caribbean artists a-z

As an influential artist as well as the Chief Curator (Director Emeritus) of the National Gallery of Jamaica, David Boxer has had a significant impact on Jamaica’s art and its artists. He has consciously steered Jamaican art in new directions.

Boxer studied at medical school in the US, later switching to complete his doctorate in art history. He has had no formal art training. Nevertheless, his artistic vocabulary is sophisticated, stemming from an interest in artists such as Francis Bacon, Joseph Cornell and Joseph Beuys. He now works increasingly in series and was one of the first Jamaican artists to move ‘of the wall’ into environmental and installation art. Canvas, paper, boxes, found-objects and furnishings are all integrated within his displays, as he works to enshrine, dramatise and expound his themes. As an accomplished classical pianist, his themes are like musical suites, each phrase being worked in detail only then to be combined into a major orchestration.

Using and subverting grand narratives, Boxer tackles ideas rarely articulated n Jamaican society, in particular, the taboo issues of sexuality. More recently. he has been pre-occupied with issues related to history, slavery and political traumas as they arise throughout the world. The Milky Way: A Postscript (1991-93) was part of his response to the bombing of Baghdad during the first Iraqui War. For Boxer, it seemed incredible that even in Jamaica one could witness the atrocities of that war, courtesy of the cable news networks which make Jamaica virtually a satellite of the USA and its culture. Boxer’s initial response was to create an installation that was first exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1991 in the exhibition Aspects III: Eight Avant Garde Artists. When the piece was dismantled, he decided to retain the imagery in his postscript of works on paper.

Certain ‘leitmotifs’ or ‘icons’ recur throughout Boxer’s imagery. In Memories of Colonisation (1983) and Violin D’Ingres (1986) the fragmented and gauzed human form, the African Tchi Wara mask, renaissance images and musical notations are spliced and collaged; personal and cultural imagery inserted is disruptive, he cuts and replaces so neatly and decisively, like a surgeon, that the overall effect is one of completeness. He explains:

“Very often in my work, I’m trying to deal with bringing together two cultures. I have African ancestry, I have English ancestry and the two cultures clash. This clash is witnessed in my Memories of Colonisation series set in English palaces with the African masks invading them…”

Boxer’s use of African masks is symbolic, if not ritualistic. He incorporates them within these new settings as a way of maintaining the black presence; although they are merely cut-outs, the plastic surgery he executes on them is intended, as he says, to ‘activate and revitalize’ them.

The development of Ralph Campbell’s career as a painter parallels similar developments in Jamaica’s modern art history. It is not surprising that his maturation as a painter mirrors the same process of maturation in Jamaica’s cultural institutions, since a great deal of his artistic achievements were due to their foundation. In his lifetime as an artist he experienced the birth of Jamaican art as well as its rise to public acclaim.

In an era when pottery was still regarded as a lesser art form Cecil Baugh was a pioneer in educating Jamaican art lovers and gaining their respect for its fine art status.

Cecil Baugh first developed an interest in clay making and ceramics as a young man living in Kingston. His first contact came through the Trenchfield sisters who lived in his Mountain View community. Originally from St Elizabeth, the sister made ‘yabbas’ in the traditional African way, and Baugh who had never seen these techniques in his home parish of Portland, became fascinated. He also recognized that making pots was a lucrative business, especially in the days before refrigeration when ‘yabbas’ were used for cool storage. Along with a fellow potter Wilfred Lord he established the Cornwall Works in Montego Bay, but later transferred to St Ann and then back to Kingston. Always innovative, Baugh worked to develop his techniques in pot making, experimenting with glazes and learning the intricacies of kiln firing to perfect his skills. Increasingly he moved further from the African tradition towards Western and Asian styles achieving his own distinctive coloured glazes.

Born in 1913, Abrahams like so many schoolboys took up caricaturing his schoolmasters while in his teens at Calabar College. Similarly, he applied his skills to drawing automobiles (the rage of that era) and emulated his father who also created car designs. It was a schoolboy talent that he was reluctant to outgrow and encouraged by his headmaster Rev. Ernest Price he began copying old master paintings as well as documenting local Jamaican scenes. In addition, he became fascinated with spiritual and mythical topics and tried to depict the scenes he visualized from his reading of the Bible and Greek classics. These are the themes that he would return to repeatedly during his long career as an artist.