for the festival to move from its former home of O Cinema in Miami’s Wynwood district to Little Haiti, a rapidly gentrifying community in Northeast Miami, to which she and many other members of the festival’s team have a close relationship. That Little Haiti sits on some of the highest ground in a city besieged by rising sea levels is no coincidence when it comes to the rate at which developers have been snapping up property there. In 2017 alone, rents jumped by more than 50%. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article at Hyperallergic.