The Kingston Biennial – Part 3: Reinventing the Wheel
In this third part of my review of the inaugural Kingston Biennial I provide some history, as a necessary context to my concerns about the current exhibition. I should acknowledge here that I am an interested party, as I was the lead curator of the 2012, 2014 and 2017 biennials, and conceptualized the Biennial’s new trajectory with the curatorial team in my capacity as the National Gallery’s Executive Director at that time. The team also included O’Neil Lawrence, Monique Barnett-Davidson and, intermittently, Nicole Smythe-Johnson. Before that, the Biennial and its predecessors at the National Gallery had been directed by David Boxer.
What has now again been rebranded, for the third time since 2004, as the Kingston Biennial, has much earlier origins. It started with the All-Island Exhibitions, of which the first edition was held as a private initiative in 1938 and which were held by the Institute of Jamaica from the 1940s onwards. These annual exhibitions were designed to unearth new talent and to encourage the development of a dynamic and diverse Jamaican art world. Such concerns are not irrelevant today.
The National Gallery of Jamaica, which was itself established in 1974, took over the baton in 1977 with the first Annual National Exhibition, which was conceived along similar lines. The curatorial method initially varied – the 1983 edition was, for instance, curated by the members of National Gallery’s curatorial department who spent months visiting artists’ studios. By the mid-1980s, the approach was settled, and involved an ever-growing list of invited artists, deemed to be of exceptional accomplishment, along with an open call for other Jamaican and Jamaica-based artists to submit work to the juried section. The exhibition invariably attracted some controversy, because of the politics of who was, and who was not invited, or selected through the jury process. Many also felt, with good reason, that the jury, while changing annually, typically consisted of persons who were too closely allied with the National Gallery, and reinforced rather than challenged its curatorial biases.
In 2002, it was decided that the Annual National would become a National Biennial, of which the first edition would be held in 2004. It was felt that the quality of entries was dropping, and that giving the artists more time would yield a stronger exhibition. While artists who lived outside of the island had been included in Annual Nationals, it is for the 2004 National Biennial that the first major effort was made to include high-profile Jamaican Diaspora artists. Renee Cox and Peter Wayne Lewis were among the invitees, so there was also an effort at internationalization. The introduction of the Aaron Matalon Award added a prestigious competitive element, which it was hoped would also encourage higher standards.
Yet, in the end, the National Biennial was the same, routine Annual National in a new, slightly modified package that no longer suited the rapidly changing circumstances. The 2012 edition reflected a new energy in the Jamaican art world, and raised generative curatorial questions and critical responses, driving home that more was possible and needed. This new energy had also been evident in the breakthrough Young Talent V exhibition in 2010, which had put a new generation of artists on the map, including Ebony G. Patterson, Leasho Johnson and Phillip Thomas, and which reverberated well beyond Jamaica. There were indeed dramatic changes in the local, regional and global artistic landscape that the National Gallery could not afford to ignore. We also recognized that the invited-for-life system was obsolete, and fundamentally elitist, but knew that abolishing it would be resisted, as being invited for life served to assert positions in the local artistic pecking orders, especially at a time when those were being vigorously challenged by the younger generation.
The 2014 Jamaica Biennial was conceived as a first step towards what, it was envisioned, would eventually become a (guest-)curated and possibly thematic exhibition. The four initial changes were: the use of international judges, as it was felt that a more independent judging process was needed; the change of title from National Biennial to Jamaica Biennial; the use of multiple locations, initially in Kingston and Montego Bay (where the National Gallery West branch had just opened that summer); and opening up to the Caribbean and its Diaspora, by means of special invitations selected by the National Gallery’s curatorial team. The invited and juried system was maintained but with the understanding that this structure would be abandoned for the next edition.
The title Kingston Biennial was considered but rejected because we wanted to challenge the entrenched but deeply reductive Kingston-centred approach to Jamaican art and culture. The idea was that the biennial would eventually become an island-wide event, with other locations being added. The name Jamaica Biennial was agreed upon, as it signalled what we wanted the exhibition to be, which was both inward- and outward-looking, inclusive and of a high standard, and positioned for local as well as international engagement.
There was a broad consensus that the 2014 Jamaica Biennial was a success. The provocative interventions into derelict buildings in Downtown Kingston by the Bahamian artist Blue Curry and the exhibition at Devon House, which was installed in a provocative dialogue with the history and context of that iconic mansion, were particularly memorable. We had succeeded in moving the needle and were all set to start planning for the next edition.
The plan for 2016 was to retain the innovations from 2014 but to shift to invitations that were specific for a particular edition of the biennial only, drawn by the curatorial team from the pool of local, other Caribbean and Diaspora artists, and to retain the juried system alongside, but with a cap on the number of works to be accepted, as we wanted a more manageable exhibition size. We also planned two special tributes, for Alexander Cooper and Peter Dean Rickards — a traditionalist, figurative older painter and a younger provocateur whose photographic and video work captured the spirit of contemporary Jamaica. The contrast was deliberate, as we wanted to signal that abandoning the invited-for-life system did not mean that the artists who had been on that list would no longer be considered.
The 2016 general elections intervened, and it took until July of that year for a new board to be appointed. While curatorial decisions are not, as such, board matters, expenditure had to be approved and possible changes in policy considered, so the second edition of the Jamaica Biennial was postponed to February 2017. The new board did not support our plan to abolish the lifetime invitations or to cap the jury selections. We were also instructed to include two board members along with the international judges, so the move towards a more independent selection process was not supported (while board micromanagement increased exponentially).
The result was an unwieldy behemoth of an exhibition, consisting of a record number of works, many of them large-scale. While the exhibitions at Devon House and National Gallery West were arguably even stronger than in the 2014 edition, the National Gallery building on the waterfront was bursting at its seams, forced to accommodate more exhibits than its capacity allowed. The 2017 edition was an uncomfortable compromise, but at least it was not a step back.
Much of what happened then, and has happened since then, has to do with this ridiculous and counterproductive part of the local political culture, whereby an incoming administration, and its politically appointed boards, feel that they must absolutely devalue, discard, and reinvent anything that happened before them. This usually amounts to a politically motivated, and often also ego-driven, reinvention of the wheel which reduces national institutions to political and personal turf, and distracts from the broader public interests they should serve. Such disruptions set institutions back, rather than to move them forward. And the retrograde effects of such politics are, despite the exhibition’s merits, painfully evident in the inaugural Kingston Biennial, to which I will return in what will now be the fourth and final part of my commentary on that exhibition.
Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.
