Caribbean Beat — 25th Anniversary Edition — March/April 2017 (#144)

we got there,” McCarthy explains. “What we’re
doing is reviving Kingston to what it used to be.”
As McCarthy points out, Paint Jamaica is not
the first attempt to use street art for transformation
in Kingston. He points to the work of Rosie Chung
of Studio 174, and Alison Perkins, who conducted
the Red Rubberband painting project through the
Kingston on the Edge (KOTE) festival. Still, Paint
Jamaica has easily been the most successful. “Not
only do you paint something, but you also attract
the attention of other people who wanted to do
something,” McCarthy says. Indeed, the project
would not have been successful without throngs
of volunteers from the community and outside
it. Working on the project also significantly
boosted the skills of the individual artists in
creating murals, as well as better understanding
A girl from the neighbourhood,
posing here with
her friend, discovers an uncanny
resemblance in artist
Matthew Henry’s mural
the people in the community, you don’t get the authentic story,”
McCarthy says.
Additionally, Paint Jamaica has benefitted from a democratic
process among the artists. The group found themselves inspired
by the 2011 Arab Spring and its germination via Facebook. So
they too started a Facebook page, and invited other interested
artists to share and participate.
One key element is that interest in the Fleet Street project has
leveraged opportunities for both the artists who have worked on
the project and members of the community as well. One of these
is Life Yard, an ital (i.e. vegetarian) cookshop that operates just
across the street from the warehouse. Apart from benefitting
from patronage by visitors to the mural, Life Yard has also been
hired to cater events outside the neighbourhood.
And members of the community are getting exposure and
making connections and gaining opportunities previously
closed off to them, because of the music videos and photo shoots
taking place there. “There are a lot of artistic people in the
community, and they’ve been practicing their craft long before
Paint Jamaica is more
a movement than a
foundation, but its
foundations are rock solid:
using art to create and
inspire change
how to run art projects aimed at stimulating
development.
Yet, despite the project’s success, Paint
Jamaica has been deliberately slow in proliferation
across the island. “It was alluring to go everywhere, but it was
also beautiful to stay there and watch the community grow,”
McCarthy says. “Many people consider me a painter, but I
personally consider myself a social engineer.”
Interestingly, Paint Jamaica was born after the police had
systematically removed murals of fallen “dons” from the walls
of several communities throughout Kingston. McCarthy admits
that the decision to pursue the project was a direct response
to that. “We try to do things that will have an impact because
they are a response to other things that are happening,” he says.
“This project is a very diplomatic project. We don’t do anything
because we think it should be done, we do it because we feel it
must be done. The neglect was unreasonable. I don’t think any
community should suffer from this kind of neglect.”
For Paint Jamaica, its greatest impact will not simply be how
it transforms one community, but rather how it inspires others
to do the same. “I want to make sure that every artist feels the
current of this project,” McCarthy says, “that they can do this
too. We were just a set of average Joes on Facebook.” n
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