View articles about Caribbean Artists and Diaspora Artists written by Petrine Archer. Research over 100 artists, their sites and thumbnails of their art work in alphabetical order. Click on highlighted names for links to websites, watch video, or for detailed exhibition records, visit Edna Manley College Online Library.
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Carl Abrahams
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.t 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. full article
Cecil Baugh
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. full story
Lillian Blades
Born in Nassau, Bahamas, Blades attended the College of The Bahamas and received the Chris Blackwell Junkanoo Scholarship enabling her to complete her BFA at Savannah College of Art and Design in 1968. In 1999, she attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completed her MFA the following year at Georgia State University. She has participated in several group and solo shows including A Return to the Womb (2000), Can You Hear Me Shout (2002) and Strange Fruit (2002). She recently completed a commission for the Hartsfield International Airport, Concourse E, Atlanta, Georgia.
Valerie Bloomfield
Born in Scotland, Valerie Bloomfield studied in Glasgow and moved to Jamaica as a young artist. She began to exhibit regularly in group exhibitions and quickly established a name for herself because of her unerring sense of realism and ability to capture likeness. During the 1970s she became one of Jamaica’s most sought after portrait painters, particularly amongst Jamaica’s upper class elites. But her work was most endearing when she was painting artists and friends such as Barrington Watson, Kofi Kayiga and John Maxwell. These works have become important historical records of that artistic milieu. full article
David Boxer
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. full article
See also: Tribute to David Boxer full article
As a practicing artist during the 1980s and 90s, I belonged to that generation of young women who owed a great deal to Hope Brooks as a mentor, role model and as a creator of a type of feminist art peculiar to the Caribbean region. In those days, our feminism did not shout its protests, rather it was manifest in quiet multi-layered surfaces that smoldered internally and made statements revealed over time. full article
Everald Brown
Everald Brown's art and spirituality are intricately bound together. His painting, sculptures and patterned musical instruments, become more vivid as his understanding of his environment, the world and his place in the universe matures. His complex spiritual beliefs that come from a Baptist upbringing and his rastafarian faith, are reflected in imagery full of biblical references, signs, symbols and historical anecdotes. Now into his eighties, the wisdom and skill of his paintings show that he is an artist of special intuition and vision; a true elder of Jamaican art.
Born in 1917, Everald Brown's spiritual path takes a clear trajectory from a confining orthodoxy under colonialism to a world view that is now syncretic and distinctly Caribbean. Looking at his art in the context of Jamaican history, it is possible to see how his life, beliefs and paintings have been shaped by events significant to the island. It is also clear that his imagery and his role as a seer have had an impact on Jamaicans increasingly alienated from their history. His gifts are peculiar, he is a rare bridge between past and present, between one culture and another, between our daily realities and the spiritual world. He is a link with Jamaican self-hood that we cannot afford to lose. full article
Stan Burnside
Stan Burnside received his BFA and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1970s he worked in the United States painting and designing album covers for notable R&B artists. After returning to the Bahamas, he distinguished himself as an art teacher at the College of The Bahamas, as a cartoonist with SideBurns commentary, as a principle designer for the Saxon Superstars and later the One Family Junkanoo groups, and as a founder and co-creator of the artist collectives B-CAUSE and Jammin. In addition to his early shows in The Bahamas, Burnside has exhibited widely in venues such as Paris and Cagnes-sur-Mer, France, Ecuador, Bermuda, Cuba, Washington DC, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. His work can be found in collections such as the Museum of Americas in Washington and the Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo.
Eric Cadien
Eric Cadien attended the ‘art school’ during the dynamic seventies when self- reliance and self-determination became the political watch-words that guided Jamaica beyond independence towards self-government and Democratic Socialism. full article
Ralph Campbell
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.
Initially attending the informal Saturday morning classes at the Institute of Jamaica, Campbell was one of the first students to benefit from the establishment of formal art classes at the DaCosta Institute and its outgrowth, the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts, In his earliest years he was taught sculptural modeling by Edna Manley, but painting was his strength. In time he would return to his alma mater as a painting tutor, making his own contribution to institutional development. full article
Eddie Chambers is a curator and a writer of art criticism. He was born in Wolverhampton, England and gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Sunderland Polytechnic in 1983. He now holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, awarded in 1998, for his thesis researching press and public responses to Black visual arts practice in England in the 1980s. Chambers began organising exhibitions while still a student. Since then, he has curated a large number of exhibitions in Britain and abroad. full article
Kereina Changfatt
There is something ethereal about Kereina Changfatt's work. They are tender fragile forms that speak to temporality and the difficulty of location. In many ways they represent the artist's own life experience and her sense of dislocation, at once divided between memory and loss; between past and present, between enigma and exposure. Kerienna takes us with her as she navigates the spaces and relationships of her life, held together by the thinnest of threads. full story
Camille Chedda
Camille Chedda's talent is precocious. As a fairly recent graduate of the Edna Manley College (Dip.Hons, 2007) she has already established an enviable exhibition record, having her works appear in in two Jamaica National Biennials (2006, 2008) as well as the Curator's Eye exhibition Materializing Slavery, where her slave ship imagery shared space with established artists such as Omari Ra and David Boxer. Her success speaks to the sophistication of her vision as well as her ability to execute her ideas in ways that are well defined and very contemporary. full story
Margaret Chen
Educated at the Jamaica School of Art, Margaret Chen left Jamaica after graduating with distinction to pursue post-graduate studies in Canada at York University, Ontario. It was in Canada also that she began her career as a sculptor, exhibiting in a number of Toronto galleries with increasing success. It is significant however that in the 1980s Margaret chose to return to Jamaica for her first solo exhibition at the Upstairs Downstairs Galleries; to establish her studio, and to become a important contributor to group exhibitions locally and Jamaican exhibitions abroad. full article
Albert Chong is an contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography, installation, sculpture and artist books. His works have dealt directly with personal mysticism, spirituality, race, identity and numerous other topics as well as celebrating the beauty of images and objects. His main bodies of photographic work have been in the genres of still lifes in black and white and color. These works range from playful juxtapositions and formal still lifes to works that represent and reanimate his family history. Here we learn about Aunt Winnie, Justice, Miss Peggy, we gain an insight into one family’s story from Jamaica’s past. full article
Alexander Cooper
Alexander Cooper studied at The Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts in its earliest days of operation. He came from a generation of painters that were the children of a newly formed Jamaican nationalism. He grew up admiring the works of other Jamaican painters such as Albert Huie and Ralph Campbell and took to painting in a similar manner creating genre scenes that documented everyday scenes of Jamaica’s city and rural life. full article
Cecil Cooper
Cecil Cooper was one of the first students to graduate from the Jamaica School of Arts diploma programme in 1966. During his time there he was taught by artists such as Barrington Watson, who was then Director of Studies and Head of the Painting Department, Karl Parboosingh, Vernal Reuben and Milton Harley and Albert Huie who was the ‘artist in residence’. In those days he gravitated towards a style incorporating an expressive realsim. His peers were Christopher Gonzalez, Winston Patrick, Kofi Kayiga and Gene Pearson who would all become respected artists in their own right. It was time of great ferment as a new generation of independent Jamaica became aware of their black identities and shared sympathies with the bourgeoning civil rights and black power movements in the US. But Cecil Cooper’s talents were not restricted to the visual arts and these debates, his talents as a classical musician exposed him to European forms also, and it was on the basis of these skills that he was awarded a scholarship by the Jamaican Government to study music in New York. Once there, his twin interests vied and he took the decision to attend the Art Students League, where he studied under the African-American abstract expressionist Norman Lewis. A few years later, he attended the School of Visual Arts where he obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1976. full article
Keisha Costello
Keisha Costello is a Jamaican artist living and working in Kingston. She studied painting the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts and graduated in 200? Since then her work has been shown at the National Gallery of Jamaica and in other significant group exhibitions. She held her first solo show at the Mutual life Gallery in 2008.
Keisha Costello's work echoes Naipaul's vain hope for order in an environment destined for chaos and deterioration. She is preoccupied with organic forms that offer a perverse and morbid aesthetic even as they wither and disintegrate. Found objects, such as bones, shells, leaves, and insects are assembled into compositions that speak to her futile fight for life. Once gathered these items are placed within boxes that conserve, contain and reframe our understanding of life in the Caribbean and its fragility. more
Karl Jerry Craig received his earliest training as an artist in the UK attending the St Martin’s School of Art. He stayed there after graduating exhibiting regularly while working as a Senior Lecturer for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in London. In 1972, he was invited to head the Jamaica School of Art and would go on to become the first Deputy Dean when that institution was fused with the Schools of Dance, Drama and Music becoming the Cultural Training Centre (CTC).As both artist and educator Karl Craig made significant contributions to the development of the arts during the 1970s. full article
Henry Daley
Although few details are known about this Henry Daley’s life, his paintings many of which are self-portraits, provide insight into his short, poignant career as an artist. Even so, Daley’s paintings are highly personalized depictions and for this reason, they should not be over romanticized.
Born in 1919 in Hope Bay, Daley was one of the first Jamaican students to benefit from the informal Saturday morning classes offered by artists such as Edna Manley and Koren der Harootian at the Institute of Jamaica. These classes had a workshop type atmosphere that allowed locals to paint alongside more accomplished artists, in the main expatriates. The aim was to nurture local art inspired by Jamaican culture rather Europe’s art forms. Daley attended these workshops while still a young man. As an artisan by trade, doing small jobs that ranged from painting to plumbing, these classes offered him instruction and an opportunity for self-expression. full article
Leonard Daley
Leonard Daley’s mural like outpourings have all the power of Dubuffet’s Art Brut, or the Surrealist imagery of Andre mason, yet with none of the self-conscious denial employed by these modern artists. In 1987 when Daley’s work was included in the ‘Fifteen Intuitives’ exhibition, David Boxer could still write with honesty that Leonard Daley had no concept of his work as being art, in the sense of a commodity. He painted on fragments of used tarpaulin and plywood, often utilizing both sides of these surfaces and had no desire to title his work. Today, a realism tinged with sadness is sensed in the fact that Daley now conforms to more formal methods of presentation, using more durable and readily exhibited materials, suggesting that even with the sensitive ‘protection’ of the National Gallery of Jamaica, this intuitive is far more aware than he used to be.full article Watch: Video
Rex Dixon
As a youth, Rex Dixon first attended art college in Stourbridge, he was part of that initial wave of working-class students who recognized their difference when confronted with middle-class dominated art institutions. His preference for abstraction as expounded by the American action painters can be seen as an early decision in favour of Internationaliam, rather than British parochialism, and the confinement that that represented. A later decision to live in Ireland and Jamaica teaching, and now Trinidad, underscored his ability to identify with other cultures outside of his own, with little remorse. full article
Ras Dizzy (Birth Livingstone)
Ras Dizzy is vocal against the injustices he meets within Jamaican society. A temperamental artist, he will 'curse you' as readily as he will tutor you in his reading from the Bible. His uneven temperament is reflected in his painting but, in his lucid moments, he paints powerfully and lyrically, with deep insight into the history of Jamaica and its people. Also a poet and a write, his itles are often enigmatic and he is not averse to writing within his paintings. full article
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John Dunkley
John Dunkley is considered one of modern Jamaica’s first and finest intuitive artists painters. Like so many self-taught painters that would follow in his wake, Dunkley emerged from that class of self-employed, skilled artisans who lived by their hands. John Dunkley was a barber, Dunkley’s early life appears to have been filled with misfortune and adventure that may account for his unique vision. Born in Savannah-la-Mar, at the age of seven he suffered an accident that damaged one of his eyes and affected his schooling, as a result, as a teenager he was sent to his father living in Panama. There again, tragedy struck, he arrived to find that his father had recently died, dashing his hopes for the future. Alone, and at the outbreak of the Great War, he became a sailor and is reported to have travelled through South and Central America, North America finally returning to Cheriqui, Panama where he took up painting and came under the influence of the painter Clarence Rock. full article
Gloria Escoffery
Gloria Escoffery’s talents as an intellect and a painter were apparent from early. As a Jamaica Scholar, after gaining a Bachelor of Arts degree at McGill University in Canada, Escoffery went on to pursue her Masters at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Like many of her peers such as Ralph Campbell, Barrington Watson and Albert Huie, she absorbed the lessons offered in European art forms, but after returning to Jamaica in the 1950’s she quickly adapted these principles to suit her Caribbean environment and Jamaican vision. She returned from London with a definitive style, no longer content to render her subject matter in representational form. full article
Laura Facey
"Laura Facey is in an enormously productive phase of her work. Recently, she has completed some of the most challenging pieces of her professional life. Spirit Dancer 1999, Earth to Earth 1999, Christ Ascending 2000, Indigo Prayer 2000, and Still Singing 2001 are a group of installations and commisioned works that evidence this surge, all the more remarkable because of their commanding scale and robust physicality. These life size figures with their healthiness have usurped the fragmented body parts and fragile puppet strung forms, that this sculptor sometimes spent months and years honing and refining. Her recent works boldly announce a victory for beauty and vigour over the negative energy that underpinned works such as Goddess of Change 1993. This transformation of output, scale, and content tells the story of a profound shift in Laura Facey's life, productivity and spirituality. full article
Colin Garland
Australian by birth and trained in Sydney and London, Garland came to Jamaica in 1962 and adopted the newly independent nation as his home. His commitment was immediately reflected in his art that became Jamaican in content. Inspired by both Haitian and Jamaican self-taught painters such as John Dunkley, but underpinned by a taste for the fantastic, in the works of artists such as Botticelli, Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Richard Dadd, he brought a wry, intellectual humour to his depictions of life in the Caribbean. full article
Amos Ferguson
Born 1928, in Exuma and educated at Roker’s Point School in Exuma. Ferguson became a house painter in Nassau and began fine art painting after receiving ‘divine instruction’. He is completely self-taught and has become the country’s best known intuitive artist. His distinctive signature “paint by Amos Ferguson” was also the title of a successful one-man exhibition held in 1985 at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticutt. The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas recently received over twenty of his works, formerly exhibited at the Pompey Museum for the National Collection
Milton George
Despite Milton George’s attempt to create a minimal expressionist style in the 1980s, his paintings remain complex. Even when he subdues his characteristic use of vibrant colour in favour of a darker palette, his work combusts. Energy emanates from the amount of visual information he provides, not merely in terms of subject matter, but in the urgency and fullness of his brush strokes, in the palpability of the pigment, and the way in which he can describe emotion in and of itself. When this is combined with his keen sense of observation and natural tendency towards satirical story-telling, his work is explosive. full article
Christopher Gonzales
Although his post-graduate training was received from several notable institutions abroad such as the California College of Arts and Crafts and Spellman College, Atlanta, Georgia, Christopher Gonzalez can claim an art-historical lineage that references his earliest influences from the Jamaica School of Art. As one of the first students to graduate from the institution, his works reverently acknowledges the symbolism of Edna Manley, and the paintings of his tutor Barrington Watson. Yet, none of these influences overshadow the distinctive aesthetic in Gonzales’ work. His sculptures demonstrate strength of character and motifs that sometimes even set him at odds with his viewing public. full article
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Lawrence Graham Brown
Lawrence Graham Brown is a Jamaican artist living in New Jersey, USA who has been exhibiting in Jamaica since the 1990's. His work is stridently race conscious,
wrestling with issues related to Black and gay self-hatred, Black-ness,
Jamaican-ness, African-ness, sexuality, class and religion. He achieves all this through a self-taught direct style that calls on Rastafari and Garvey symbolism.
Often beginning with found objects, the pan-African colours red, green and black are a regular feature that help to distinguish and 'package' his work. Like a shorthand these colours underpin his imagery and re-enforce their political statements. full story
Born in England to parents of Jamaican origin, Joy Gregory’s work has been influenced by a combination of race, gender and aesthetics. She attended the Royal College of Art where she was awarded a Masters in Photography in 1986. Gregory has exhibited internationally, including in Cape Town, South Africa where she first showed her series Lost Histories, reflecting on colonization and its effects on culture and self-image. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her to combine her unique 19th century printing process with digital media. Her work is featured in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale University, New Haven. She lives and works in London. More
Khepera Oluyia's work is a powerful mix of the collective and the personal. Through her painting she makes ambitious statements about the ideological systems that seduce, confine and manipulate us in the black diaspora. She challenges these belief systems and provides new models for our consideration and commitment.Jamaica's understanding of political blackness and skin colour are two of her most serious concerns. These are themes she has been exploring since her art school years, combining striking racial portraits with enigmatic titles. full article
Koren der Harootian
This Armenian born artist first came to Jamaica in the 1929 and lived here with some interruptions until 1944. Originally a painter, during the thirties he became friends with the sculptor Edna Manley and together their works reflected the nationalist preoccupations of that time focusing on the beauty of the black physiognomy in a primitivising and exoticising style.
Koren became a regular house-guest at the Manley’s home initially at Bedford Park and then in Drumblair, upper St Andrew. There, Edna and Koren exchanged ideas with other artists such as Burnett Webster, designer of Jamaican Art Deco furniture, the photographer Dennis Gick, playwright and journalist Esther Chapman, and Norman Manley’s more politically minded friends. Conversation focused on the development of a West Indian aesthetic and what Burnett Webster described as the beginnings of a Jamaican art movement. full article
Albert Huie
Albert Huie claims he was born to be an artist, painting from as far back as he can remember. His mother and grandmother who raised him worried about his strange reserved personality and the fact that he spent so much time observing nature or questioning his station in life. Brought up in a strong matriarchal and conservative setting that emphasized discipline and religion, Huie was not encouraged to ponder on the fact that his father, then living in Cuba, had named him Alphonso after the then Cuban president, in fact his grandmother insisted that he be called by his third name – Albert - after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. full article
Nakazzi Hutchinson
The contradiction in Nakazzi’s work is her desire to move away from materiality towards a greater sense of spirituality, and to do this, she sets up a tension between the object and the space around it. Even as she is constructing her characteristically life size figures, she is simultaneously stripping away their body parts, and representing the body in a fragmentary way that hints at the essence of humanity’s flesh and blood forms. full article
Eugene Hyde
Coming from fairly humble beginnings, Eugene Hyde was born in Cooper’s Hill, Portland and raised by his mother Ivy Larman, stepfather and grandmother. His father John Hyde, had died when he was a boy, but it is possible that it was from his father - a photographer - that Hyde nurtured an early desire to become a commercial artist. After his father’s death in 1944, the family moved to Spanish Town where Eugene attended Beckford and Smith’s (now St Jago High School). Hyde began his career in advertising as a graphic apprentice at Art and Publicity Company in Kingston but after five years he decided to travel and study.full article
William 'Woody' Joseph
Born in rural in the hills of St Andrew, William ‘Woody’ Joseph’s talent as an artist was not recognized by Jamaica’s art ‘cognicenti’ until fairly late in his life. Initially, within his rural community he was considered something of a curiosity and even accused of Obeah and devil worship by members of his community. In that relatively conservative Christian setting, his sculptures were considered graven images and a challenge to Old Testament biblical traditions. Even in the face of this opposition Woody continued to carve. With no formal training or knowledge of western artistic principles, he was guided by his inner visions that he felt compelled to execute. full article
Born in Kingston to Jamaican and Cuban parents Kayiga forsook a white-collar job in favour of studies at the newly formed Jamaica School of Art and Crafts. He majored in graphics but after winning a Government Scholarship pursued a Masters in Fine Art degree at the Royal College of Art, London. On graduating he took a job teaching and doing post-graduate research at Makarere University Uganda and also exhibited there (Kofi Kayiga), Nomo Gallery, 1970 and (Kofi Kayiga and Kefa Sempagni), Uganda Museum, Kampala (1972). full article
Is a Guyanese British artist raised in Trinidad who currently works in the UK. Her research and artwork is concerned with re-interpretations of historical and contemporary material of the Caribbean and Britain. She explores colonial and postcolonial Caribbean and Britain through the use of digital media and networked environments.
I exhibit internationally in solo and group shows. more
O'Neil Lawrence
O'Neil Lawrence is a trained photographer and a graduate of both the University of the West Indies and the Edna Manley College of The Visual and Performing Arts. His work questions the new World experience and what it means to be Jamaican. Because of this, issues related to Africa, slavery, the Middle Passage and our resulting actions and values all figure in his work. In particular, he considers the role of religion in our lives recognizing that Christianity, once a tool of enslavement and colonization, has been creolized to accommodate our African heritage.full story
Judy Ann MacMillan is one of Jamaica’s foremost academic painters. Born in Kingston but trained in Scotland she brings to her work a unique synthesis of technical ability and subjective intimacy that only a Caribbean artist can achieve. Returning from her studies in Europe, in the early 1970s Judy MacMillan began to establish a name for herself amongst collectors and patrons alike as she undertook a series of portrait commissions. Her keen sense of observation, classical rendering and her sense of pathos for her sitters brought her public acclaim and success. full article
Edna Manley
Born in Yorkshire England, Edna Manley’s mother was Jamaican, from the prominent Shearer family. In 1936 she met her cousin Norman Manley who had come to England as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. He was later conscripted and fought in WW1, while Edna studied at St Martin’s School of Art. They married in 1922 and moved to Jamaica where Edna was to pursue her career as a sculptor creating images that reflected Jamaica’s struggle for nationhood. During the 1930’s Edna Manley continued to exhibit in London but increasingly her focus was Jamaica where she exhibited and supported the development of the arts. full article
Alvin Marriot
Marriot was born into an artistic family, his mother was a musician and writer while his father made and sold straw items. From an early age, encouraged to explore his own creativity, he developed an interest in wood and earned his earliest commissions when he was still a teenager. After completing school, he apprenticed as a furniture maker. His skills gained him employment locally working with Art Deco furniture designer Burnett Webster executing custom furniture, and then abroad, first as a carpenter in Panama, and later as a farm worker in USA. By the 1940’s, he was featured in local newspapers as an enterprising sculptor: and while in America he presented a bust of then President F.D. Roosevelt, to the White House. full article
Sidney McLaren
Born in rural St Thomas, McLaren went as far as the 6th grade in primary school, then left to take up an apprenticeship in coach building. At the turn of the century this would have been a viable profession but with the introduction of the motor car after the 1920’s McLaren’s skills became redundant, For the next few years he did casual work but then returned to farming on his father’s land in St Thomas. His interest in painting developed out of a need to do more and he surprised himself, family and his neighbours with his own talent. In the years to come he would enter fine arts painting and drawing competitions with increasing success, finally coming to the attention of the Institute of Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica who encouraged him to exhibit. full article
David Miller Snr.
Its unusual to speak about David Miller, the father without also mentioning his son of the same name. As carpenters and curio craftsmen they worked together, initially with David the son being an apprentice too his father. Regularly exhibited together, their works are conceptually similar, but stylistically very different.Initially, the Millers created carvings for Jamaica’s growing tourist industry. They operated a workshop on Bray Street off Windwards Rd where in addition to making their furniture and when house-building was slow, they also made curious that bore their signatures and a typical reference to Jamaica W.I. full article
David Miller Jnr.
David Miller Jnr’s relationship with his father David Miller Jnr was crucial to his development as and artists, and it is rare that one is mentioned without the other, despite their stylistic differences. David Miller was apprenticed to his father in their carpentry business established on Bray Street of Windward Rd. They regularly did trades work for the house building business, but when that was slow, they wood create carvings for sale to the tourists that normally docked at Kingston Harbour. They did not sell directly to the public but instead used a middle man. In this way, they were insulated from the more commercial aspects of tourism trade, rarely dealing with the public and pricing of their work. When visitors did come to their workshop, the pair never haggled over prices but instead placed their work on display in a showcase that visitors were free to select from or leave. In this way, they also maintained their dinity as craftsmen and artists. full article
Ronald Moody
Born in Kingston to a well-to-do family, Moody left Jamaica at aged 23, initially to pursue a career in dentistry. This was not necessarily his first choice, he was already widely read in Chinese and Indian metaphysics and showed an aptitude for the arts. While still a student he visited the British Museum and was so affected by the Egyptian and Asian collections there that he taught himself to carve. By the time he had completed his dental studies in 1930, he had also become a proficient artist creating significant works such as Wohin (1934; Sacramento, CA, Adolf Loeb priv. co.), and Johanaan (1935; London, Tate).full article
Cleveland Morgan
Cleveland Morgan’s maturation as a painter mirrors the same process of maturation in Jamaica’s cultural institutions, since a great deal of his artistic achievements are due to their foundation. Introduced to art through his local secondary school teacher, he was encouraged to study formally and was one of the first students to benefit from formal art classes at the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts after its establishment in the 1950’s. full article
Lorraine Morgan
As Lorraine Morgan’s work becomes more personal, it becomes smaller in scale. As she comes closer to an understanding of herself and her world, she becomes more focussed and detailed in her work and its presentation. Her technique in recent years has been distinctive using holes and spheres punched from paper or scraps of paper shredded, cut and pieced back together. Thus, she builds her surfaces so that they read topographically as textured, and psychologically as emotionally intense. full article
Petrona Morrison
From an early age Morrison sketched incessantly, covering family books with figure drawings. By the time she reached her teens she was certain that she wanted to be an artist. Art satisfied an obsession that she had not yet clearly defined but had welcomed wholly.School teachers advised that she seek higher education. At McMaster University in Canada, and later, at Howard University in Washington D.C., she specialized in painting, but later developed an interest in sculpture. Returning to Jamaica in 1976, Morrison taught for a year and found it ‘draining’. She stayed at home for ten months simply considering her next move. She did nothing, and people kept asking her what was wrong. A job in television at the Agency for Public Information presented new options for refining her politics. full article
Eugene Palmer
Eugene is a man caught between two cultures and his paintings reflect this dichotomy. Despite the fact that he paints with all the deftness and technical skills of a thoroughly trained artist, the content of his paintings belie the Western tradition. He is repainting history, mimicking the Old Masters and usurping their models in order to claim or reclaim the presence of the black within a 'grand tradition' of narrative painting and portraiture. His most recent paintings employ Eugene's own family members juxtaposed with landscapes which might easily be scenarios from another century. These figures and vistas are thrown up against each other in such awkward ways that they poignantly question the relationship of blacks to a European Tradition in painting and life generally. more
Karl Parboosingh
Something of a prodigy, Karl Parboosingh’s paintings reveal his rare and gifted talents as a painter. Examination of his background however shows that whatever artistic skills he may have been born with, they were enhanced during his lifetime by solid training and exposure to art. During his younger years he had the rare opportunity (at least, for Jamaican painters) to work alongside some of the masters of the international modern art movement in such cities as Paris, New York and Mexico and this undoubtedly supported his success. full article
Seya Parboosingh
Seya’s simple style reflects a search for truth and purity. This has led her away from subjects in the material world towards a form of abstract painting inspired by thought rather than image. Her interest in painting came from her love of poetry and and her relationship with Jamaican husband Parboosingh. Her quiet temperament and spiritual fortitude must have been the perfect compliment to Karl Parboosingh’s largesse, but coming from a protected merchant class family environment in Allentown, Pensylvania, she could hardly match his bohemianism. full article
Ebony G. Patterson
Ebony G. Patterson is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts who is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY. While still a students she gained a great deal of attention for her bold paintings that focused on female genitalia. Since 2002 she has participated in several shows including Taboo a small group exhibition that she curated. She has been the recipient of several awards. In 2006 she was awarded the Prime Minister's Youth Awards for Excellence in Arts and Culture. The highest award that a young person can receive in this field in Jamaica. more
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Winston Patrick
Winston Patrick considers himself fortunate to have studied at the Jamaica School of Art during the time of Barrington Watson and Colin Garland. Both artists had an impact on his career; in particular, the memory of Colin Garland’s keen observation and attention to detail would always stay with him, while he would be grateful to Barrington Watson for his support and the opportunity Watson provided for him to travel, to see works of great artists and to expand his insights as an artist. full article
Gene Pearson
Gene Pearson’s influence on the making of ceramics in Jamaica is staggering. His stylised ceramic heads have become his trademark and their haunting profiles have influenced many potters and painters locally and abroad. Trained at the Jamaica School of Art his work shows the stylistic influence of peers such as Christopher Gonzales and conceptual links to pioneers such as Osmond Watson. full article
Born in 1960, Keith Piper first exhibited in 1981 as a member of the BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK. In a series of exhibitions entitled 'The Pan African Connection', members of the group including Eddie Chambers, Claudette Johnson and Donald Rodney, sought to explore issues relevant to aspects of black political struggles through contemporary art practice. Following the dissolution of the Blk Art Group in 1984, Piper continued to work within the context of the developing wave of black British artists who were to emerge during the 1980's. more
David Pottinger
David Pottinger is one of Jamaica’s pioneer painters. His interest in art dates back to the days when volunteer art classes were held at the Institute of Jamaica for the sake of developing artists with a Jamaican vision. In the seventy-odd years that he has painted his commitment to the painting of genre scenes and nationalist vision has never faltered. Essentially self-taught, David ‘Jack’ Pottinger began his career as a sign painter. From the outset, he was a man of the streets dedicating his painting to the vagaries of life in Kingston. full article
Kalfani Ra
In his earliest years at the Jamaica School of Art, Kalfani Ra’s work was viewed as radical and progressive. In those days ‘Dougy’ (as he was then called) had a reputation for being unconventional and for constantly challenging his peers and tutors. His approach found sympathy with fellow-students like Omari Ra, Stanford Watson and Valentine Fairclough who were experimenting not only with the formal concepts of painting but also with the whole thought structure that underpinned Western notions of art and life. full article
Omari Ra
Omari Ra has maintained the ‘enfant terrible ‘ image acquired at the Jamaica School of Art, even though it is nearly twenty years since he graduated. Back then, he was known to his fellow students as ‘African’ a pseudonym perfectly suited to his black separatist concerns and his image as radical painter. His reputation stuck because he seemed so perfectly suited as a leader of Jamaica’s younger artists who matured in the shadows of party-political intrigues, ghetto wars and dancehall. full article
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Givani Red
Givanni Red is a story teller much as she is a photographer. Her pictures are insightful, provocative tales about the way that she sees people and life. Givanni Red’s ability to distort reality combined a with her rigourous technical skills provide the viewer with imagery that is at once surreal while being entirely convincing. But, because she knows the craftiness of photography, the only person not convinced by its seductiveness is Givanni herself. full article
Zawdi Reece
Zawdi Reece is a painter in a truly modernist sense. He combines lush, pigment ridden brushstrokes with satirical subject matter that calls to mind the work of Belgian expressionist James Ensor. And similarly, Reece’s paintings are angst ridden, driven by the evils of society and the toll its decadence takes on him as an individual as well as others. What started out as being a statement against society while he was still an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts, developed into a hard-hitting crusade that became almost therapeutic. full article
Vernal Reuben
Reuben began his earliest training under the guidance of the late Edna Manley initially at the DaCosta Institute that would eventually become the Jamaica School of Art. He would go on to specialise in printmaking, taught by visiting tutors as part of the commercial design course. The printmaking skills encouraged then were related to graphics, advertising and commercial art, but from the outset Reuben showed interest in printmaking as a fine art, creating genre images that reflected the growing nationalist sentiments of his day. full article
Mallica Reynolds 'Kapo'
Kapo (Mallica Reynolds) was born in Bynloss St Catherine, a rural community about thirty miles from Kingston. As early as age sixteen he began receiving visions and started traveling the countryside preaching and healing. In 1931 he came to Cockburn Pen on the outskirts of Kingston, but eventually settled in Trench Town where he established his Zion Revival church. Here, he began creating his sculptures and paintings that reflected the people in his community their ritual practices. full article
Namba Roy
Born in Accompong Jamaica, Namba Roy settled in South London after World War Two where he established himself as both a writer and artist. Despite migration, Namba Roy was always conscious of his Caribbean-African heritage especially the tradition of rebellion and courage that was a part of the runaway slaves, maroon history and settlement in his home town, Accompong. His novels Black Albino and No Black Sparrows written in the 1950s recreate this history and are a testament to black culture. full article
Born in 1980, Russell is a graduate of the Edna Manley College, Kingston Jamaica and Goldsmiths, University of London UK. Although based in Kingston, as a recipient of a Commonwealth Scholarship she has traveled to Japan to pursue her interest in digital animation and film-making. Her career began as a painter, but her interest in comic characters soon led her to digital media and since graduating she has created a number of short films that parody her own life and speak to the condition of women in the post-modern caribbean diaspora. Her interest in art history has allowed her to explore contemporary issues while still referencing historical and fictional characters such as Manet's Olympia and Nana, Ophelia, Aunt Jemima and her own dance-hall alter ego. more
Dawn Scott
Dawn Scott is an artist whose creative spirit knows no bounds, although she has exhibited professionally, her art has not been confined to museums and galleries, instead her works can be found throughout all walks of life in restaurants, shops, offices and tourist resorts at home and abroad. Dawn Scott is at once an textile and installation artist, as well as a designer of home interiors, theatre sets and fashion. A restless spirit, during the 1970s she refused to be pigeon holed and began working in various media for personal satisfaction, exhibition as well as to make a living. full article
Kay Sullivan
Returning from her studies in Europe, Kay Sullivan’s sculptures came to prominence in the 1970’s at a time when public sculpture was in demand. Skilled in many different media such as resin, fiberglas and bronze, her understanding of the human form as well as her empathy for Jamaican subject matter made her a candidate for these commissions. At a time when the health of Jamaica’s pioneer sculptor Alvin Marriot was failing, Sullivan became an ideal replacement. Sullivan’s style is representational. Her ability to capture the likeness of her models brought her increasing success with a Jamaican public still wary of abstraction. full article
Samere Tansley
Specializing in painting, Samere Tansley was trained at art college’s in the UK and came to Jamaica in 1970. She had been a teacher in London and continued in that profession at Camperdown High School for ten years and part-time for fifteen years at the School of Art. Meanwhile she also established her career as artist exhibiting in numerous group and solo exhibitions through the decades, including a solo show in Bermuda in 1997.
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Phillip Thomas
Phillip Thomas (b.1980) is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts where he gained both a certificate and diploma in Painting with honours (2003). He currently lives and studies in New York but continues to exhibit in Jamaica. In 2008 he won the Aaron Matalon Award for his outstanding contribution to that year's Jamaica National Biennial.
Phillip Thomas is considered a realist and he paints with an ease that demonstrates his sure draftsmanship and understanding of the human form. Yet there is more to his artistry than just representation. He harnesses the classical approach of European masters to cloth and critique his contemporary black subjects. full story
Barrington Watson
There is something heroic about Barrington Watson's commitment to the painting of Jamaica and its people. He paints for posterity. In the vein of French salon painters such as Eugene Delacroix or Cabin Al, he documents the culture's history; it's myths and fantasies. Although he might balk at constantly being described as a painter steeped in the European academic tradition, he has no qualms about being described as a figurative painter. He is steadfast in his efforts to paint figuratively and to accurately depict what he calls the Caribbean's temperate influences, its light, its colour, tropical feel and vagaries of the Caribbean's flesh tones. Of course, he relishes working with oils, since no other medium could so obviously suggest his respect for tradition. In a similar manner, each major work is supported by series of preliminary charcoal drawings and watercolours demonstrating his deft draftsmanship and his commitment to this historically validated process of painting. full article
Basil Watson
Basil Watson was one of the first students to benefit from the Jamaica School of Arts removal to its new campus as part of the Cultural Training Centre. He feels he was fortunate to be taught by a diverse range of tutor including Christopher Gonzales, Gene Pearson, Alexander Cooper, George Rodney and Kofi Kayiga. He specialised in Sculpture and soon became noted for his interest in the human form. full story
Osmond Watson
Born in Kingston, Osmond Watson was a graduate of one of the first teaching programmes created by Edna Manley at the Jamaica School of Art and Crafts. In 1961, disappointed at the failure of plans for a West Indian Federation, he decided to travel to England with the intention of furthering his studies. He registered at St Martin’s School of Art, London, but spent much of his time teaching himself through visits to view the African masks at the British Museum and works of the modern masters at the Tate. After a brief stint in Paris he returned to London and remained there until 1965. full article Watch video
Raymond Watson
Raymond Watson has lived and worked in Jamaica, Trinidad, and London, and exhibited across the Caribbean, the United States, South America and England. He has mounted public sculptures in London, Kingston, and Port of Spain, as well as being represented in private collections world wide. In 1990, he along with Basil Watson mounted Sculpture in the Park an outdoor exhibition of life size sculptures in New Kingston, Jamaica. In 1994, Raymond moved to London to work and subsequently mounted the First Child commission in 1998 at Max Roach Park, Brixton. He has since returned to live and work in Jamaica. His work continues to be a synthesis of influences, born as much out of process as concept.
Stanford Watson
After graduating from Ruseas High School in Hanover, Stanford Watson came to study at the Jamaica School of Art in 1979. He enjoyed his exposure to different art forms and the tuition he gained from teachers like Arthur Coppege, Hedy Buzan, Eric Cadien and Cecil Cooper. He chose to specialise in painting and soon developed an expressive style that mirrored the restless mood of the early eighties. His friendships with fellow students such as African/Omari Ra, Douglas Wallace/Kalfani Ra and Valentine Fairclough among others stimulated his interest in the political, economic and social concerns that fed his work. After graduating he quickly established himself as a serious painter by exhibiting widely in Jamaica and international exhibitions. more