LECTURE @ National Gallery: Reframing Slavery

Dr. Krista Thompson to Present 2009 Edna Manley Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 5 at the National Gallery of Jamaica

The Edna Manley Foundation, in association with the Edna Manley College and the National Gallery of Jamaica, is pleased to present its 2009 Edna Manley Memorial Lecture, Reframing Slavery: Photography, History, and Re(Memory) by Krista Thompson. The lecture will take place at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston Mall, on Thursday, March 5, 2009, starting at 2:30 pm. A reception will follow at the end of the lecture.

The Edna Manley Foundation was established shortly after Edna Manley's death in 1987, as a foundation dedicated to her artistic legacy, in terms of her own work and her broader role in Jamaican art. The Foundation is also dedicated to the broader development of art in Jamaica and to stimulating intellectual discourse on the subject. Its activities include, among others, the organization of an annual Edna Manley Memorial Lecture, which is featured during Edna Manley Week, the Edna Manley College's annual founders' week. While the inaugural lecture focused on aspects of Edna Manley's life and work, this year's lecture will cast a broader look at Caribbean culture and history.

Krista Thompson's Reframing Slavery lecture examines how photographs from the late nineteenth century inform visual memory in Jamaica and in the Anglophone Caribbean more generally. It explores how, despite photography's invention as slavery was being abolished in the English speaking territories, historians often use photographs from the post-slavery period to represent slavery. While this occludes aspects of the history of slavery from view, it also brings into focus African Diasporic ways of remembering. Indeed, the transposition of slavery and the late nineteenth century in some historical accounts seems to aptly capture what Toni Morrison characterizes as "re-memory" among enslaved Africans and their descendants, the ruptures in space and time, the ever-presentness of the past, that are intrinsic to the memory of slavery and to the formation of the African Diaspora more generally.

Krista A. Thompson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and the author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006), an examination of the colonial imaging of the Anglophone Caribbean in photographs and its effects on landscape, history, race, governmentality, and contemporary art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Cultural Studies from Emory University. A Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellow (2008-2009), she is currently working on a book titled The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice on the intersections among black vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art in the Caribbean and the United States. Her writings have appeared in American Art, The Drama Review, and Small Axe.

The Edna Manley Memorial Lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Veerle Poupeye, at 929-2350-2 @ extension 2117, mobile 579-8282 or veerle.poupeye@emc.edu.jm.

-contributed by Veerle Poupeye

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Materialising Slavery: Art, Artefact Memory and Identity

Images taken of the current exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica

The opening of the exhibition Materialising Slavery: Art, Artefact Memory and Identity was very well attended on Thursday, December 13, at 3 pm. Wayne Modest set the stage with the historical background of our Nation and the context within which each representing artist and ambassador leads. The exhibiting artists are David Boxer, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Christopher Irons, Khalfani Ra and Oneika Russell.

Though exhibited within fragmented spaces, the consistent threads that tied the exhibition together as a powerful forward movement shared by more established artists and the younger generation set examples for us all, as we celebrate the mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade of enslaved Africans to Jamaica.

The theory of existentialism, very simular to that of the chaos vs. symmetry theory were also clearly at work throughout the exhibition. Chattel slavery was clearly an injustice served against our Jamaican people in the context of our connection to Africa, the Black Diaspora, to Black people and to humanity in general. In this context, existentially, our ancestors have already bourn enough pain, suffering and anguish in our honour, this being a past purpose. If we refuse to view the world as being chaotic, there is always symmetry in the greater view of humanity. Every thing does in fact serve a purpose, one to learn from and add to our everyday rituals of "living good with people".

In locating ourselves in the present day and in an attempt to set a new paradigm, we need not necessarily re-live this pain and suffering. It is a much more suitable position to identify ourselves with the fact that those wounds have already been healed. We, the descendants, therefore are “Free” of these issues. The contemporary issues that our history continues to prove relevant are issues of identity, race, gender and the body.

It all came together in the new galleries of the Institute of Jamaica, 95-97 Water Lane (entrance at #10 East Street). This exhibition is part of the collaborative project Materialising Slavery: Art, Artefact Memory and Identity being put on by the Museums of History and Ethnography and the National Gallery of Jamaica.

I cannot possibly reflect to you what experiencing this installation of fine artists is like, please visit the site in person. All were and continue to be invited to play a significant part in this exhibition.

The exhibition closes in March 2008.

contributed by Tricia Gordon-Johnston

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