Art visual np2

Richard Bridgens, 'West India Scenery' FROM THE ORGANISERS: The English artist Richard Bridgens lived and worked in Trinidad in the 1830s, a generation before Cazabon, and drew and commented on what he found here. He took not only an artistic but also an anthropological interest in the sugar estates and the people who worked on them. Nevertheless, his work has either been completely overlooked or else dismissed as pro-slavery polemic that offers little more than caricature. But it is now increasingly being recognised by historians and art historians as an important visual record of the last years of slavery. Judy Raymond is researching Bridgens’s life and work in an attempt to discover more about the meaning of his drawings and resolve these contradictions. Judy Raymond has a BA in Literae Humaniores (Classics) from Hertford College, Oxford, and an MA in Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She has worked...

Imperial (2010), by Holly Bynoe; digital collage, 40 x 60 inches Holly Bynoe is a visual artist and editor-in-chief of ARC Magazine . A portfolio of her amazing work is published this month at the Caribbean Review of Books . As noted by Melanie Archer, Bynoe, in writing about her work, refers to Walter Benjamin's idea of the "fan of memory": He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. >>>SEE & READ MORE here .

Introducing ARC. SEE website here . READ CRB blog piece with ARC's editor in chief Holly Bynoe and the magazine's creative director Nadia Huggins  here . FROM THE ARC website: ARC Magazine is a quarterly Caribbean Art and Culture print and e-magazine published out of St. Vincent and the Grenadines by artists Nadia Huggins and Holly Bynoe. We are endeavouring to form a creative platform to offer insight into current practices across the burgeoning creative industries, while bridging the gap between established and emerging artists. Within the recent motions of integration there is a critical space developing where, for the first time, we can envision a converging nexus of artists who want to share their creative experience. ARC Magazine presents a formula, an experiment and an imaginative body of curated work that exhibits the trajectory and the motion of artists who practice within the region. Within our collective networks, we are finding it necessary to make the common man ...

From my favorite CRB cover: Little Crippled Haiti  (2006), by Édouard Duval Carrié; mixed media on aluminium, 48 x 48 inches ; courtesy the artist and Bernice Steinbaum Gallery In November and December 2010, the  CRB  is running a readers’ donation drive.  FROM CRB EDITOR NICHOLAS LAUGHLIN: It’s six months since the  CRB  relaunched online with a new website and a renewed sense of purpose — that purpose being the sustained and serious, insightful and intelligent, but also accessible and entertaining coverage of contemporary Caribbean books and writing alongside art, film, and music. The  CRB  is the only magazine in the anglophone Caribbean devoted to this kind of broad literary and cultural criticism for a general audience. Since our relaunch, we’ve published three bimonthly issues — dated  May ,  July , and September  2010 — filled with dozens of book reviews, as well as profiles and essays, original poems and fiction, interv...

"It starts with the image of a woman’s eyes. Then, slowly, dancing plumes of white and pink smoke. Then the woman again, dancing. An opening title tells us the history of the indentured East Indians who came to Trinidad in the nineteenth century. Two narrators — one a young Indo-Trinidadian woman, the other an older man — use sometimes rhyming verse to weave the central conflict that is the subject matter of Coolie Pink and Green: a conflict left unresolved at the end of this poetic short film by the Trinidadian scholar Patricia Mohammed..." READ the full review at the Caribbean Review of Books' special section on Caribbean film here . FIND out more at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival blog here .

Detail from Ebony G. Patterson's  The Counting Money HaHa (Counting Lesson Revisited )   (2010); mixed media. (Courtesy CRB /NGJ). "The consensus is that the National Gallery of Jamaica’s  Young Talent V  survey was a resounding success, marking a decisive shift in artistic ground, not unlike the infamous 1997 Saatchi show  Sensation  that launched the career of the Young British Artists. "  That is the opening sentence of Annie Paul's review ,  recently published by the online journal   Caribbean Review of Books ,   of "the latest in a series of exhibitions curated by the National Gallery (of Jamaica)  whenever a quorum of noteworthy new talent is aggregated" .  The first  Young Talent  was held in 1985, followed by exhibitions in 1989, 1995, and 2002 : "As the catalogue states: “The  Young Talent  exhibitions have been scheduled whenever the NGJ curators felt that a sufficiently large cohort of...

Detail from an untitled drawing by Christopher Cozier (2002), reproduced on the cover of the August 2004  CRB ;  courtesy the artist. At long last the trail-blazing online version of the Caribbean Review of Book s is on stream! Editor Nicholas Laughlin promises to bring more frequent installments of the journal than ever before. This is a very, very pleasing development. "If the original Caribbean Review of Books — published from 1991 to 1994 in Jamaica — was CRB version 1.0, and the CRB as revived in 2004 in Trinidad was version 2.0, then perhaps this incarnation of the magazine before you now, dear reader, might be called version 2.5," Laughlin writes on the new CRB site. "Because our new website, launched in time for our sixth anniversary, marks a shift in medium, but not in purpose, direction, or ambition. As in the twenty-one print editions we published between May 2004 and May 2009, the CRB will continue to provide serious (but not solemn) coverage of conte...