IDB

Extract from the IDB Essay: Jamaican Art: Looking Back Moving Forward

Contemporary Jamaican Art: A Jamaican Presence in the About Change Exhibition curated by Felix Angel, essay Petrine Archer, May 18, 2011

What we call Jamaican Art today is a phenomenon of the 20th century. The genre dates to the earliest days of a fledgling nationalist movement that exhorted the island's artists to take inspiration from local subjects. In the advent of independence from British colonialism and with the creation of works such as Edna Manley's Beadseller (1922) modeled from a local market vendor, we can speak of an art form rooted in the experiences of people who identified with the island as home. Because of this, we can also recognise Jamaican art as being 'already modern'. It was fashioned when avant-garde artists in other cities such as Paris, New York and London, disenchanted by the spoils of imperialism and inspired by the art of other cultures, posited new ways of seeing. Similarly, works such as Ronald Moody's Johanaan, 1936 or John Dunkley's Banana Plantation (1936) and David Miller Jnr's horned heads from the 1950s, represented a nation undergoing change and reflected new visual models with modern culturally distinct aspirations. Framing contemporary Jamaican art within this context of modernity allows us to view works such as Michael Parchment's A New Beginning (2009), and the Jamaican artist's identity not as native or primitivised, but rather as radicalized and instrumental in a process that would critique and support the dismantling of European colonialism in the second half of the 20^th century.