Amanda Coulson

Sitting with Amanda on the balcony of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) I realize I am in for quite the education – and it is not because I have just learnt that the gallery occupies an 1860s period building once owned by Sir William Doyle, then Chief Justice of The Bahamas and the first Bahamian to be knighted. Amanda Coulson – a published art critic and celebrated curator – who recently has returned to her homeland to fill the role of Director of The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas is telling me how she sees the visual art industry evolving here in The Bahamas and how she will be among the driving forces behind that progress. I must add that this is task which I have no doubt she can live up to. In 2005, Coulson was one of the co-founders of the VOLTA fair in Basel, Switzerland. Three years later, acting as the Executive Director she conceived the solo show idea for the inaugural edition of VOLTA NY, where she still serves as Curatorial Consultant. Having returned to The Bahamas, with her expertise in tow and the passion to match it she is an Island Connoisseur in every way.

VP – Let’s get straight to it. Tell me about the art scene here in The Bahamas and what challenges Bahamian Artists are currently facing?
AC – The major challenge is lack of commercial galleries working at an international level and not catering to only a tourist trade. Galleries serve the really important function for artists of making the first selection, curating the work—so to speak—and then promoting it and disseminating information to a large audience. Really a gallery is like an agent, it is extremely hard for artists to represent themselves to the world. So it is a real challenge down here for individual artists because there are no commercial galleries doing that work for them. Galleries are the intermediary between the studio and the collector and they are also important because art fairs have become such a big part of the global art community; that’s how a lot of curators, a lot of institutions, a lot of collectors, a lot of journalists get exposed to artists and their work. It is by going to these art fairs, where a gallery from Cape Town, a gallery from Chicago, a gallery from Sydney, gets the exposure. There are simply no galleries from the Caribbean participating and representing artists from the islands. Fairs do not usually deal directly with an artist, so not having that gallery as an agent is a really major problem. Normally an institution would not do that job, a museum in any other country is not going to represent artists in that capacity, but because of the lack I feel it is something that we, as the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB), need to do. I am using my contacts in the art world and passing on the information about practicing artists. We can make a difference by trying to curate our artists into international shows and by doing exchange programs with other institutions. Hopefully then our artists will be picked by a gallery in that city, or someone that sees the show. In short, the major reason the artists are not known better is because there is no one promoting their work.

VP – So what you are more less saying is you can’t be an artist and a publicist at the same time.

AC – Exactly. Dancers don’t book their performances, bands don’t book their gigs and pay for their own demo tapes – well possibly they do in the beginning but you have people that help you, for lack of a better word – package and market you. You have a management team that knows how to sell you. It is hard for artists to sell themselves because they are too close to the work. It is a big lack for the Caribbean that there are no commercial galleries that can get into the contemporary discourse. It is all networks: artists meet other artists and meet their dealer, that is how artists get known, through the dealer they get curated in to other shows, and that’s how they move ahead, through these social networks.

VP – It is the business side of art.

AC – Exactly, and as we are an institution we should not really be concerned with the market side. Institutions normally just confirm the arrival of an artist really by legitimizing their practice, by putting them in an institutional framework. Also, normally an institution is the goal after you’ve been through the gallery circuit. I work with a lot of artists here that are very, very good but they are still extremely naïve about how the market works, how they should sell their work, because they haven’t been through that circuit. Therefore they are arriving and getting a show at the NAGB – which is a significant institutional credit – but they have not been through the whole rigorous system that many other artists go through. That is: doing of a lot of shows, being put in a group show first, then being picked to do a solo show where they meet collectors or critics, and then finally moving to the institution. Here in The Bahamas, the NAGB is often the first major show an artist might have and since we are not commercial they must function as their own agents, which is really hard for the artists. They themselves are the ones that have to mediate between their work and the buyer and it is very difficult for an artist to do that because it’s like selling yourself, which is extremely awkward. Again, in any other context, say you’re an actor and you go and audition and are selected, the casting company will negotiate with your agent. You need someone not emotionally tied to your work, who will sell it effectively and negotiate the right price. It is a Catch-22 really, until there is a bigger audience here that understands what a gallery is, why they should go, and why they should support it—which there isn’t yet—there won’t be galleries; without galleries there is no-one to help promote and educate to create the audience. We have barriers to break through and what we have to do here is educate the population. There are two things – one is to get more Bahamians interested in art, help them understand why it is valid and important and why they might actually want to own it, because obviously that is next step in the discourse. But then also we need to expose Bahamian art to those cultural tourists that are visiting, as it is not until then through word-of-mouth that we will become known as a place where art of value being produced. Maybe then visitors will come to islands looking to buy art. We really need to increase the awareness of what is happening in the art world of The Bahamas, on an international level and in our own community so that there is enough of a support system that will then warrant more galleries being opened.

VP – Which leads me to, what is your vision for the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and how do you plan to turn your vision in to a reality?  
AC – For me the vision is two-fold similar to what I said above. One goal is to open our doors much more to the “average” Bahamian. Museums are quite often seen as elite places. This happens everywhere in the world, it is not a stigma just attached to The Bahamas. It is thought by many that to be a part of the art community you have to be educated to a certain degree and that galleries are full of only hoity-toity people having highfalutin conversations. We need to bust that image and communicate that is not what museums are. Of course this is every director’s challenge in every community. How do I look to do that? You make kid-friendly shows, shows that appeal to a larger population base – every institution wants to hold very scholarly shows that are acknowledged by their peers, but if you do too many of those then you will indeed become the hub for the over-educated and the elite.

Right now, for example, we are showing Bahamian painter Amos Ferguson’s work. We have a room in the gallery where you can try your hand at painting a canvas like he did – because he is an Outsider artist everyone typically says, “Oh a kid can do that, it looks so easy!” So we thought, “OK let’s see if you can!” We covered a room in cardboard and there with a paintbrush in hand you can try and copy one of his pieces and see for yourself how difficult it is to paint like him. This is something very accessible to all ages and kinds of people.

So, my first step to bringing my vision to life is to open up the programming, to make it more diverse and welcoming. The first show I did had a Junkanoo theme, which has never been done before. I understand the reasons why, as there is this fear that you are going to be branded as “that museum that curates a show around a craft,” or pigeonhole yourself as “regional” or provincial,” but that’s precisely why the curator John Cox mixed the Junkanoo pieces with Jackson Burnside’s work, a fine artist who is known for his oil paintings and who recently passed away. We also included in the show work by College of The Bahamas (COB) art students. We sent those students to the shacks where the Junkanoo pieces were being made and their challenge was to make original contemporary artwork based on their experience in the shacks. That was a show that was extremely popular, because of course it appealed to almost every single Bahamian and sent the message that art is made everywhere, in every context and can be appreciated by every person.

We are looking to be true to our motto “It belongs to you” – we want Bahamians to feel invested in the gallery and for the The Bahamas to feel that the Bahamian art we have here is indeed owned by the nation and “belongs” to every Bahamian. We’ve created extra gallery space by reshuffling offices, because if you just have one show that runs for six or seven months, and it’s a retrospective of a single artist, while it might be really beautiful it’s not going to get a lot of turnover. We now have, alongside the temporary shows (which will run only 3-4 months) the permanent collection on show downstairs, so schools and visitors can come and get an idea of the different range of Bahamian art. Historically we have photographs from the turn of the century, really contemporary video work, sculpture, and ceramics. There visitors can see a progression of where Bahamian art started and where it has come to today and that will stay up permanently.

The second part of this two-pronged vision is to reach out internationally and to get the NAGB known overseas. From my experience I have a lot of friends and contacts in the industry and when I was hired and told them I am going to live in The Bahamas to be the Director of the NAGB the general response was, “Oh really? There is a National Gallery down there?” People don’t know about it and they should. We should have a program that, at least once a year, will include a show on an international level, not necessarily with international artists but Bahamian artists who we can put in to dialogue with international artists. This will help us achieve getting the institution noticed and increasing the number of people visiting our webpage once a month to see what’s currently on at the gallery. By doing that we will be able to promote Bahamian artists better and hopefully get them curated in to other shows, have our shows travel, go to other institutions. We need to not just get ourselves known better in the art world but also in the travel world. I mean, as a tourist destination The Bahamas does have a lot to offer besides the beach. The vision is just to increase our awareness, both at home and abroad. We are going to have 4 -5 shows per year, not all shows will be retrospectives like Amos Ferguson, though we will have that level of a show every two years or so as that is a big production and a lot of research.

VP – Let’s discuss Outsider Artists as there has surely been a movement here in The Bahamas with artists such as the famed Amos Ferguson…
AC – We have a strong collection of Amos Ferguson’s work that are actually part of the permanent collection on the ground floor. There we are now also displaying a few works of other Bahamian Outsider artists to show that it is a kind of movement here in its own right as well as an art historical genre. Wellington Bridgewater, a man who lives on a house-boat and paints for his own devices, is one of them; there’s also Joe Monks, Rev. Thompson, Tony Mackay (also known as Exuma, The Obeah Man). Normally the art is very simple and naive and typically Outsider artists do not try to paint in an academic style with any perspective or modeling. They are also some times called “Intuitive” artists because they paint very instinctively. Many Intuitive artists or Outsider artists are quite reclusive; some have mental disorders – in fact some very famous Outsider artists, who are known in international circuits, started their painting as a form of therapy; quite often, as in the case of Amos Ferguson of Wellington Bridgewater they are extremely religious and are visited by visions. These artists are more or less on another wavelength and they are not trying to fit in to our structured society and therefore quite often they are regulated into the genre of “folk art” and are not considered as part of the regular art discourse.

Amos Ferguson was a house painter and he was never formally trained. He was born in the Exumas in the 1920, which was then extremely rural. He was the descendant of slaves and his family was sharecroppers, who still worked the land. He was trained as a furniture finisher and he moved to Nassau when he was seventeen to find work, which he found and was then sent to the states for a while. At the time of the war the Bahamas had an agreement with the U.S.  and Bahamian farmhands would go to the U.S. under contract and pick the food as the Americans were fighting overseas. When he returned he became a house painter and actually painted a lot of houses in Lyford Cay. His nephew had a vision one night and said God came and told him that one his relatives was squandering their talent, not painting for His own benefit. Apparently Amos recognized himself in the dream. From that day on he started painting pictures, in the beginning he continued painting houses and finishing furniture. He said he would have a vision and as soon as he did he would climb down the ladder and note what time it was so that he could make his sketch but he would never not work the hours needed to paint the house. When he wasn’t painting houses he was painting religious themes, the life of Jesus or market themes, city life and monuments – Government House, Gregory’s Arch and the Queen’s Staircase. He loved nature obviously, and painted birds, fruits and things like that. He painted on cardboard, the back of cereal and pizza boxes – using exterior house paint, the same paint he would use to paint the houses in Lyford Cay. He mixed his own colours and made his own technique and found his own voice. He found his own style, which is very simplistic, almost cartoony. This was in the sixties and seventies we are talking about, there wasn’t really a kind of Bahamian art scene at that time. It was really a time when artists such as Brent Malone were starting to also paint and opened his own galleries. You know your average Bahamian criticized Amos for painting like child and that his paintings weren’t finished and he wasn’t portraying the world as it is. That of course was the whole point, he was portraying the world as he saw it and he saw it in his visions and painted the interpretation of those visions. He later met a woman who worked in the straw market, her name was Bea; they lived together for many years and they had a real love story. She was his muse and she made baskets, she also stitched the raffia flowers onto them. There is believed to be a correlation between the two. People have hypothesized that possibly the flatness of his style was influenced by the work he saw Bea doing. He actually started selling some of his work on Bay Street in the straw market and even at the bottom of Paradise Island Bridge he set up a small stall. The only people that really paid any attention were tourists, for a long time he was really supported by foreign visitors. That was something that was very upsetting to him. Soon he became more and more known – Brent Malone supported a solo show he did and later he became world famous. A woman from New York saw his work and purchased a piece, she then tried to hunt him down, finally she found him and introduced him to a German art historian that specializes in folk art, Haitian and Caribbean art. They organized a show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Connecticut, a very important museum. He did a show with about sixty paintings that ended up traveling around America. That really made him known internationally, his work sold but mostly to foreigners. While he did have a few standing supporters here it was only when he came back and he had the international attention that Bahamians then asked, “What do we have here?” Actually it was Sir Lynden Pindling, who was then Prime Minister, who realized that could be used as a promotional tool, that highlighting our culture would be good for our nation. It was he who decided that the Central Bank of The Bahamas would purchase twenty-five of his works. Those paintings were really the founding of the national collection and the NAGB as it is today.  Eventually Ferguson quit his other jobs and painted art full time and he really just painted all day and all night in his home. He would often go long in to the night and he and Bea lived together, they got married very late when he was in his seventies. After his show at the Central Bank he was awarded an Order of The British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Slowly he started becoming more accepted. Amos never moved, his house still exists on a street which was once named ‘Exuma Street’ and is now called ‘Amos Ferguson Street’ – he never moved, he sold his work for a lot of money, he was a very tough negotiator. He never left his neighborhood, he supported a lot of people in his there. When he died it was really a loss for the community, he was someone of importance not only culturally but socially for the community. His house still exists to this day. The idea of the retrospective is to confirm to the world how important he was, especially to Bahamians.

VP – As an art critic what differentiates Bahamian art from what you have seen abroad?
AC – Interestingly enough, you know in certain respects not much, which is a good thing. I think there are artists working here that are working with a vocabulary and the means, which don’t pigeonhole them in to being regional. There are artists that are working that can easily be inserted in to a show with international artists, their art wouldn’t stand out because of its “Bahamian-ness.” These artists are using very sophisticated vocabulary and that is the same discourse and vocabulary that is being used internationally. Having said that, it is quite easy to identify Korean art, Chinese art, and South American art. South American art  has a certain look to it – normally it is very crafty and material orientated, a lot of clay and wood is incorporated – you can quite often see South American art and know it is from somewhere in the region. I think Bahamian art does fit in to a context of Caribbean art as there is a certain use of colour, definitely, as we live every day with an incredibly bright palette. There is texture too. There is very long print-making history here that is still seen in today’s art, it is very patchwork, very layered. Also, interestingly, ceramics. I think there are certain traits that you can connect Bahamian artists together and see that they are being influenced by their environment. Which is very normal, our environment is very layered, coloured and organic. You do see that in a lot of work, even the very abstract work. You see this kind of lushness that makes you think of the vegetation, the foliage. You can speculate or say that these influences produce Bahamian art but I don’t think this makes it regional or provincial in any way. There are artists working here with a very highly developed vocabulary, someone like John Beadle who works with raw materials – clay and found driftwood – does a lot of carving. Very native materials, so of course right away you respond to that as being very Bahamian but he is using a technique and a language that is extremely developed. Again, he could insert himself in to a show on an international level and with artists that are at the same level. While it is influenced by The Bahamas I don’t want that to make it sound like it is lesser than other things I’ve seen. I think that is what is very impressive. There is a generation here that is becoming the kind of “mature” generation—such as Antonius Roberts, John Beadle, Heino Schmid and John Cox—they’re now reaching their forties and are the teachers of the new generation coming out of COB right now and I must say their work is stunning. I couldn’t believe when I first got here, I mean I know all the other artists as I’ve worked with them doing shows in the past, but I am kind of getting to know the younger generation coming out of art school and they’re really incredible. They are really highly developed and ready to compete on an international level. Therefore that is what we have to do, we have to facilitate these artists and insert them in to an international discourse. That’s why it is such a big part of my agenda, I’m meeting with curators – there are a lot of people in Miami that work at different museums there and want to put Bahamian art in their programming. Of course that will expose artist to the American audience and hopefully there will be a domino effect.

There is one young artist in particular, Jeffrey Meris, who has such a great story. He is from “Over the Hill,” and he built his vocabulary and learned his craft and how to work with colour through working in the Junkanoo shacks, by making Junkanoo costumes. Then he went to College of The Bahamas (COB) to hone these skills and now he has won a grant to go to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), which is one of the better art schools in the United States. I think it is so great because he is someone so rooted in the Bahamian culture and now is able to take this language that he has learnt in none other than a Junkanoo shack to go off to RISD where he will further his learning and experience a greater interchanging of ideas. Then he’ll come back down and share that knowledge, which is of course is what we need happening, encouraging that dialogue and the interchange of ideas.  He’s someone to watch out for, for sure!

VP – I will be sure to!

A tip of the straw hat to Amanda Coulson and the NAGB team for being game changers in the industry. Thank you for being a part of the experience.

Photo credit – Featured Photo: Nicholas Winter Photography
Additional Photos via the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas