Dawn Scott working on A Cultural Object in 1985. Photograph courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Dawn Scott, Jamaican artist, died on Tuesday 21 September in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica posted an obituary:

Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at the Grosvenor Galleries in Kingston. By far her most impactful exhibition, however, was her contribution to Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), the National Gallery’s (and Jamaica’s) first exhibition of installation art. On this occasion, she produced A Cultural Object, a haunting, spiral-shaped “zinc fence” structure which transposed some of the realities of Jamaica’s inner city life into the gallery spaces of the National Gallery.

A Cultural Object, in permanent display in the NGJ’s contemporary galleries, is a powerful and disturbing work that continues to influence younger Jamaican artists, most recently Ebony G. Patterson, whose Cultural Soliloquy (Cultural Object Revisited) (2010) was included in the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery.

In later years, Scott taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and worked as a fashion, interior, stage, and set designer. In 1999 she was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal for her contribution to Jamaican visual art. The citation read, in part:

Hers is a humanist art in which the human figure takes central stage. Her social concerns are reflected in her dignified but graphic depictions of the life of the working class.

Detail of A Cultural Object (1985), by Dawn Scott. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

Sharing at the Table (1999), by Seya Parboosingh. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Seya Parboosingh, American-born artist living in Jamaica since 1958, died on Friday 13 August in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica blog published a short obituary:

The painter and poet Seya Parboosingh, née Samila Joseph, was born in 1925, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was of Lebanese descent. She attended the University of Iowa, where she concentrated on creative writing. Seya met and married Jamaican artist Karl Parboosingh in New York in 1957 and began to paint under his direction. The couple settled in Jamaica in 1958 and that year they had their first joint exhibition at the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library. Seya spent most of her active life in Jamaica and was a well-recognised member of the Jamaican artistic community . . .

The close artistic partnership between Seya and Karl Parboosingh continued until the time of his death in 1975 and arguably endured beyond that time. Some of her most poignant works were visual expressions of her grief at his passing.

The critic Petrine Archer wrote a profile of Parboosingh for Caribbean Beat in 2000. You can download a PDF of the piece here. Archer wrote:

Seya’s painting has always tended towards minimalism. Her surfaces are characterised by a handful of motifs and images that she uses again and again. Typical are her silent female figures and seemingly isolated objects drawn from nature. Flowers, fruits, birds, fish and angelic figures are painted so that they relate to each other, but still remain separate. Even when they touch they rarely interact; each object seems self-sufficient with a sense of wholeness. But partnered with one another, her subjects tell a story of cosmic unity and love among all things.

Enthroned Madonna (2010), by Marvin Bartley; digital print on archival paper; 109.2 x 241.3 cm. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Regular Antilles readers may remember that nearly two months ago we posted a few images from and links to the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica. The Young Talent exhibition series, surveying work by emerging Jamaican artists, was launched by the NGJ in 1985, and the fifth and most recent version ran earlier this year, from 16 May to 10 July. This week, the CRB publishes a review of Young Talent V by Annie Paul, who has observed and written about the Jamaican art scene for almost two decades. Alongside the review, we publish a portfolio of works by all fourteen Young Talent artists.

For more on the show, browse through the archives of the NGJ blog, where the exhibition is extensively documented, with biographical information on all the artists and short essays by the curators. (Also check out this short video of the exhibition opening by the Jamaican artist and filmmaker Storm Saulter.)

In her review, Paul singles out the artist Ebony G. Patterson, who she argues “captures some of the seismic shifts that have taken place in artistic and other languages in Jamaica.” If you’re curious, you can read a dialogue between Patterson and Oneika Russell (another Young Talent V artist) published a year ago in the Small Axe “Vocabularies” blog, and download a PDF catalogue of Patterson’s recent solo show Gangstas, Disciplez + the Doiley Boyz. And here’s a link to an article by Mel Cooke, published in the Jamaica Gleaner two days ago, reporting on a recent forum where several other Young Talent artists spoke about their work.

Also published today in the CRB: a review by Kelly Baker Josephs of You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, which collects several public and private talks given by James during an extended visit to Canada in 1966 and 1967, together with other documents of that period. This was a kind of turning-point for James, Josephs suggests:

these lectures, interviews, and letters also showcase a James who was increasingly disheartened by the way the Caribbean’s post-independence leaders were “taking part” in West Indian politics and society, and wished to spur challenges to their continued allegiance to foreign powers. This James was not quite as confident about the potential sovereignty of the West Indies as the man who wrote the appendix to the 1962 reissue of The Black Jacobins. Having tried, and failed, to take part via the political route in Trinidad, having witnessed the failure of Federation, having been exiled by his former protégé Eric Williams, the James who lectures in Montreal in 1966–67 was perhaps less sanguine, though still positive about the change that the young people in his audience might yet engender.

The young people in James’s audience in Montreal included some who would go on to play important roles in Caribbean politics in the 1970s and 80s. We don’t know what parts the Young Talent artists will play in coming decades in the Caribbean art world, but, on the evidence of this show, it should be exciting to watch.

Di Real Big Man (2010), by Ebony G. Patterson. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica

One welcome recent development in the Jamaican art scene has been the launch of the National Gallery of Jamaica blog, which finally gives the NGJ a meaningful online presence. (For this we can thank Veerle Poupeye, who was appointed executive director of the gallery last year.) The NGC’s current show, Young Talent V, brings together fourteen emerging artists under forty and based in Jamaica for a survey of current and future directions in contemporary Jamaican art. (Young Talent is a series of periodic exhibitions, with previous surveys organised by the NGJ in 1985, 1989, 1995, and 2002.) It opened on 18 May, runs till 10 July, and has been amply documented at the NGJ blog.

Ahead of the opening, the NGJ has posted profiles of each Young Talent artist — with biographical information, images, and notes from the curators:

• Marvin Bartley
• Keisha Castello
• Stefan Clarke
• Michael Elliott
• Christopher Harris
• Marlon James (not to be confused with the novelist of the same name)
• Leasho Johnson
• Megan McKain
• Oliver Myrie
• Ebony G. Patterson
• Oneika Russell
• Sand
• Caroline “bops” Sardine
• Phillip Thomas

Carousel (2009), by Phillip Thomas. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica

The July issue of the CRB will include a review of Young Talent. Meanwhile, here’s what artist and critic Petrine Archer — who participated in the first Young Talent show in 1985 — has to say:

This time around, Young Talent V offers stunning, sophisticated and superlative work that addresses contemporary issues related to history and identity, gender and sexuality, violence and social issues in ways that harness contemporary vernaculars. Its artists and curators deserve high praise for mounting a show that after a hiatus as a result of internal squabbling, commercialism and funding difficulties seems set to put Jamaican art back on the international art map.

Territorial Fad (2010; left panel of triptych), by Leasho Johnson.
Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica