Caribbean Beat — November/December 2021 (#167)
In the latest issue of Caribbean Beat magazine, our editorial team share their personal bucket list wishes for future travel experiences — from Junkanoo in the Bahamas to whale-watching in Dominica and exploring the Guyanese rainforest. Meet a Trinidadian dancer and choreographer bringing classical Indian traditions to the Caribbean, and hear from award-winning St Lucian poet Canisia Lubrin. See highlights of a new exhibition of Caribbean art and photography in Toronto. Plus coverage of Caribbean books, music, food, the year-end festivals of Divali and Christmas, and more!
In the latest issue of Caribbean Beat magazine, our editorial team share their personal bucket list wishes for future travel experiences — from Junkanoo in the Bahamas to whale-watching in Dominica and exploring the Guyanese rainforest. Meet a Trinidadian dancer and choreographer bringing classical Indian traditions to the Caribbean, and hear from award-winning St Lucian poet Canisia Lubrin. See highlights of a new exhibition of Caribbean art and photography in Toronto. Plus coverage of Caribbean books, music, food, the year-end festivals of Divali and Christmas, and more!
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portfolio
Unknown. Jamaican Women, c. 1900. Gelatin
silver print, overall: 17.5 × 23.5 cm. Montgomery
Collection of Caribbean Photographs
Purchase, with funds from Dr Liza & Dr Frederick
Murrell, Bruce Croxon & Debra Thier, Wes Hall
& Kingsdale Advisors, Cindy & Shon Barnett,
Donette Chin-Loy Chang, Kamala-Jean Gopie,
Phil Lind & Ellen Roland, Martin Doc McKinney,
Francilla Charles, Ray & Georgina Williams, Thaine
& Bianca Carter, Charmaine Crooks, Nathaniel
Crooks, Andrew Garrett & Dr Belinda Longe, Neil
L. Le Grand, Michael Lewis, Dr Kenneth Montague
& Sarah Aranha, Lenny & Julia Mortimore, and The
Ferrotype Collective, 2019. © Art Gallery of Ontario
2019/2210
Assembling
fragments
Historical photographs and works by
contemporary Caribbean artists come
together in a new exhibition at the Art Gallery
of Ontario, to show how stories of ourselves
have changed over time
Almost thirty years after St Lucian
poet Derek Walcott delivered his
Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm,
one hopeful and especially
quotable sentence continues to
resonate in the imaginations of
Caribbean thinkers. “Break a vase, and the love that
reassembles the fragments is stronger than that
love which took its symmetry for granted when it
was whole.” The Caribbean’s broken vase, Walcott
suggested, is reassembled from the “shattered
histories” and “shards of vocabulary” of our
ancestral traditions — relics of five centuries of
violence and oppression. “This gathering of broken
pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles,” Walcott
wrote. “Antillean art is this restoration.”
Fragments of Epic Memory, a new exhibition at
Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario — which opened
in September 2021 and runs through 21 February,
2022 — borrows from Walcott’s Nobel lecture
both its title and the summoning idea that the task
and privilege of Caribbean artists is to create new
stories and images from the disjecta membra of
our troubling past and present. It also reminds us
that those stories and images must evolve over
time — that each generation must indeed reassemble
the fragments and reimagine the forms of
our individual and shared memories.
Fragments of Epic Memory is the first exhibition
organised by the AGO’s Department of Arts of
Global Africa and the Diaspora, established in
2020 under the directorship of Julie Crooks. In her
previous role as photography curator, Crooks managed
the landmark acquisition of the Montgomery
Collection of Caribbean Photographs, thought to
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