Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Fall 2001 – Volume 3, Number 2

In the Fullness of Time and Before

From August 30 through October 14, Handwerker Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Jamaican art entitled In the Fullness of Time. Its curator, Catherine Amidon, director of exhibitions at the Karl Drerup Gallery, Plymouth State College, spoke with us about the exhibition and the representation of Jamaican art today.

HANDWERKER GALLERY: Please tell us about the "prehistory" of the exhibition --- where did the idea come from, and how difficult was it to choose a theme, select the works, and get in contact with the artists?

CATHERINE AMIDON: The exhibition came through a convergence of opportunity and a fascination with Jamaican art and culture. While teaching in Kansas City, Missouri, I had a nontraditional student with whom I became friends. She graciously invited me to join her family and extended family on a summer trip to Jamaica.

I landed in paradise; we stayed at a back-country villa and working farm called Good Hope. Away from the beaches, crowds, and drinks with pink paper parasols, I fell in love with the beauty of the island flora and fauna. On that trip and several subsequent ones I also encountered island art in public forums like Harmony Hall in Ocho Rios and the National Gallery of Art in Kingston, and then in artists’ studios. The breadth of the creative activity overwhelmed me. I decided to do a Jamaican exhibition "someday."

When I changed from teaching full-time and working as an independent curator on the side to become the director of exhibitions at Plymouth State College, it seemed a good time to move forward with a Jamaican exhibition.

One of my first calls was to intuitive art collector Wayne Cox, whom I had met several years earlier at an opening at Harmony Hall. From the start he was a helpful collaborator and early on suggested that I get in touch with Margaret Bernal. She had just begun the process of forming the Jamaica Artists Alliance.

HG: This exhibition is conceived and realized as a collaborative effort, which does not happen very often in con- temporary art shows where we are more used to having one "star" curator. What can you tell us about this type of curating? What did it involve, and was there any specific reason for such an approach? What were your role and duties in this collaboration?

CA: After a series of phone conversations, I invited Margaret to Plymouth State College to lecture, and that was the start of a very fruitful collaboration. I attribute much of the success to the fact that she is a phenomenal, energetic person who is committed to bringing Jamaican art into the international arena. Because we share that commitment, the process flowed smoothly. We each have our strengths. As an established figure in the Jamaican art scene, president of the Jamaica Artists Alliance, and wife of the Jamaican ambassador to the United States, she has a plethora of contacts ranging from collectors to scholars, as well as ideas that she shared freely. I just did what I usually do, which is to curate, administer, and write. The activity level of the Jamaica Artists Alliance, like that of many all-volunteer non-profit organizations, waxes and wanes. When there is a project, people pull together to contribute time, thoughts, and resources. A number of alliance members gave valuable feedback on the texts and didactics and helped locate critical source material, informing content. Others helped get crates to shippers and brochures to critics. On-island artists kept information flowing, helped identify additional studios, and helped with customs.

Plymouth State College extended many resources, including additional funding. Campus public relations offered time and enthusiasm getting the brochure, press releases, and other materials together.

It was a true collaborative venture.

HG: Cultural debates since the late 1980s have been dominated by the issue of the so-called " postmodernist plurality," and many discussions ensued that were designed to critically examine and evaluate multiculturalism and its ramifications and effects on the presence, visibility, and representation of the cultures of the "other" --- that is, not dominant West European (white, male) cultures. As a result, it is often acknowledged that this "plurality" acts as a more efficient way to neutralize the existing differences by creating a new "box" (an all-encompassing label), rather than creating a real opportunity for a dialogue and acknowledgment of differences. In what way can your exhibition In the Fullness of Time be said to contribute to these debates?

CA: Postmodern plurality, in its most pedestrian form, neutralizes culture. Anything that drops into a primordial soup of a word like "plurality" or a prefix like "multi" can lose its flavor. Or it can be isolated and looked at as an ingredient, a component, essential to the makeup of the whole. The "butterfly effect," from the early days of chaos theory, finds parallels in subtle cultural influences in the arts. The proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil affecting the weather in Texas can be Taino influence on slaves imported from Africa to Jamaica, passed down through the generations, and manifested in Jamaican art today. We don’t have the tools to measure all these shifts, but we can hardly use that as a reason to say they are neutralized because they have passed through different places and times. They are, rather, components to seemingly random patterns to be studied and appreciated rather than neutralized.

HG: Our last question has to do similarly with international shows of contemporary art and the presence of non-Western art in them. A number of artists, like Albert Chong and Arthur Simms, who are participating in this exhibition are also present with their works in this year’s Venice Biennale, the oldest and most important bastion of European contemporary art. Given its notorious selection processes --- regarding both national pavilions and curator’s selection of a central exhibition theme designed to preserve and foster the dominance of Western art --- what is the significance of their presence, and do you think that this is a sign of an important change and new, more egalitarian internationalism in the art world?

CA: The Venice Biennale, venerable bastion of European contemporary art, is not changing. Outside forces are bringing change to it. Jamaica is present through the tenacious efforts of the three artists --- Arthur Simms, Keith Morrison, and Albert Chong --- and the commissar Margaret Bernal. The origin of the Jamaican pavilion was not typical, in that an artist [started the process]. Arthur Simms was committed to establishing a Jamaican pavilion. His choice to collaborate with two other Jamaican-American artists helped to ensure a stronger infrastructure because of the current on-island economic situation. Even so, the endeavor is clearly "low budget" by biennale standards.

Otherwise, Africa and the African diaspora remain sorely underrepresented at the biennale. Egypt and the concurrent exhibition Authentic/Ex-centric: In and Out of Africa by the Forum for African Arts (at Cornell University) and the Ford Foundation are the only ones to bring art from the continent of Africa to the "plateau of humanity" theme of the biennale.

Exposure in the art world is changing and diversifying at many levels, but the lemming mindset of the market-driven contemporary art crowd creates obstacles to the practice of diversity in form and content at an event like the biennale. As a result, the Jamaican pavilion offered a refreshing contribution to an otherwise multimedia-dominated exhibition. The "herd" all charged off in a new direction, making the biennale feel like a film festival as much as an art show. The paintings, photographs, and sculptures of the Jamaican pavilion communicated the multicultural heritage of the island and plurality of symbolic languages through more traditional media, appropriately reflecting media use in the culture.

NOTE: See the following contributions on this subject published so far in the Handwerker newsletter: "What Did Hybridity Do," a talk with Kobena Mercer (volume 1, number 4, winter 1999–2000); "A Talk with Bara Diokhane about Senegalese Art and Mor Faye" (volume 2, number 3, fall/winter 2000–2001).