The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas extends and invitation to a public lecture— Caribbean Artists Visualising Enslavement—by cultural critic, writer, and professor Eddie Chambers on Thursday, June 21, 2018, at 7:00pm. 

Description: With so much of the New World being built on enslavement, it’s not surprising that slavery’s legacies should continue to exercise so many artists, not only of the Caribbean region, but also those of what we might call the Caribbean diaspora. These artists visualise slavery in an astonishingly broad range of ways, and one particularly fascinating aspect of this visualisation are the ways in which visual articulations of enslavement act as a means of animating decidedly contemporary challenges. Caribbean artists are extraordinarily adept at making innovative, challenging, aesthetically cogent work, and a notable strand of this is work that turns its attention to the formidable and ongoing task of visualizing slavery and its multiple legacies.

In this regard, We Suffer to Remain is very much a textured, layered, multi-faceted manifestation of artists grappling with slavery and its legacies. This talk will present and discuss various examples of the ways in which artists of the Caribbean and its diasporas have responded to the challenges of visualizing slavery. Among the artists whose work is to be included in the talk are Charles Campbell (Jamaica/Canada), Terry Boddie (Saint Kiits and Nevis/USA), and Tam Joseph (Dominica/UK).

Eddie Chambers, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was born in Wolverhampton, England. He gained his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1998, for his study of press and other responses to the work of a new generation of Black artists in Britain, active during the 1980s. He was on a number of occasions between 2003 and 2009, a Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta. He joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin in January 2010 where he is currently a Professor. In 2012 Rodopi Editions, Amsterdam and New York, published his book Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain. He is also the author of Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s, published by I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2014, reissued 2015, and Roots & Culture: Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain, published 2017. His website is http://www.eddiechambers.com/.

[Image above: Detail from John Beadle’s “Cuffed: held in check”.]

For original post, see http://nagb.org.bs/events/2018/6/21/public-lecture-by-eddie-chambers-caribbean-artists-visualising-enslavement