Kapo and the Father of Spirulina

Sometime in 2018, I came across a lengthy but most interesting Wikipedia entry on Christopher Hills, an English expatriate commodities trader, one time politician, art patron, gallerist, and later yoga and health food guru. Hills was based in Jamaica for a significant part of his life and his friends and associates included the likes of Norman Manley, Percy Junor, and the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The praise heaped on Christopher Hills in the Wikipedia article is effusive, and many names are dropped, but Wikipedia has reasonably good checks and balances these days, and the entry has not been flagged as problematic, so I must assume that it is substantially accurate, and that Christopher Hills indeed led a remarkable life.

Christopher Hills played an important role in the development of Jamaican art as the co-owner of the Hills Gallery, along with his wife Norah, who was also English and who had served as deputy headmistress at Wolmer’s High School for Girls. The Wikipedia entry discusses the Hills Gallery in some detail, to which I have added other research information in the paragraphs below. The section is illustrated with a remarkable photo of a young Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds at the opening of his 1957 solo exhibition there, in the company of Christopher Hills and Governor Sir Hugh Foot, who apparently served as the guest speaker. A sculpture by Kapo can be seen in the background.

The Hills Gallery was the first major commercial art gallery in Jamaica and operated between 1951 and 1977 at 101 Harbour Street in downtown Kingston, a short distance from the Myrtle Bank Hotel, which was then Kingston’s grand hotel, and just a few buildings away from where Kingston Creative is now headquartered. Much of the Hills’ efforts focused on bringing quality Jamaican art and craft to the tourism market and their clients which included celebrity visitors such as Elizabeth Taylor. As the Wikipedia entry reports, the Hills’ yacht, the Robanne, regularly docked at Round Hill Villas and Resorts, laden with art works. For a while, there was a Hills Gallery branch in Montego Bay and the Hills also operated an “art van” which travelled to various parts of the island.

The Hills team, however, also made serious efforts to encourage the appreciation of self-taught popular art and to develop local art audiences. The Hills Gallery was crucially important in launching the careers of artists such as Alexander Cooper, Kapo, Gloria Escoffery, Gaston Tabois, Sidney McLaren, and Carl Abrahams. Norah Hill’s frequent letters to the Gleaner clamoured for greater public art awareness and more governmental support for the arts. The guest speaker at the Gallery’s 10th anniversary exhibition in 1963, then Gleaner editor Theodore Sealy, claimed that 40 per cent of sales were to local buyers and signalled this as a notable achievement. Not unimportantly, at a time when such things were hard to get in Jamaica, the Hills Gallery also sold art materials and was the main agent in the West Indies for Grumbacher, Rowney’s, and Winsor & Newton art supplies.

The Gallery also helped to ignite the artistic imagination and interests of others who would soon play an important role in the Jamaican art world. I remember the story of David Boxer being fascinated by the sight of The Angel (Winged Moon Man) (1963) in the shop window of the Hills Gallery. The Angel, a large mahogany carving, is one of Kapo’s most remarkable sculptures, technically, aesthetically and in terms of its subject matter. Carved in a cocoon-like, twisted concave form, a tension-filled shape which suggests that the figure is about to unfurl its wings, Kapo’s angel is both a spiritual and physical being, with prominent genitalia that leave no doubt about the angel’s male gender. It illustrates the ethos of Zion Revivalism which sees no conflict between spirituality and sexuality, unlike mainstream Christianity. The work ended up in the collection of Larry Wirth, the American owner of the Stony Hill Hotel, and was in 1983 acquired for the National Gallery of Jamaica, where it is now on permanent view in the Kapo Gallery.

The Hills Gallery also took on non-profit projects, occasionally, such as an exhibition of Puerto Rican printmaking on the occasion of the state visit of Governor Luis Muñoz Marin in 1955, which was the first exhibition in Jamaica of Caribbean art from outside of the English-speaking islands. The Gallery provided an important commercial counterpart to the efforts of the Institute of Jamaica and its art gallery (which later became the National Gallery of Jamaica) and along with what was then the Jamaica School of Art (now part of the Edna Manley College). It was one of the pillars in the development of Jamaican art in the 1950s and 60s.

There is, however, an interesting twist to the story of Christopher and Norah Hills, and the Hills Gallery. The Hills may have been among the movers and shakers in Jamaican society around independence, and definitely part of the social elite, but Christopher Hills also had great sympathy and respect for the popular culture, as evidenced in his support of the self-taught artists. Christopher Hills, we are told, was also an early advocate of the Rastafarian movement, at a time when social and political prejudice towards the movement was very high, to the point of active repression. The Wikipedia entry claims that his involvement with Rastafari awakened his spiritual interests and describes him as the “first white Rasta,” noting that he grew his hair and beard in solidarity with what he regarded as a righteous movement, that provided some of the ethical, practical and spiritual answers Jamaica was looking for.

But imagine my surprise, when I also read in the Wikipedia article that Christopher Hills is regarded as the “Father of Spirulina” and was a major figure in the health food and New Age movement. I have to wonder how his visionary ideas and projects, such as his promotion of spirulina, were influenced by his years in Jamaica, its natural food culture, and his encounters with the likes of Kapo and the Rastafari movement in the 1950s and 1960s. And, I also wonder whether Hills’ pioneering advocacy of spirulina, which started when he was still regularly visiting Jamaica, might in turn have influenced the natural food culture of Rastafari, in what is an unexpected but perhaps not entirely surprising connection with the history of Jamaican art.

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.