QB 390

April 24, 2021

We continue our time in the National Gallery of Jamaica Art with Albert Huie whose  paintings celebrated the workers in the fields. 

Self-portrait

In early Jamaican art, black inhabitants were often portrayed as part of the scenery. Huie’s The Counting Lesson is a turning point in Jamaican art. 

In it a black young girl is the central point. The girl, looking intently at what is in front of her, is counting. She wears a polka dot dress, her hair is neatly coifed with a red bow, and the finger poised in midair stresses her mental calculations. 

All elements of the painting point to the girl’s education, respectability, and civility. Huie provided a rare representational mirror of black Jamaica, allowing black viewers to attribute to themselves the signs of distinction, prestige, and selfhood formerly reserved for the white colonial elite.

Huie was the first Jamaican artist who was able to support himself on the sale of his artwork. Today, Albert Huie is acclaimed as a key figure in Jamaican art and remembered as “The Father of Jamaican painting,” and it started with The Counting Lesson.

Dawn Scott was one of six artists invited in 1985 to produce installations in the National Gallery of Jamaica’s exhibition galleries. The room-sized work – Cultural Zone – reflects the physical and cultural environment of Kingston’s inner cities.

This, her most significant work, consists of a spiral-shaped “zinc-fence”, made from salvaged corrugated metal and lumber – the dominant building materials in the local squatter settlements. The surfaces contain the sort of street art, shop signs and graffiti that are commonly seen in Kingston’s inner cities. It starts with a large sign that reads “Culture zone, enter at your own risk.” The imagery and graffiti on the walls deal with popular music, street food, the rum bar, the attitudes towards women and sexuality, religion, politics and, at the center, mental illness and homelessness, which takes the form of the reclining, rag-clad figure of a male street person. 

At first sight, the installation appears unplanned, much like a squatter settlement, but it is carefully orchestrated: the claustrophobic, trap-like spiral corridor deliberately takes the visitor from amusement to horror, when the shockingly realistic street person in the middle is suddenly seen. Almost every detail of the work was based on something that then existed in Kingston, which Scott  documented photographically.

Barrington Watson  has been described as “Jamaica’s master painter.” He produced some of the most iconic images in Jamaican art story.

Against the background of the nationalist sentiments that dominated Jamaica around the time of independence – 1962 – Barrington Watson’s Out of Many One People captured a sense of history making in the new country. Jamaica’s national motto “Out of Many One People” refers to the diverse ethnic groups that make up the Jamaican population and their unity.

Dance of the Maroons (Escaped slaves – the word comes from the Spanish cimarrones which means mountaineer)

The Conversation

Athletes’ Nightmare

Edna Manley is often considered the “mother of Jamaican art.”

In 1921, she married Norman Manley, and moved to Jamaica with him in 1922 from her native Yorkshire, England. The move had a profound impact on her work. 

Jamaica was facing many political changes. Members of the African diaspora were voicing their displeasure with the aging colonial system by organizing strikes, and promoting protest marches. Manley’s work reflected this civil unrest. 

In the mid 1930s, her work became increasingly political and embodied the emerging Jamaican nationalist, anti-colonial movement. Negro Aroused caught the inner spirit of the people and reflected their rapidly rising resentment of the stagnant colonial system.

The people of Jamaica purchased Negro Aroused to became the basis for the National Gallery of Jamaica collection. Manly was deeply moved by this act because she claimed that it was such a difficult piece to create. She said, “Negro Aroused ... was trying to create a national vision.”

She portrays a person of African heritage who has been “aroused” to action, with head raised. The figure speaks to the social and political context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles.

Another work created out of political expression was her statue of Paul Bogle. Bogle was born free about 1822. The poverty and injustice he saw, caused Bogle to lead a protest march on October 11, 1865. In a violent confrontation with official forces that followed the march, nearly 500 people were killed.

Bogle was captured and hanged on October 24, 1865; but his demonstration brought about a change in official policy and attitude, which made possible the social and economic betterment of the people. In recognition of his efforts, Bogle was conferred with the Order of the National Hero in 1969.

In “So Much Things to Say”, by Bob Marley & The Wailers, Marley mentions Bogle with Jesus Christ and Marcus Garvey (a proponent of Black nationalism in Jamaica), concluding, “I’ll never forget no way they turned their backs on Paul Bogle, so don’t you forget no youth who you are and where you stand in the struggle.”

Jamaica’s 1980 general election was marred by 844 murders in a fight over ideology, and the financial state of the nation. Prime Minister Michael Manley, Edna Manley’s son, called for early elections on October 5, 1980.

A strike by workers of the Jamaica Public Service Company plunged 70 percent of Jamaica into darkness. Blood started to flow when a resident home was torched, killing 153 aged women. A plot to overthrow the Government ended in the arrest of two dozen police and civilians. Many called it the most awful period of Jamaica’s history.

The Jamaica Labor Party swept the October 30 election, scoring 51 seats to 9 for the Michael Manley’s People’s National Party.

Ghetto Mother is a 46-inch work displaying a massive mother figure with four frail children huddling around her bended knees. The sculpture evokes the horror of poverty and fear. The mother’s large face is anguished while her hollow-eyed children, mouths agape, cringe in terror, clinging to their mother for help. Manley  created the figure in response to the horror of the 1980 elections.

When Edna Manley died in 1987, she was honored with a plaque at the National Heroes Park, her work having earned her the unofficial title of “Mother of Jamaican Art.”

“Museum Mosaic” concludes next week with Martinique.

👉  Today’s close is from Praying with the Psalms, by Eugene H. Peterson.

“Truly the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him, on those who hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18).

Not only did the Lord make everything, he cares for it.  He did not create the world and then walk off and leave it; he watches over it wisely and lovingly.  We are his creatures; we are also his children, for whom he provides faithfully.

Prayer: Your creative work, Almighty God, fills me with awe: such power and such magnificence!  Your providence envelopes me with hope: such care and such attention!  Thank you for being everything to me in Jesus!  Amen.

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