Petrine Archer [.com]

Jamaica lost one of it most generous art collector's today. Guy McIntosh the owner of Frame Centre Gallery and one of the finest collections of contemporary Jamaican art has died just a few months after making a major donation from his collection to the National Gallery of Jamaica.

Much about Guy McIntosh's early life predisposed him to Jamaica's modern art movement. He grew up in Westmoreland in a family already involved with woodwork, making furniture. Initially, he too learned cabinet-making in his adopted father's workshop, but once he came to Kingston in his late teens, he recognised that he could earn a living from framing art. Initially, he framed work for burgeoning collectors such as Dorit Hutson, Pat Rousseau, Vin McMorris and A.D. Scott but eventually the establishment of a small workshop on the premises of the newly formed Contemporary Art Gallery, meant that he would establish friendships and his own working relationships with artists such as Barrington Watson, and Karl Parboosingh, and recent JSA graduates Gene Pearson, Jackson Gordon, Cecil Cooper and Kofi Kayiga so much so that even after the CAG dissolved and he set up a workshop on Constant Spring Road beneath the studios shared by Barrington Watson, Keith Curwin and George Rodney, these artists continued bringing their art to him. The support of other collectors such as Maurice and Valerie Facey and a stint as Manager at Noel Ho Tom's HiQo Gallery finally encouraged him to re-establish his own business on a more formal setting with partners and a bank loan. In 1972, he incorporated the G. McIntosh Frame Centre, that would become the prototype of the Gallery and work shop later opened in Tangerine Place.

If as Rastas believe, we are all divine and ever living then we cannot be sad about the passing of Alton 'Barry' Chevannes one of the movement's finest scholarly supporters. Instead we must celebrate his life and consider his achievements in support of Rastafari. As a university academic and a cultural activist/pacifist Chevannes helped to remove the stigma from the movement that was once reviled and almost outlawed by the State. Today, the Rastafari movement is a global phenomenon, popularised through its music and spiritual life style. Chevannes sociologist, anthropologist and the author of important books such as Rastafari: Roots and Ideology and Rastafari and Other World Views played a significant part in extrapounding the beliefs of Rastas as well helping to decriminalise their sacred herb marijuana. As the Chairman of the Institute of Jamaica and dean of the UWI's Faculty of Social Sciences, Chevannes put his intellectual weight behind the movement helping others to see it as a modern cultural phenomenon with roots that our nation should be proud of. In this sense his legacy lives and Jah lives!

The Jamaican art community is saddened by the recent death of artist and poet Seya Parboosingh. She died at 85 having spent more than fifty years here. Born Samila Joseph in 1925 in Allentown Pennsylvania, Seya changed her name in 1957 when she married expressionist painter Karl Parboosingh in New York. They moved to Jamaica the next year and with Karl's encouragement, Seya began painting and exhibiting alongside him. Their styles were remarkably different. His paintings were strident with bold, brash brushmarks that critiqued the social conventions he abhored. Seya was more introspective, reserving her poetic forms for domesticated scenes with young women that like In Sorrow (1977) seemed to blend a childlike imagination with adult poignancy. In 2000, over a number of weekly visits, I had the privilege of talking at length with Seya while we prepared an article about her life and work for the magazine Caribbean Beat. I will miss her. Read the article.