Minister hopes art will calm ‘volatile’ world
Published:Thursday | June 15, 2023 | 1:08 AMMichael Reckord/Gleaner Writer
In opening the School of Visual Arts Final-Year exhibition at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts on Saturday evening, Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams shared the hope that it would bring “calm and solace” to a world that is “volatile, uncertain, complex [and] ambiguous”.
That might well happen, for the show has been receiving praise from many who have seen the multimedia offerings of the 29 students involved. At the same time, suggesting that art can be both calming and disturbing, the guest speaker, Malene Barnett, described the show as an “intense interrogation of socio-political and geographical issues that impact our humanity”.
Continuing, Barnett, a Fulbright scholar, community builder and artist-in-residence at the school, told the audience in the Vera Moody Concert Hall: “In the show you’ll experience the insightful outcomes of creative thinkers who will exemplify what it means to be an emerging artist in the contemporary art world.
“The works presented are essential and provoking conversations and action around the effects of centuries of systemic challenges that continue to build barriers around women’s bodies, the lack of protection for our children and destroy the environment.”
She ended her address with the exhortation to the students, “Continue to make our ancestors proud.”
In her curatorial overview of the exhibition, the school’s dean, Miriam Hinds Smith, expressed satisfaction, stating that while “punching over their weight,”, some of the students produced work at a master’s level. In the process, they were “brutally honest” in criticising their own work.
She mentioned two major challenges the cohort of students faced – starting their programme online, because of the disruptions to education caused by the COVID pandemic and the later “catastrophe” of the fire that razed the Hope Brooks Painting Studios in September 2021. Nevertheless, the students remained “undeterred”, and that word became the theme of the exhibition, which marked the first such gathering in four years.
Of the works the audience would be seeing after leaving the concert hall to tour of the studios, Hinds Smith said: ”The curatorial process that ensures each student whose work you will experience today and over the next two weeks is nothing short of miracles which have moved by dramatic leaps and bounds from an individualistic stance to a thoughtful interrogation of medium and materiality, morphing into a broader recognition and manifestations of contemporary approaches and currency of ideas.
“The construct of the exhibition, therefore, stems largely from the students’ concepts and mediums employed and the arranged intersectionality of ideas and scholarly framing guaranteeing a more dynamic interaction in the exhibition.”
“Overall,” she concluded, “it is our hope that this exhibition will spark new ideas about contemporary expressions of visual arts and initiate meaningful discourse relevant to the continuing evolution of art and its centrality to the elevation and transformation of us all moving forward undeterred.”