Petrine Archer [.com]

Curatorial practice is an essential feature of my professional life stemming from my earliest training under the tutelage of Chief-Curator David Boxer (Cornell, Class of 67')  at the National Gallery of Jamaica in the early 1980s. In these heady days, when the Gallery moved into its purpose designed location with a permanent collection in its eighteen new gallery spaces, promotion of Jamaican art through exhibitions was uppermost. As a young professional and over the next 20 years, I worked my way up the curatorial ladder from being an education docent, curatorial assistant, research officer, and then guest curator, to the Board Directors where I have served on the exhibition committee since 2000. Taking  part in this institution's development, I recognize the extent to which mounting exhibitions, cataloging,  and publishing are at the heart of canonizing our national art form and I am fortunate to have contributed to this pioneering process. The professional raison d'etre  of much of my curatorial work has  been the development and promotion of our national culture and to a great extent it has informed the choices that I have made about exhibitions. Although these have been hand-picked and relatively few, they have all been significantly large projects with good catalogs, and each taking more than two years to execute. In this way I have built a small but nevertheless credible portfolio of shows that has helped to define Jamaican and Caribbean art.

My first exhibition Home and Away was mounted at the October Gallery in 1990 and explored work by 7 contemporary artists, Omari Ra (African), Leonard Daley, Petrona Morrison, Danijah Tafari, Rex Dixon, Milton George and Eugene Palmer. The exhibition was funded by Eddie Chambers through the New Institute of Visual Arts (INIVA) and  was accompanied by a catalog featuring an introduction and essays on each of the artists  that explored their relationship to the concept of home from their different cultural perspectives. Home and Away served to introduce British artists to a handful of Jamaica's most contemporary artists as well as acquaint artists such as Eugene Palmer and Danijah Tafari to Jamaican art viewers. From a curatorial point of view it initiated my mission of creating exhibitions that mediated between Jamaica and its international audiences. In many ways this was a landmark show since it was the first time that audiences abroad were able to see art art work from Jamaica arranged around a post-modern theme. It shifted people's expectations away from the idea of Jamaican art as 'exotic' previously informed through a limited exposure to Jamaica's self-taught tradition and the work of the Commonwealth Institute.

New World Imagery was the title of my second exhibition curated for  the Hayward Gallery's National Touring Exhibitions at the South Bank Centre in 1995 that formed part of Britain's Africa 95 season. 

The exhibition, involved a conceptual framework built around the notion of the New World where issues of identity, for the eight artists selected, defined their art. Many of the artists had long since transcended these traditional racial and cultural categories of white-Jamaican, Chinese, African, but nevertheless for the sake of thematic presentation and the catalog essay, and most importantly the opportunity to show in some of the best galleries in Britain, they were revived.