#sexypink/fresh milk

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Sexypink - a great opportunity.

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Sexypink - Excellent, exciting news for Fresh Milk in Barbados.

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Sexypink - Great news for St.Kittishian Artist Klieon John.

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Sexypink - JACQUELINE BISHOP, writer and visual artist, born in Kingston, Jamaica, and who now lives and works in New York City. She has held several Fulbright Fellowships, and exhibited her work widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She is also an Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at New York University.

On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked. In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman—centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards—and placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.

I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother—cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica. For that same reason, British Art Studies is a fitting venue for their first ever publication and partner to create an accompanying film exploring the plates and their themes.

Though the likenesses of none of the women in my family are represented in this series, centering the market woman is my way of paying homage to my great-grandmother Celeste Walker, who I grew up knowing very well, and who was a market woman/huckster/milkwoman par excellence. Celeste was born in the tiny district of Nonsuch hidden high in the Blue Mountains in Portland Parish on the island of Jamaica. Her mother died on the way home from a market, when my great-grandmother was too young to even remember her face. In her adulthood, while my great-grandfather farmed the land, my great-grandmother was the huckster who could easily carry bunches of bananas and baskets of food on her head; the market woman who travelled to far away Kingston to sell in Coronation Market, the largest market on the island. She also hawked fresh fish, and prepared and sold coconut oil, ginger beer, cut flowers, and cocoa beans that were pounded in a heavy wooden mortar. I remember her in my childhood as the milkwoman waking very early in the morning and walking through the district selling fresh cow’s milk. The tradition of huckstering would be passed on to my grandmother who relished the role in her older years. My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaican and Caribbean societies.

My work integrates the mediums of painting, drawing and photography to explore issues of home, ancestry, family, connectivity and belonging. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.

Oftentimes I utilize a process of competing narratives to have the viewer participate in the creation of meaning. In my “Folly” series I recount a story I heard as a child, of two tales of a “haunted” house. In time, I researched the history of the house and through a process of photomontage combined photographs I took with archival footage to try and tell the two stories. The ghostly images of the past occupants are integrated into the walls and on the grounds of the present-day ruins. The overall effect is spectral and haunting. I also used this process of photomontage in an ongoing series of ethereal and transcendent “Childhood Memories,” in which characters are often split between heaven and earth. There is a palpable sense of loss in these images as characters seek to inhabit a time and a place long gone.

The “Babylon” and “Zion” paintings are about the Rastafarian ideas of Babylon being a place of captivity and oppression while Zion symbolizes a utopian place of unity and peace. In the Babylon series, I write the lyrics from songs and poems to create text-based drip paintings leading up to the “Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” in which I use popular dancehall posters to evoke the inner-city Babylonian “walls” of Kingston. The Zion series is comprised largely of monochrome paintings to delineate this symbolic paradise. Glitter is present in these works not only as a representation of the paradise that Rastafarians seek in the Biblical homeland of Zion but also as a commentary on the ‘bling and glitter’ culture that has enveloped much of Jamaican society. Consequently, my work is very much engaged with helping me to understand my heritage.

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~Sexypink~ The Winners. Congratulations all.

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~Sexypink~ Barbadian Artist Annalee Davis of Fresh Milk has a new venture. Do check it out and read her eloquent words on Sour Grass.

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This morning, as I share the new Sour Grass website with you all, so beautifully presented by the Trinidad-based master designer, Kriston Chen, I reflect on the many twists and turns in my art career over the past three decades. The decision to return to and remain in the Caribbean, while sometimes fraught with doubt, has always been the right one for me in spite of the endless challenges of working in one of the most debt-ridden regions in the world where cultural workers may feel like orphans given the still limiting infrastructural support for contemporary visual artists.

Many years of bonding with peers - fellow artists, tutors, students, curators, collectors, co-activists, institutions, and conspirators - of sharing values and believing in the notion and immense value of our Caribbean civilization, the bedrock from which our creative offerings emanate and which we choose to nurture and foster, has enlarged my understanding of who we are beyond imagination. One of the most generative and generous collaborations over the past ten years has been with my friend and fellow soldier in the trenches- Holly Bynoe. 

Since sharing ARC magazine's Issue III in August 2011 at the launch of the Fresh Milk Art Platform here in Barbados, we have continued to envision projects together including Caribbean Linked and Tilting Axis. Our love for this region and its extraordinarily talented artists has been both anchor and kite.As the layers of economic, health, and environmental crises continue to build in this profoundly challenging moment we may find ourselves languishing in, Holly and I cherish and are committed to the creativity and resiliencies that run throughout the archipelago. I believe that this is a time where flourishing can be mutual for us both and for all those whom we choose to work with. 

As we launch Sour Grass's website today, I'd like to mention our first two multi-year collaborations and to really feel joyful because of the beautiful human beings and institutions who want to walk this road with us. The way people reveal themselves through collaborations is telling and Holly and I have been fortunate to find some incredible souls who we respect and are excited to continue to work together with.(i) Shout out to Kunstinstituut Melly, especially Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy and Rosa de Graaf who are trusting us to bring artists from the Caribbean to showcase at their Rotterdam-based contemporary space over the next few years, kicking off with Bathed in Sacred Fire! –a solo show of Trinidad-based Jamaican artist, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan!(ii) Sour Grass is one of nine Caribbean galleries and agencies presenting at the inaugural Atlantic World Art Fair initiated by the brave Lisa Howie of Black Pony Gallery (Bermuda) on Artsy. 

This annual partnership is dedicated to growing the cultural capital of the Caribbean with the goal of elevating the visual arts within our community to the wider world. We are thrilled to be showcasing the works of nine artists from across this region including Franz Caba (Dominican Republic) ° Ronald Cyrille (Dominica/Guadeloupe) ° Deborah Jack (St. Martin/USA) ° Abigail Hadeed (Trinidad & Tobago) ° Katherine Kennedy (Barbados) ° Lisandro Suriel (St. Martin) ° Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic/USA) ° Eliazar Ortiz (Dominican Republic) ° Samuel Sarmiento (Venezuela/Aruba). We go live June 1st for three weeks so keep an eye out!Our work is an active gift of sisterhood, community, and love, rich with the fibre of collective imaginations and our ancestors. Check us out! https://sour-grass.com/

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Sexypink 2011.... Richard Mark Rawlins (T&T) Dean Arlen, Kwynn Johnson,Marlon Griffith, ARC/FRESH MILK/ Pauline Marcelle (DOMINICA) Sunil Puljhun (SURINAME), Dhiradj Ramsamoedj (SURINAME), Leasho Johnson (JAMAICAN) Pinky & Emigrant (Trinidad/Venezuela)

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~Sexypink~ Another good read.

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~SEXYPINK 2020~ The year in pictures ~ Catapult Winners, Akuzuru’s short film, Lockdown Moments at Arnim’s Gallery, The Mighty Sparrow Sculpture controversy. State of Confinement Group Show and The Portrait Show.

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~Sexypink~ This wonderful initiative of American Friends of Jamaica, Kingston Creative and Fresh Milk Barbados provides a ray of sunlight in the storm of covid-19 realities.

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~Sexypink~ An Art grant initiative to look into.

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~Sexypink~ Please join me in conversation with WIRRED's Managing Director, Kiesha Farnum for the Live Living Room Session- Bush Tea Plots: Post Plantation Regenerative Strategies on Thursday, May 14th at 11 am AST. "In the Caribbean, most of us are familiar with the term “Bush Tea”. Many of us grew up on it and remember it fondly (and not so fondly). Some of us continue these “bush tea” practices today! Join WIRRED’s Kiesha Farnum on Thursday 14th at 11am as she talks with Annalee Davis, visual artist and cultural activist about her work “Bush Tea Plots” and its relevance to regenerative agriculture and climate mitigation and resilience. Annalee’s practice works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies. Her studio, located on a working dairy farm, operated as a 17thC sugarcane plantation, offers a critical context for her practice which engages with the residue of the plantation. Annalee is also the founder of the artist-led initiative “Fresh Milk” and is the co-founder and co-director of Caribbean Linked, an annual residency in Aruba, and Tilting Axis, an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters. On Thursday 14th at 11am come let’s explore post plantation regenerative strategies and climate resilience through the lens of culture, heritage, and art!" Links to article & Annalee’s work: http://rablands.notsirk.com/ www.annaleedavis.com / https://www.instagram.com/annalee.devere/