Art Show
Art
Fifty Years of Contemporary Art in Jamaica
The National Gallery of Jamaica was established in 1974, as the first national art gallery in the Anglo phone Caribbean, and has a comprehensive collection of early,modern and contemporary art from Jamaica, along with some Caribbean and international holdings.
This summer, the Art Gallery of Mississauga will host an exhibition of master works from the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica.
Contemporary Jamaican Art c1962/c2012 will open on July 12, 2012 for an eight-week exhibition that will feature works by Barrington Watson, Edna Manley, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, Eugene Hyde, Karl Parboosingh, Milton Harley, Osmond Watson, Ebony G Patterson, Marlon James, Petrona Morrison and Leasho Johnson.
Peter Chin will be a featured artist in Contemporary Jamaican Art circa 1962 / circa 2012 at the Art Gallery of Mississauga creating a new performance art piece for the opening on July the 12th
Publication
Contemporary Jamaican Art, Circa 1962/Circa 2012
is a 48-page full-colour commemorative publication —a companion reference catalogue for the exhibition of masterworks from the National Gallery of Jamaica,
coming to the Art Gallery of Mississauga this summer.
Limited to an edition of 800 and sure to become a collectable, the perfect keepsake for our Canadian celebration of the 50th year anniversary of Jamaica’s independence. GET YOUR COPY TODAY!
The book contains photographs of the many exhibits, two essays by curator Dr. Veerle Poupeye, and profiles of 26 Jamaican artists including Barrington Watson, Edna Manley, Albert Huie, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds, Karl Parboosingh, Ebony G. Patterson, Marlon James and Leasho Johnson.
To Mail In your order— Click HERE
To Order Online —– Click HERE
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A Tribute to Jamaica 50 Years!
In honour of the Jamaica Independence celebration of 50 years – The Jamaican national flag will be presented on the big screen at Celebration Square during July and August alongside the Canadian flag. The Jamaican flag of black, green, and gold was adopted on August 2, 1962.
Saturday July 14th, 1 – 3 pm Walk the Talk with Jamaica 50 Committee, artist Ebony Patterson, exhibition Curator Dr. Veerle Poupeye, and AGM Curator Stuart Keeler. Join us at the Art Gallery of Mississauga for a casual stroll throughout the gallery with National Gallery of Jamaica Executive Director Dr. Veerle Poupeye, artist Ebony G. Patterson, and AGM Curator Stuart Keeler.
Thursday, July 19th, 7 pm Book It! A presentation by author Rachel Manley (Edna Manley’s grand-daughter). The author of Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, which won the Governor General’s literary Award for Non-fiction in 1997 Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers and Horses in her Hair: A Granddaughter’s story about sculptor Edna Manley. Manley has won Jamaica’s prestigious Centennial Medal for poetry.
Saturday, July 21st, 3 pm Book It! A reading by short story writer Peta-Gaye Nash. I Too Hear the Drums is her 2010 collection. Nash is also author of three children’s books and lives in Mississauga.
Thursday, July 26th, 7 – 9 pm Art to Heart to Art Walk and dance at the Gallery with Kevin Ormsby, Artistic Director of KasheDance, international choreographer and dancer who transforms art to dance while Paula de Ronde, Co-Chair Jamaica 50 Art + Literature Committee relates how art speaks to the individual.
Saturday, July 28th, 3 pm Quentin “Vercetty” Lindsay. Lindsay knows no boundaries when it comes to his ‘urban word’ artistic expression. This amazing thinker spreads a message of social change through the innovation of different art forms. The gallery will be a platform for engagement.
Thursday, August 9th, 7 pm Book It! A reading by author Rachel Manley (Edna Manley’s grand-daughter). The author of Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, which won the Governor General’s literary Award for Non-fiction in 1997.
Saturday, August 18th, 3pm Book It! Honor Ford Smith, Associate Professor at York University discussesPerformance, popular murals and the struggle for public memory in Kingston,Jamaica. Performance and social movements are among Ford Smith’s special areas of interest. Come to be engaged in a presentation that will be active, maybe controversial and relevant. Publications include: 3 Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology and Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women.
Thursday, August 23rd, 7 pm Book It! Author Olive Senior introduces you to various facets of Jamaican Heritage through her work Encyclopedia of Jamaica Heritage. Senior is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Summer Lightning and Other Stories, Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence in 2003, and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica in 2004.
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Jamaica 50 – A Literary Legacy
To paraphrase novelist Anais Nin, Jamaica’s history breathes through its literature, cries out with its literature, and sings in its literature. In other words, literature is central to our culture, and we have every need and use for it. The Harbourfront Centre is especially aware of the power invoked by the written word, and celebrates it in the Reading Series, an event that hosts numerous writers with unique literary voices.
This year the season begins with a proud voice echoing from the pages of Jamaican lit, complemented by the depth of African-Canadian prose. Kwame Dawes, Honor Ford-Smith and new participant Ishion Hutchinson, hosted by Dr. Afua Cooper, will discuss Jamaica over the last 50 years, the journey that led us to where we are and where they see us going. Join us on September 19th at the Harbourfront Centre in the Brigantine Room to hear Jamaica’s voice—our voice through literature.
Kwame Dawes
Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes is the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. Dawes has also edited nine anthologies. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and Associate Poetry Editor for Peepal Tree Press in the UK. Dawes also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program and is a faculty member of Cave Canem. Dawes’ latest book, Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Copper Canyon in 2013. His pioneering work as poet/journalist has led to several award-winning multimedia pieces covering a range of themes including HIV AIDS (Live Hope Love and Voices of Haiti), inner city blight (Ashes) and the legacy of Jim Crow (Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country). Dawes’ many awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Silver Musgrave Medal, the Emmy, the Pushcart Prize, the Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award, and most recently the Poets and Writers Barnes and Nobles Writers for Writers Award. Kwame Dawes is the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is currently working on an extended sequence of poems that are inspired by and that dialog with the plays of August Wilson, titled, August: A Quintet.
Honor Ford-Smith
Associate Professor BA (Theatre and English) Madison, Wisconsin; MA (Adult Education) Toronto, PhD (Education) Toronto
Honor Ford-Smith grew up and was educated in Kingston, Jamaica, where she lived most of his life on the Hope Road, ironically built on top of the land occupied by a slave plantation that no doubt long ago contributed much to English coffers. One day, a Rastaman called Bob Marley moved into a house across the street. From there he poured out his songs, changing popular music and representations of African diaspora forever. What a lesson!
Ford-Smith’s research and artistic work is linked by a focus on performance and social change. Initially focusing on gender, class, drama, popular culture and popular education, she became active in the Caribbean women’s movement, creating plays and popular dramas dealing with critical social issues. She worked in collaborative theatre, collected oral testimonies about women’s lives and researched the contribution of the Jamaican women’s movements to anti-colonialism.
Ford-Smith then turned to the study of performance as a site of anti-imperial nationalism in postcolonial Jamaica. Critiques of Western development paradigms, racism and mixed race identity, community arts practice and organizational democracy have been themes of her work, especially as these are linked to social movements in the former colonized world. She became interested not only in what we know, but also in how we know, and began a search for methods of knowledge creation that rupture colonial knowledge-making practices underlying what one Jamaican writer has called “the unfinished project emancipation” (Brodber).
Presently, Ford-Smith is working on questions of place, memory and violence in the context of neo-liberal globalization. She is interested in ways in which neo-liberal violence has ruptured people’s relationship to place and the ways in which performances of various kinds represent and can represent this. She welcomes the challenge of working at FES because it allows her to bring together many interests across the disciplines and to work on the development of a critically engaged curriculum.
Ishion Hutchinson
The newest addition to this panel, Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He attended the University of the West Indies, Mona, and received his MFA in Poetry from New York University. His work has appeared in the LA Review, Callaloo, Caribbean Review of Books, Poetry International and the chapbook, Bryan’s Bay. Far District, his first full-length collection, won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award in 2010.
Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His first collection, Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other works include The Garden, Harlem Summer, Two Trees, and A Small Pantheon.
Afua Cooper is a scholar, author and poet. She earned her PhD in Canadian history and the African Diaspora with a focus on the black communities of 19th century Ontario. Her doctoral dissertation was a biography of renowned antislavery crusader Henry Bibb. She has also done extensive research on Mary Bibb, a schoolteacher and abolitionist, and groundbreaking work on the enslavement of Black people in Canada. Such research has resulted in The Hanging of Angélique: the Untold Story of Slavery in Canada and The Burning of Old Montreal (2006). Cooper
has authored several collections of poetry, including the award-winning Memories Have Tongue (1992) and Copper Woman and Other Poems (2007), as well as several books for young adults.