Entering a New Era of Multimedia - Lehman College

Jacqueline Bishop ‘94
To Lehman, With Love: An Artist’s Journey
For Jacqueline Bishop (‘94, B.A.),
Lehman College holds more than
fond memories of her early years in
the United States, after emigrating
from Jamaica. It is the place where
the seeds of her fruitful literary
career took root. Today, the New
York University professor, who has
received two Fulbright awards and
authored five books, still feels a special
connection to her alma mater.
“Lehman holds a big and important
place in our family,” says Bishop, who
left Jamaica in 1989 to reunite with
Jacqueline Bishop
her mother, also a Lehman alumna,
and to attend college. “The faculty,
students, and campus were all quite nurturing, and I got a good,
solid education. It was the perfect place for me to be while I
integrated into a new society and country.”
Bishop entered as an undergraduate through the Lehman Scholars
Program. Though her budding interest in human behavior led to
a major in psychology, it was her experience studying abroad that
allowed her to truly discover where her talents lay. While spending
a year in France through the CUNY-Paris program, she began to
think seriously about writing creatively, a pastime she thoroughly
enjoyed in her youth.
“Perhaps it is true what people say, that there are no accidents,”
she says, “because that year, I was the au pair to the children of
one of the foremost publishers in France, and they really encouraged
me to start writing again. Perhaps all along, the life I am now
living was calling out to me, but that time in Paris caused me to
take a definite step in that direction.”
Bishop was once again living in Paris this spring, but as a
UNESCO/Fulbright scholar, working in the Creative Cities
Network. Launched by UNESCO in 2004, the Network aims to
enhance the creative, social, and economic potential of cultural
industries, promoting UNESCO’s goal of cultural diversity. “Of the
twenty-one cities in the Network, there are no cities from Africa,
only one from an Arab state, and two from Latin America and the
Caribbean,” says Bishop. “I am working on a proposal to better
geographically balance the Network with countries from
underrepresented regions.”
This is her second Fulbright Award, the first having taken her to
Morocco. There, Bishop, who is also a painter and quiltmaker,
hosted an exhibition of her quilts at a local gallery while working
on her writing and giving talks around the country about her work.
Bishop received both a master’s in English and a Master of
Fine Arts degree from NYU, where she began working as an
instructor, teaching writing courses to undergraduates, and
eventually became a full-time master teacher in its Liberal Studies
Program. Her books include a novel, The River’s Song, a comingof-age
story about a young girl living in a Kingston tenement yard,
whose educational pursuits pull her away from her mother, friends,
and ultimately, the island, but heighten her awareness of Jamaica’s
class divisions, endemic violence, and growing HIV-AIDS problem.
Her other works include poetry collections Fauna and Snapshots
from Istanbul; and non-fiction works Writers Who Paint, Painters
Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists and My Mother Who Is Me:
Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York. She also founded
Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters as a multilingual
forum for Caribbean writers, artists, and thinkers.
Bishop credits her experience at Lehman with teaching her new
ways of thinking, being, and looking at the world. “As I ponder going
for a Ph.D., I think about those classes a lot and how they inform
what I do in my own classroom, as an instructor,” she says.
Earlier this year, Bishop’s quilts were exhibited at Camere Chiare
Gallery, part of the Universita Delgi Studi Di Trieste in Trieste, Italy.
This “Triangular Series” consisted of quilts her great-grandmother
made in Jamaica and those Bishop made in the U.S. and Morocco.
In the near future, she hopes to continue work on a documentary
about a group of untutored Jamaican artists called the Intuitives,
who are integral to contemporary Jamaican art.
Lehman Today/Spring 2010 27