Description

Featuring international guests:  Dr. Veerle Poupeye, Art Historian and former Director and Chief Curator of the Jamaica Biennial and Erica Moiah James, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Miami and former Director of The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, in discussion with NGCI Director and Chief Curator Natalie Urquhart. Join international curators for a discussion on Biennial exhibitions in the Caribbean, with examples from Jamaica and the Bahamas. Admission is free and refreshments will be served.

About the Speakers

Erica Moiah James

Erica Moiah James is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Miami.  Before arriving in Miami she taught at Yale University was the founding Director and Chief Curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB). Publications include, Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art (Small Axe, 2012); Dreams of Utopia: Sustaining Art Institutions in the Transnational Caribbean(Open Arts Journal, 2016) (Manchester UP 2017); Every Nigger is A Star: (1974) Re-imaging Blackness from Post Civil Rights America to the Post Independence Caribbean (Black Camera, 2016) and Crisis of Faith: Charles White’s J’Accuse! (1966) and the Limits of Universal Blackness (AAAJ, 2016). She recently coedited a special issue of Small Axe Journal entitled ‘Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice’ (March 2017).  Curatorial projects and essays include Reincarnation: R Brent Malone a Retrospective, NAGB, 2015;  “Sunsplash” for the exhibition Nari Ward: Sunsplash (Perez Art Museum Miami, 2015);Caribbean Queer Visualities (Belfast 2016 and Glasgow, 2017) and “Graham Fagen: Opus V” for the exhibition Graham Fagen: The Slave’s Lament (Galerie de L’Uquam,  Université du Québec à Montréal, 2017). Her forthcoming book is entitled After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary.

Dr. Veerle Poupeye

Veerle Poupeye is a Belgian-Jamaican art historian, curator and critic, based in Kingston, Jamaica. She was educated at the Universiteit Gent in Belgium (BA and MA, Art History) and at Emory University in Atlanta (PhD, Art History and Cultural Studies). She has curated more than forty exhibitions for the National Gallery of Jamaica and other museums and galleries, and she was the lead curator for the inaugural Jamaica Biennial 2014 and the Jamaica Biennial 2017. She has published extensively on Caribbean art and culture. Her best-known publications are Caribbean Art (1998), in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series, and Modern Jamaican Art (1998). She has contributed to several edited volumes, including Curating in the Caribbean (2012); journals and periodicals such as Small Axe, Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, Raw Vision, The Australia and New Zealand Art Journal, The Miami Rail, The Jamaica Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer; and many art exhibition catalogues. Her personal blog, Perspectives, explores artists and issues in Caribbean art and beyond (veerlepoupeye.wordpress.com).

Poupeye until recently served as the Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica and had previously worked there as a Curator. She lectures in Material Culture and Curatorial Studies at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston and has also taught at the University of the West Indies-Mona, and at Emory University and New York University. She developed the Introduction to Curatorial Studies course that is offered at the Edna Manley College, which is the only such course offered in the English-speaking Caribbean, and she has mentored most of the younger curators that have emerged from Jamaica in recent years. She presently works as an independent curator and writer.