Bahamian cultural icon, Patricia Bazard, passes away

Patricia Bazard, former director of the National Children’s Choir, “cultural icon” and “exemplary talent”, died in hospital on Christmas Day. She was 71. Bazard had recently been in and out of hospital.

Her friends and family posted fond memories of Bazard via social media, singing praises of her life’s work and contributions to the country.

Lindsay Thompson wrote, “Her singing voice will forever be with us. Her care and gentle manner has touched so many.”

Bazard’s daughter-in-law, Cheryl Bazard, a former senator and former Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) candidate for St. Barnabas, said, “It’s a highly personal loss because for Mrs. Bazard, family was everything.

“We also join in the nation because of her contribution to the various choirs, in particular the National Children’s Choir, the Boy’s Choir, [and] Salem Union Baptist Choir, where she was the director of music. And it came on a day which should have been celebratory but it ended with us losing her on Christmas Day.” [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Related Story:
“Ministry Statement on the Passing of Patricia Bazard...”

Bahamian artist awarded a Queen’s Honour

Government House has announced the Queen’s 2018 New Year’s Honours recognizing the accomplishments of persons who have made major contributions to various spheres of Bahamian life.

Well known Bahamian visual artist, educator, community leader Antonius Roberts was awarded an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contributions and sacrifices to and for education, the arts and the community.

Antonius Roberts (born 1958, Nassau, The Bahamas) is an accomplished painter, sculptor, open space designer, passionate about preserving and documenting Bahamian life and African heritage. Roberts began his art career as a painter and his practice has grown to incorporate sculpture and installation.

Among many of his notable works is Sacred Spaces, which pays homage to the first landing site of slaves in The Bahamas. Roberts carved 12 female figures from the rooted stumps of Casuarina trees, all of them looking towards Africa. In 2009, he designed seven acres of grounds at Centreville House, which included landscaping and Art installations. It marked the first downtown park in Nassau. In 2013, he was invited to create an installation of hand blown glass spheres for the new Lynden Pindling Airport.

A graduate from Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, P.A.), Roberts received a Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Painting in 1981 and has since played a significant role in the development of art and artists in the country. He was a teacher at Government High School and Lecturer at College of The Bahamas, mentoring a generation of Bahamian artists. For the past 25 years, he has been a driving force behind the Central Bank's annual art competition. He was a coordinator of the FINCO Summer Art Workshop for youth, and played a leading role in the creation of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. Roberts is also deeply committed to community development and is the current Artist-in-Residence of the Schooner Bay project in Abaco.

Roberts was the recipient of a Cacique Award, a Bahamas Silver Jubilee Award, and a Delta Sigma Theta Award. In 2008, he was featured in the documentary film Artists of The Bahamas. Roberts’ studio and gallery is located at Hillside House, Cumberland Street.

CLICK HERE to visit Antonius’ website.

Bahamian artist in new LA exhibition

Launch LA and the California African American Museum (CAAM) are proud to present a multicultural survey of selected works entitled “Eyes Forward” that features ten contemporary artists of color living and working in Los Angeles. One of the artists selected is Bahamian artist April Bey.

Despite the artists’ diverse backgrounds, interests, and life experiences, all these artists share an urgency to be heard when addressing contemporary issues of race, class, and gender while expressing disenchantment with the current political and social establishment.

April Bey’s complex, layered works on panel are created using oil paint, wax fabric, and epoxy resin. She employs a visually charged graphic-design style complemented by text, rooted in popular culture and mass media communication, to raise issues of Black empowerment and feminism.

The artwork on display includes both two and three-dimensional works, and ranges from figurative depictions to highly abstracted forms, from acrylic on canvas paintings to mixed-media collage, and clay sculptures to assemblage with found objects.

CLICK HERE for more information at LA Art Show.

Christian Campbell gives talk on Basquiat’s work at the Barbican in London tonight

In its programming supportive of the UK’s first ever large-scale exhibition of the work of famed American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Barbican Center is proud to host acclaimed Bahamian-Trinidadian poet, Christian Campbell, as he speaks on his ongoing work on Basquiat in a lecture entitled “Basquiat and Hip Hop” tonight, Thursday, January 11th at 7pm.

Campbell will address Basquiat’s early graffiti experiments as one half of the infamous graffiti duo SAMO©. His talk will be followed by a discussion centered on the burgeoning hip hop, rap and graffiti scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s.

“Basquiat: Boom for Real”, is an unprecedented exhibition that brings together an outstanding selection of more than 100 of Basquiat’s works from international museums and private collections.

Way to go Christian!

Bradley Roberts releases new autobiography

by Felicity Ingraham

“Big Bad Brad” is the name of the recently published autobiography of Bradley B. E. Roberts, National Chairman Emeritus of the Progressive Liberal Party, a Member of Parliament for 25 years and former Cabinet Minister. It is now on shelves of local book stores and contains more than 200 pages of the history of one of the most colourful characters in Bahamian politics.

Veteran journalist Steve McKinney coined the name “Big Bad Brad” while he was working at the More94 radio station and was conducting debates in 1998, shortly after the Free National Movement was in its second term as governing party. He found that Mr. Roberts had a knack for digging up facts and doing his research, and coming well-prepared to battle his political opponents with a booming voice and the vigor and energy of a lion. “I call a spade a spade and I lay out the facts,” said Mr. Roberts, alluding to why the name has stuck with him over the years.

In contrast to his audacious personality on the political front, Mr Roberts swears he is as humble as a “pussycat”. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article on Pg 4 of The Tribune Weekend.

A literary treasure and her tale of a sea monster

by Richard Coulson

If we have a literary “establishment” in The Bahamas, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas must be judged its leader.

A month ago, our National Art Gallery staged for her many followers the presentation of “Lusca and other fantastic Tales,” her 18th published work, produced after a lifetime as a novelist, poet, historian, biographer, essayist, teacher, publicist, art critic, TV and film producer – you name it – in the fields of literature and Bahamian folklore. Starting with the first Cacique Award for Writing in 1995, her complete list of recognitions and publications would fill this entire column, and then some.

Patti, as she is known to friends, was born in 1950 in Cat Island, whose enigmatic monastery ruins seem to bestow mystic gifts on many of its offspring. While shuttling to schools in Nassau, her early life was inspired by the amateur literary abilities of her maternal grandfather, assigned as headmaster of the local one-room school. With that intellectual background, she could hardy remain an insular provincial.

Her career in education led on the University of Miami, then to BA at the University of West Indies, where she majored in French and Spanish, a year as assistant teacher at a school in southern France, and a 17-year academic period as professor and department head with The College of The Bahamas, where she was the keynote poet at the ceremony when it became a university. Her later life has embraced conference lectures in London and Leeds in the UK and a memorial tribute for poet Maya Angelou in St Louis, Missouri, as well as Latin American symposia in the Caribbean and Washington, DC. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article on Pg 13 of The Tribune Weekend.

Minister Pintard: “Connecting displaced young people to the arts can be transformative”

by Eric Rose, BIS

At the recent Opening Reception for “Medium” and the Unveiling of the Gates Commission at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture the Hon. Michael Pintard said in his view culture can have a calming effect if applied to issues of concern currently being dealt with in society.

For example, in the ongoing fight against crime, Minister Pintard said: “If you take the young man who has a case of self-hatred – which enables him to take the life of someone who looks identical to him, who sounds just like him – and you were to introduce him to a setting like this, where he is able to recognize skills that he has that have never been validated in the society, he begins to see the world differently. He begins to explore certain things in his mind and, more importantly, in his heart, he – or she – has an epiphany.”

Minister Pintard said that what his Ministry is doing is asking individuals in society to embrace the creative within themselves. He added that it could aid in taking the thousands of “disconnected” young people and reconnect them to themselves through the Arts, presenting Bahamian society with a reasonable chance of “doing something transformative” in The Bahamas.

Minister Pintard reiterated that it was important to use art as a “national development tool” that helps Bahamian society see the value of the industry, and an image of themselves that they could be in love with and embrace. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Bahamas Weekly.

A defining moment for an emerging Bahamian artist

Artist Matthew Rahming’s debut.

by Keisha Oliver

Last month, The Pro Gallery at the University of The Bahamas closed its 2017 programming on a high note with the opening of new works by Matthew Rahming entitled ‘tuff’.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the gallery and project space has been dedicated to burgeoning the careers of UB art students and emerging Bahamian artists. For UB Art major Matthew Rahming, the support from the gallery and UB art faculty has been no different.

Beginning his studies at UB in 2015 as a Secondary Education major, Rahming soon transitioned to the art programme in 2016. Like many emerging artists, he struggled with the uncertainty of a career in the arts that often stems from a history of brainwashed societal views. As a nation, we need to realise the wealth of the creative economy and plant more seeds of nurturing and mentorship so that creativity prevails. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article at the Nassau Guardian.

The Power of Imprisonment through Language

The Eye for the Tropics and Majority Rule in 2018 Bahamas

by Dr Ian Bethell Bennett

“We believe that rape is a private matter and that women are inherently unequal.”

As 2017 passed into memory this last week, it seems important to think about how we see ourselves in the future. Spirituality could play a large part in this vision, or we could simply choose to continue along what seems to be a road paved with consumerist joy.

The paradise myth is part and parcel of that consumerism: where beaches and bodies of paradise that we need to survive can be bought, sold, bartered, negotiated away and given to other sovereign states for their own devices. The opening of “Medium: Practices and Route of Spirituality and Mysticism” at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) on December 14, 2017 presented a moment for reflection, but also for a new focus. When we can celebrate Bahamian ‘masters’ Tony McKay aka “Exuma” or “The Obeah Man,” Amos Ferguson, Wellington Bridgewater and Netica “Nettie” Symonette, along with a boat-load–used intentionally–of other artists, we are saying that perhaps we are changing the way we see ourselves.

It was once practised to appreciate only those classically-trained artists who were somehow ‘better’ than the nonconformists, who envisioned the unseen story, which according to Édouard Glissant, lay submerged and links the entire region together. These untaught hands and fingers put to paper, wood, rock and canvas to create what they see, however they see it. These stories have been effectively silenced, erased, cut off by the din of postcolonial discourse that chooses to see ‘other’ people, in particular, limiting ways. [....]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Amos Ferguson’s “Jesus and the Good Semeriton”

The colour of God and histories of faith.

by Natalie Willis

Amos Ferguson is arguably one of our most widely known Bahamian artists in the international arena. By now quite a few of us know of his life’s story: coming from Exuma to Nassau, growing up under a very religious father (as one of many children), growing his deep love of the Bible and his father’s words as a preacher, the house painter by trade turned intuitive artist. With his foundation in art being so firmly rooted in visions and the divine (he was famously told to paint by a vision from God that his nephew had experienced), and in the hustle and bustle of the straw market, Ferguson’s work appears to be quaint but holds the conviction and confidence of a man who knows himself. This kind of confidence, it would seem, can only come from such a strong belief in oneself – and maybe this can only come from believing in something bigger than you. This might be where the Bahamian brand of biggity behavior comes from – our spirituality – whatever deity we might bow our heads to.

“Jesus and the Good Semeriton” (nd) is in keeping with Ferguson’s practice in the now-iconic markers of his practice: flat expanses of color in simplified shapes, a particularly plastic and fleshy pink to denote whiteness of skin, his beloved white Jesus, and hand-painted titles full of Bahamian vernacular. Yes, there are misspellings, but with Ferguson’s work it often feels as though this has more to do with the particularities of our speech and dialect than a careless disregard for proper spelling and grammar. His attention to titling is one of the few ways we have immortalized Bahamian dialect in a genuine, sincere, and meaningful way. [...]

CLICK HERE for full article in The Nassau Guardian.

Bringing Taíno Peoples back into history

An upcoming Smithsonian exhibition explores the legacy of Native peoples in the Greater Antilles and their contemporary heritage movement.

by Ranald Woodaman

No exhibition has actually addressed the topic of Native peoples in the Caribbean after 1492. Native peoples, represented by the durable elements of their material culture, are contained in museums within the pre-colonial moment. To frame an exhibition that emphasizes the survival and contemporary vitality of these indigenous peoples is an intimidating task. But such is the upcoming “Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean,” now under preparation for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Gustav Heye Center in New York City.

In another lifetime—2008—I first approached the archeological Native American collections at the Smithsonian’s American Indian and Natural History museums with an interest in the history of the collections themselves. How were these artifacts first collected, and how did they end up at the Smithsonian? What were the political contexts, the ideologies behind collecting and the market forces at hand? About the time I was poking around collections, I heard someone in the Smithsonian leadership talk about the Taíno movement in Puerto Rico, and I thought to myself, “How’s that possible? Indians in Puerto Rico are extinct.”

CLICK HERE to read full article at the Smithsonian.

7 simple ways to be more creative in 2018

by Isaac Kaplan

Being creative isn’t easy, even for artists. At times, the ability to summon creativity can feel daunting, while other times, the ability to come up with novel ideas may come easily. But there’s plenty of research on what prompts and enhance creativity, and also how creative expression itself can positively impact your health and wellness. If you’re looking to live a more creative life in 2018, here are seven ways to do just that (and you’ll feel better while you’re doing it).

1. Ditch distractions
In order to better appreciate beauty and art, find ways to get rid of distractions. A study published in May of this year found that when we’re distracted, our ability to experience beauty is diminished. The research supports the contention popularized by philosopher Immanuel Kant, that processing beauty requires complex thoughts.
The same applies when looking at art. And these days, the biggest distraction at galleries and museums is very likely your cell phone. So, next time you’re heading out to see art, consider putting your phone away, or leave it at home altogether. As painful as it may be to pass up a selfie with the Mona Lisa, research has found that the mere presence of a phone in your pocket can lessen your focus. [...]

CLICK HERE to read full list at Artsy.

3 ways to channel your fears into creativity

by Meera Lee Patel

After six years of working as a book editor, Meera Lee Patel quit her publishing job to become a freelance illustrator. In the years prior, she taught herself to draw and paint, and developed an affinity for watercolor, drawn to the medium’s spontaneous nature and rich, translucent hues. Patel developed her own style—swirling visions of nature, often peppered with upbeat aphorisms in jaunty capital letters—and hustled to get her work in front of the eyeballs of art directors. Along the way, she faced stress, anxiety, and the insecurities that come with being a self-taught artist—but learned that creating new work, and transcending her fears, could push her to become better.

Now a best-selling author and accomplished illustrator, Patel just released her second book, My Friend Fear: Finding Magic in the Unknown. In it, through her own essays and art, as well as the wise words of famous writers and artists (from James Baldwin to Charlotte Rampling), Patel reflects on her experiences overcoming fear and encourages readers to recognize fear as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle. Here, Patel shares some advice for fellow artists, writers, and other individuals. [...]

1. Lose the imposter syndrome
The imposter syndrome is designed to make us feel like failures, even if we’re doing our very best; and especially when our very best is more than enough. It tells us that no matter how skilled we are, all of our achievements are mistakes—and that any successes were arrived at by an accidental stroke of luck.

CLICK HERE to read full article at Artsy.

The Black Cloth Uprising

By Bahamian artist
Kishan Munroe

• • •

I, ....................................... do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors, according to law. So help me God.

– Oath of Allegiance, (The Commonwealth of The Bahamas)

As The Bahamas celebrates its 51st anniversary of Majority Rule and settles from the frenzy of social dialogues, vicious onslaughts of partisan politics, and propagandistic revisions of history that accompanied the 2017 political season, I feel compelled to take a critical look at the state of postcolonial Bahamas.

Through the use of allegory and the implementation of a metaphorical language charged with sentiments of power, sovereignty and revolution, I confront the
complexity of these universal issues, particularly evident in the contemporary Caribbean, from a unique Bahamian contextual perspective. Through careful
attention to detail and placement of articles such as the mace and the Guy Fawkes mask, these allegorical compositions act as an anthropological chronicle, tracking the “development” of society; moments and eras of our nation’s collective struggle – from Independence (1973) to the present.

Referencing the colonial heritage of the Caribbean, I shape these dynamic compositions using the pastel pinks (‘flamingo’) and blues of the popular Caribbean colonial palette, speaking to the ‘climate’ of neocolonialism we arguably find ourselves in, still, despite our proclamations of independence. This colour scheme also draws reference to the condescending mindset some Europeans once held, regarding what they considered the brute culture of the Caribbean: vibrant colors were viewed as a sign of unsophistication, with the more muted European color palette, an indication of a refined culture/society.

Central in all of these compositions is the ceremonial mace: originally a blunt medieval weapon used to bludgeon one’s enemy in battle. As time progressed it became an embellished ceremonial symbol of power and sovereignty. Fixed atop the Bahamian mace is a crown, which represents the British monarchy. Surviving the silent revolution for independence, this mace is still recognized as the symbol of supreme power and authority in the governance of an independent Commonwealth of the Bahamas – 51 years after Majority Rule! These contradictions of true independence are perpetuated every 5 years when members of a new government administration, like former “subjects”, ceremoniously swear allegiance, to the British Crown.

I ponder, “How do we decolonize the postcolonial?”

Nowadays the universally recognized face of protest is that of the Guy Fawkes mask. The British tradition of burning in effigy, Guy Fawkes, one who had the audacity to go against colonial rule has been engrained in our psyche and our culture. We continue to assassinate those who go against “the system”. As a so-called “decolonized” society, we often wear the persona of revolution but it is all too often nothing more than that… just a mask. We still seek validation from the Queen.

With this body of work my objective is to force persons to contemplate: “Is this the portrait... the self-portrait we really want to paint? Is this what we have been
posing for…or rather, deliberately positioned for (by our political representatives), for all these years?” Consistent throughout this series is a young man… displaced… struggling, in the rose tinted waters of a perilous paradise that has already been defined for him. This figurative representation of the Bahamian people struggles in distress, but he still manages to stay above water; fatigued, yet resilient and strong.

Independently he has journeyed a great distance but in order to survive he must truly divorce himself of the heavy, unnecessary burdens weighing him down. He must be willing to lose ‘power’ to gain strength.

– Kishan Munroe