Popop’s beautiful and very large garden was a mess after Hurricane Irene. Funnily enough, while large branches and even trees blew down, many small and delicate flowers survived the harsh weather. Photos by Popop-based artist, Phoebe Luk.

The Waterloo Center for the Arts will be hosting an exhibition and symposium featuring the Master Artists of the Bahamas. The exhibition opens on October 14, 2011.

Guests will have a chance to meet the artists and learn from them and other scholarly presenters during the exhibition opening and 2-day symposium.

Experience Bahamian life and culture through the art of the country’s leading artists. From intuitive to trained, the Master Artists of the Bahamas‘ works range from easel paintings to mixed media installations and environments.

Featured in this exhibition and symposium are artists Amos Ferguson, Kendal Hanna, Max Taylor, Brent Malone, Dave Smith, Eddie Minnis, Stan Burnside, Jackson Burnside, Antonius Roberts, John Beadle and John Cox.

John Cox is the founder of Popopstudios and Kendal Hanna is a long-standing resident of the Popop art community. View their work displayed in this exhibition. Both will be travelling to Iowa to be present at the opening reception and symposium.

The Artists of the Bahamas exhibition and symposium are based on a film of the same title which highlights the Bahamas’ most celebrated art makers – artists whose dynamic and distinctive creative work is perhaps not as well recognized within the U.S as it could or should be.

Through this art, we can get a glimpse into the rich texture of Bahamian life and culture which exists beyond the beaches. This project, initiated by the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA) in cooperation with filmmaker Karen Arthur and The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, seeks to raise the profile of Bahamian art, bringing the work of Bahamian art to new audiences.

Symposium October 14 & 15, 2011

During the 2-day symposium master artists featured in the exhibition will be on hand to discuss their individual work as well as its socio-political context. Artist/musician Eddie Minnis will present a rare performance and the acclaimed Ruppapumpum will delight all with the distinctive sounds of the Junkanoo celebration.

The event will also feature premiere screenings of films exploring and documenting the work of Bahamian artists and the award-winning filmmakers behind them, Karen Arthur and Thomas Neuwirth, will provide background and discussion.

Click image above to view Artists of the Bahamas video

On February 3, 2011, Edouard Glissant, one of the most important writers of the French Caribbean, died at age 82. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant moved to Paris in 1946 to study at the Sorbonne. Friends with figures such as Frantz Fanon, and guided by his own status as a colonial subject, Glissant’s plays, poems and essays reflect on the legacy, history and meaning of colonialism, the slave trade, and racism. Though Glissant’s politics changed and evolved over time, in 1997 he wrote in a single sentence that would become his most well known political position: ‘We demand the right to opacity.’ In hearing this phrase, it must be made clear that the demand for opacity is not a demand for invisibility or obscurity, but a demand for the right not to be understood. It is a demand for the right to exist without fulfilling what he, Glissant, believed was the western perspective’s desire for transparency and the denial of difference. Obscurity absolutely frustrates knowledge, but this frustration ‘this unknowability’ is also, for Glissant, a sign of potentiality, a kind of identity that exists as a becoming rather than a static being.

Temporary Horizon, Heino Schmid

The first time I saw ‘Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions,’ Edouard Glissant had just died and his advocacy for opacity as a strategy of resistance was on my mind and guided my viewing. This proved to be a serendipitous lens through which to see the show as curators Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores presented a model for viewing or representing history as an emerging and fragmented partiality. A partiality, however, that does not preclude, but rather enriches one’s ability to contemplate the circumstances it seeks to describe. In the exhibition, which opened at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. in January and was up through mid-March, Cozier and Flores grouped together thirty-six artists from fourteen Caribbean countries and the international diaspora. Included are works of photography, drawing, painting, video, and installation.

Among the works that seemed so eloquently to speak to the notion of opacity and transparency was Nikolai Noel’s (b. Trinidad) Toussaint et George, which juxtaposes a drawing of George Washington with one of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary and hero of Haitian independence, and I might add, the subject of one of Edouard Glissant’s plays. In the work, only a very thin wash or veil of paint fills Washington’s silhouette. His utter transparency stands in sharp contrast to Toussaint’s bust, which is marked by thick black paint. As Flores notes in her catalog essay, Toussaint’s ‘gruesome mask-like appearance’ situates him as Washington’s other, ‘his dark side.’ But the black paint also renders Toussaint opaque, literally and figuratively. Noel has drawn the two figures so that they seem to be looking at one another, but Toussaint in his opacity refuses to become an object of knowledge for his western observer. Or consider Heino Schmid’s (b. Bahamas) video Temporary Horizon (2010). In this work, a man’s arms and waist appear on screen, and we watch him attempt to keep two glass bottles balanced on top one another. He momentarily succeeds, but then the bottles quickly fall. The figure puts the bottles back into place. They fall again. The transparency of the bottles’we can see through them’contrasts with the inscrutability of the action, and its repeated failure.

Rather than stage an argument about Caribbean art in toto, ‘Wrestling with the Image’ highlights the diversity and range of art practice among artists of Caribbean descent. Or as Jerry Philogene in her terrific review of the exhibition has already noted, ‘`Wrestling with the Image’ suggests that the idea of `the Caribbean,’ or a `Caribbean’ art exhibition, is fraught with stereotypes, inconsistencies, and misconceptions.’ Nevertheless, it would be hard to walk through the exhibition and not notice the various strategies put forth that all demonstrate how identity remains a key term for the artists included in the show. That is, identity remains a key theme here, yet the way it is worked through pressures what the terms experience, hybridity, even identity-politics might mean within contemporary art. At a moment when so much contemporary art strives to exceed the parameters of what came before’in many instances, to break down the very category of art in an effort to prove one’s politics and the contemporary relevance of practice”Wrestling with the Image’ stands out as an exhibition that rejects this iconoclastic impulse and instead embraces creative practice and representational space. There is nothing grand about this show, nothing iconoclastic or fashionably radical, no mass denunciations. It is a quiet, surprising show that seeks without pretense to address the complexities of Caribbean history and identity. And it gently demands to be viewed on its own terms.

To these ends, the work is not grouped by any common theme, media, or geographic locality. The aesthetic diversity the viewer encounters as she travels from painting to photograph to drawing to photograph to video to installation is matched by the conceptual shifts of moving from a work that addresses the history of the slave trade and slave rebellion (Fragment kbi wi kani, 2007, by Marcel Pinas, b. Suriname) to one that parodies the visual language of failed businesses and collapsed economies (Western Union International, 2007, by Hew Locke, b. Edinburgh) to one’beautifully rendered and psychologically charged’that speaks to issues of the self and doubling (Specimen from Local Ephemera: Mix More Media!, 2009 by Nicole Awai, b. Trinidad) to one that confronts not only the stereotype of the Caribbean as untouched paradise, but also the immaterial labor that went into producing that stereotype (Discovery of the Palm Tree: Phone Mast, 2008 by Blue Curry, b. Bahamas). All of this shifting functions as an effective metaphor for the multiplicity, cultural mixing, and perhaps, following Glissant, ultimate unknowability that characterizes the vast and constantly becoming space of the Caribbean. The result is sometimes utter disorientation, particularly for the viewer not familiar with either the history of the Caribbean or the art production associated with the region. Yet this disorientation seems precisely the point. In its production, the curators resist duplicating conventional organizational structures and create in its place a viewing experience that denies the certainty of identity, the safety of categorization, and the ultimate clarity of signs upon which established power rests.

This approach to the installation differs from that employed by another major exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art: Tumelo Mosaka’s 2007 show at the Brooklyn Museum, ‘Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art.’ That exhibition featured the work of forty-five established and emerging artists who work in the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, and Europe. And a significant number of the artists included in ‘Infinite Island’ are also included in ‘Wrestling with the Image’: Ewan Atkinson (b. Barbados), Nicole Awai, Terry Boddie (b. Nevis), Keisha Castello (b. Jamaica), Jean-Ulrick Désert (b. Haiti), Joscelyn Gardner (b. Barbados), Hew Locke, Ebony Patterson (b. Jamaica), and Marcel Pinas. Christopher Cozier, ‘Wrestling with the Image’ co-curator, was also included in ‘Infinite Island.’ Mosaka’s show divided the exhibited work into four themes: History and Memory; Politics and Identity; Myth, Ritual and Belief; and Popular Culture. In his catalog essay to the show, Mosaka smartly writes that the work included in ‘Infinite Island”that all art”is a mobile entity’Its meanings change depending on its social context, location, and audience. As such, the works do not present a singular coherent identity but rather exist in manifold realities distributed across diverse spaces.’ Similarly, in an email exchange with me, Cozier noted that one of the successes of Mosaka’s ‘Infinite Island’ was the way in which it sought to ‘engage rather than define the Caribbean.’ That exhibition’s groupings, however particularly in the show’s catalog afterlife sometimes seemed to limit a work’s multiplicity, that is, the structured presentation risked creating controlled readings.

I am not afraid to fight a perfect stranger, John Cox

‘Wrestling with the Image’ manages to avoid these potential limitations by remaining slightly awkward in its presentation, maintaining dialogue between the show’s components, and staying clear of self-enclosed thematic groupings. As a result, adjacent displays, intentionally or not, became provocative for their very antagonism. In the largest room on the second floor the sound of glass bottles falling from Schmid’s Temporary Horizon filled the room. Mysteriously mesmerizing, the video plays on a continuous loop that never grants the viewer total access to the staged event. Positioned in front of the video was Santiago Cal’s (b. Belize) Some Kind, a display of meticulously hand-crafted wood hammers that evoke manual labor, but that are utterly non-functional’not only designed to break, but carved to fit just one hand, that of the artist’s. The crashing of bottles in Temporary Horizon seems to contest or challenge the calm silence of Cal’s Some Kind. The street hustler’s trick and the non-functioning, but painstakingly fabricated, hammer, placed adjacent to one another produced a simultaneously nostalgic and cynical view of labor in a globalized economy.

In his essay for the catalog, Cozier explains that he got the idea to name this exhibition ‘Wrestling with the Image’ while looking at a series of pictures by John Cox (b. Bahamas) with titles such as I am not afraid to fight a perfect stranger. For Cozier, the way in which Cox’s images depict the artist boxing himself, wrestling and fighting himself among a tangle of images characterizes not only the condition of artistic making for all the artists in the show, but also the way in which he and Flores wanted viewers (those unfamiliar with region and those not) to wrestle with their own expectations of the region. In this I think the show was tremendously successful. And while I was deeply moved by particular works in the show: Schmid’s video, for instance; or Ebony Patterson’s Entourage (2010)’a large-scale photograph depicting Jamaican dance-hall culture; or Marlon Griffith’s (b. Trinidad) Powder Box Schoolgirl (2009) photographs’an amazing series of pictures that depict three young women with powder on their necks and chests in ‘bling’ patterns, ultimately the strength of the exhibition resides not in these individual examples, but in its wholeness, its material abundance. The work in the show was not all equally successful, but grouped together it demanded that its audience wrestle with images too.

Terri Waissman Art Museum of the Americas Taken from ArtNexus News Issue #81 Jun – Aug 2011

Popop-based Dede Brown and Popop intern Kachelle Knowles are participating in the inaugural exhibition "Bahama Mama" hosted by the Public Treasury Department Art Program

An old woman’s face weathered by time gazes into the distance; a pregnant woman’s glowing moment is captured in equally vivid colors; ceramics evoking our very bone and blood touches upon the dual forces of beauty and grotesque; language is generated into instant poetry or delivered as fast as bullets, as intently as a sermon, as sweetly as music.

All are funnelled into one gallery, and all have something to say about the complex theme of “Bahama Mama”, chosen by the Public Treasury Art Program for their inaugural exhibition shortly after moving into their new building on East Street at the beginning of this year.

“Instead of investing in artwork they decided to establish a program which would allow for rotating exhibitions in the space,” explains Keisha Oliver, the exhibition coordinator and also a participating artist.

They could not have chosen a better theme—or a better way to address it. That’s because the participating artists—17 visual artists and 5 writers—are all female Bahamian artists.

“We wanted to start off with a celebratory theme that focused on a specific aspect of Bahamian culture,” says Oliver. “We thought looking at female artists would be something very unique and timely.”

If that sounds like we’ve been here before, it’s because earlier this year, The D’Aguilar Art Foundation launched the exhibition “The F-Factor: Female Artists of The Bahamas“, curated by Holly Parotti, which is still ongoing.

While “The F-Factor” more examines the historical contribution female artists have made to the Bahamian art scene, “Bahama Mama” shifts the focus to the present and provides a space for female artists—especially contemporary ones—to examine complex notions of femininity.

Nevertheless, the fact that The Bahamas has been the site of two major and equally excellent and thought-provoking exhibitions celebrating the female presence, perspective and history in its art world is both encouraging and exciting. It acknowledges the contribution female artists have made to the cultural consciousness and holds the promise of more to come.

“I think it is important just to have the female perspective, if only because our concept was to have an exhibition for Bahamian women by Bahamian women,” says Oliver.

“I think most of the art that was submitted maintains a common thread of the Bahamian woman and motherhood,” she continues. “We do also have artists who have touched on different aspects of femininity and Bahamian culture and struggle so there are a few that have gone out of the expected or traditional concepts.”

It’s even more encouraging that the exhibition by the Public Treasury Art Program—like the exhibition at The D’Aguilar Art Foundation—strove to include artists practicing in different mediums, even writing, to give viewers an idea of modern Bahamian art by female artists.

“The Public Treasury Art Program is about exposing art and culture in its entirety—so not just looking at visual arts but looking at other forms too,” says Oliver.

“I think diversity is very important and its very evident in modern art that you have so many different things going on, so many different interpretations of one starting point,” she continues. “It’s so nice to be able to see that here, whether it’s in photography, whether it’s in tapestry, whether it’s in painting or poetry.”

In that same vein, the Public Treasury Art Program also aims to include artists living in the family islands and living or studying beyond our shores—including Anina Banks, Lillian Blades, Leanne Russell and Mardia and Ashely Powell. It all ties into their all-inclusive aim as an artistic venue in the country to educate Bahamians about modern art.

“Modern day art includes all things. Promoting artists that live abroad is just as important as promoting artists in Nassau because we’re all part of this archipelago,” says Oliver.

“Even now with the artwork being put up in the office space, you can see the people engaging more with the artwork and that’s what it’s about—starting conversations, starting interests,” she continues.

“I think for the general public what we hope is that we can encourage Bahamian people to gain a degree of appreciation for modern art by giving them a hint of what’s out there with such a diverse range of artists.”

“Bahama Mama” opens this Monday September 26th, 2011 and is on display at the Public Treasury building on East Street until February 2012. They plan to hold a call for submissions for another themed exhibition early next year in what will be an annual or biannual schedule for the new venue.

“We’d like the general public to attend, students who are studying art in school or in college,” says Oliver. “We also want parents to encourage their children to come out and see what are and culture is like in modern day Bahamas.”

SONIA FARMER The Nassau Guardian Arts & Culture Section

Though Bahamian artist Khia Poitier is only 20 years old, she’s already made her mark on the Bahamian art scene—and she’s headed for big things, starting with enrolling in the Rhode Island School of Design‘s undergraduate program in Illustration.

As this year’s recipient of the Harry Moore Memorial Scholarship in the Arts, given out by the Lyford Cay Foundation to an artist pursuing studies abroad, and the National Merit Scholarship from the Ministry of Education, Poitier is ready to make a difference in the way the public views art.

“When the art is right next to you, you feel more connected to it and I really would like to get more Bahamians connected to art,” says Poitier. “I’d like to see the art community reach out to the broader community because Bahamians are into it—I mean, look at Junkanoo.”

The artist herself has participated in public art projects, such as the Love My Bahamas mural project with the Downtown Nassau Partnership and her own mural-like piece in the Harry C. Moore Library and Information Center at the College of The Bahamas. Her work has also been exhibited during Transforming Spaces and the Schooner Bay Art Symposium.

But before all of this, her primary school drawings were exhibited on their fridge by her mother, who Poitier says has supported her all the way.

“Art has always been a part of my life. It was always encouraged in my house. My mom is a single parent and the sacrifices she’s made for me are really quite amazing,” says Poitier.

“She chooses to really support me, she loves me and cares about me a lot. She always said we’d figure it out and had a fire for me to succeed.”

Even when Poitier became unhappy with school, she and her mother decided together to try a home schooling course from 9th grade onwards. It turned out to be a significant change in Poitier’s life, allowing her to flourish in academics and try out extra-curriculars like guitar and, most importantly, art classes.

“It freed up a lot of time and money so I started afterschool art classes with Sue Bennet Williams and I think that’s when the shift started,” remembers Poitier. “Williams’s class was the first time I felt that art could be a career.”

Poitier credits Sue Bennet Williams for encouraging her to pursue art in college and to apply to the College of The Bahamas. So after finishing home school, Poitier embarked on her Associates of Art degree, earning it with distinction three years later and achieving both the 2011 College of The Bahamas School of Communications and Creative Arts A.A. Art Programme Award For Outstanding Academic Achievement as well as the 2011 College of The Bahamas School of Communication and Creative Arts Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement.

“The great thing about COB is it puts you in contact with really significant people in the art community which is important because the art world can seem so distant and there you realize it isn’t,” Poitier says.

“That one-on-one contact with teachers in small classes is great because whenever you’re excited about something, they’ll do anything to help you with that.”

Another one of her mentors she credits with supporting and inspiring her was one of these teachers: John Cox. In the educational art space he created, Popopstudios International Center for Visual Arts, Poitier flourished as one of their first (2010) Summer Junior Residents, giving her an art space and community in which to create work in over the summer, culminating in an exhibition.

“I loved just being around artists at Popop, a community of artists who are supportive or just give you help with your work or just talk about this art world,” she says.

“The art world always seemed so far away from me. But when I went to Popop, it was just all around me and it was easy to fit into it.”

She credits Cox with encouraging her to continue her education with a Bachelors at the Rhode Island School of Design, of which he is an alumni. Though she had already been accepted into another school in Portland and was intimidated by RISD’s application process and significantly higher tuition costs, Cox helped her through it, guiding her to chose the major of Illustration and writing her a glowing recommendation—which ultimately paid off.

“When I got in, I couldn’t believe it—I thought it was a mistake,” Poitier laughs. “I even called them to make sure. Then it dawned on me that I’d have to give them money I didn’t have.”

Luckily both the Harry Moore Memorial Scholarship in the Arts from the Lyford Cay Foundation and the National Merit Scholarship from the Ministry of Education came through for her just as time was running out.

“I wasn’t sure I was even going to go until about 3 weeks before,” says Poitier. “When I got that second scholarship, I cried. It was a crazy last two weeks, packing up everything before going.”

Khia on the first day of class at RISD

Now settling into RISD’s campus and already under deadlines with assignments, Poitier is excited about the work she will produce as an Illustration major.

“RISD so far is really amazing. The people I’ve met so far are wildly talented, smart and driven. It’s nice to be surrounded by that kind of energy,” she says.

“I worked so much with paint that I thought that would be what I would pursue,” she continues. “But pursuing the commercial side through Illustration would be helpful and provide me with more opportunities.”

Such opportunities, she hopes, will lead her maybe to a graduate degree in the art field and hopefully home, where she has big plans to contribute to the flourishing local art world by bringing art outside of the traditional gallery space.

“I like public art. I like art that resonates within a community,” she says. “The great thing about painting outside is while you’re painting it, people will come up with no reservations and ask questions and want to do it. It’s cool to see people thinking about art outside of a gallery space. It’s so dependent on viewer interaction and I would really like to see public art more utilized at home.”

SONIA FARMER The Nassau Guardian Arts & Culture Section

The D’Aguilar Art Foundation is proud to host an exhibition of works called “The F Factor: Female Artists of The Bahamas.” This exhibition features work in a wide range of media from 22 women artists and showcases their impact on the visual Bahamian art community.

Participating artists are: Janine Antoni, Dionne Benjamin-Smith, Sue Bennett Williams, Joann Behagg, Lillian Blades, Chantal E.Y. Bethel, Maria Chisnall, Jessica Maycock-Colebrooke, Claudette Dean, Jan Elliott, Roshanne Minnis-Eyma, Nicole Minnis-Ferguson, Kendra Frorup, Susan Katz Lightbourn, Erica Moiah James, Sarah McClean, Susan Moir Mackay, Lady Zoe Maynard, Lynn Parotti, Tamara Russell, Nora Smith and Imogene Walkine. [two of whom – Sue Katz and Jan Elliott – hold studios at Popop]

Themes considered exclusive to women—maternity and femininity—are certainly addressed, in addition to environmentalism, Bahamian social woes, immigration and even the financial crisis, which all come to the surface from what is unmistakably a feminine perspective. The result is a show that is entirely self-possessive, confident in its power to both transcend and transform though the feminine voice, and permeated with the overarching theme of possibility and all of its constant reminders.

Gallery hours are Tuesdays thru Thursdays 10am to 4pm (by appointment). Located on Virginia Street, you may call for further inquiries at 322-2323.

D’Aguilar Foundation

Too often, art classes act in a “academic vacuum” says College of The Bahamas art instructor, John Cox.

To give his advanced students experience in the local art world and to “breathe life into the art program” at the College of The Bahamas, he helps them plan and carry out site-specific art pieces.

The latest location is the new building at the College of The Bahamas, the state-of-the-art Harry C. Moore Library and Information Center — fitting since Harry C. Moore was a lifelong patron of the arts.

“I think a lot of people don’t know what a supporter of the arts he was and these pieces bring attention to it,” says Cox.

“It presents a present and future effort to make the library a monument to contemporary visual expression.”

Compared to the other installations in the Harry Moore Library and Information Center, Khia Poitier’s installation the most politically-driven — a piece that by its very existence creates controversy and leads to change.  But it’s also refreshing, engaging and eye-opening.

On the second floor of the Harry C. Moore Library and Information Center, weaving along the space between windows, lies a test.  It’s Alistair D. Stevenson’s installation “Contagious”, and it’s a veritable rorschach exercise—does the stained plywood drilled into a series of seven low-relief sculpture panels resemble a creature crawling along the wall?  A relief map?  A birds-eye-view of islands?  Coral reefs?

Sonia Farmer, The Nassau Guardian This write-up appears as the introduction to the Harry C. Moore Library Spotlight series written by Sonia Farmer for The Nassau Guardian’s Arts and Culture section.

Below are a few of the installations in the Harry C. Moore Library by John Cox’s Art 400: Advanced Painting students.

Harry C. Moore Library Spotlight On Alistair Stevenson Harry C. Moore Library Spotlight On Khia Poitier

A stellar cast of young women artists, including Popop-based artist Dede Brown and Kachelle Knowles, an intern at Popop, will be featured in the Public Treasury Art Programme’s (PTAP) upcoming exhibition ‘Bahama Mama’ which investigates the historical, cultural and social aspects of Bahamian women.

The walls of five floors of the Public Treasury Department, East Street are to be turned into a veritable art gallery in honour of Bahamian women.

Entitled ‘Bahama Mama’, the exhibition will feature aspiring young Bahamian women artists some of whom have already made significant impact internationally.

It officially opens to the public September 26 at 5:30 p.m. This session will last for five months and can be viewed at normal office hours.

The Public Treasury Art Programme (PTAP) is an initiative of the Public Treasury Department, opposite the police headquarters,

“It aims to recognise and encourage young Bahamian artists, showcase outstanding local and regional art, and engender appreciation and commitment to the arts and art education in The Bahamas,” said the administrator, Mrs Laroma Seifert.

“One of our current goals, really, is to provide the art community, particularly emerging Bahamian artists, with a new venue to exhibit their work,” she said.

The Public Treasury plans to transform the common areas of its new five-storey complex into a space where emerging and established artists can display original work, she explained.

Curated by Keisha Oliver, the exhibition, ‘Bahama Mama’ recognises those who contributed to the arts and culture in The Bahamas.

A stellar cast of young women artists, photographer, designers and writers have submitted works which investigate the historical, cultural and social aspects of Bahamian women.

They include Anina Banks, Apryl Burrows, Ashley Powell, Carla Campbell, Dede Brown, Kachelle Knowles, Keisha Oliver, Latisha Knowles, Leah Eneas, Leanne Russell, Lillian Blades, Lowree Tynes, Lyndah Wells, Mardia Powell, Sacha-Kathleen Hadland, Shorlette Francis, and Tiffany Barrett.

Born in Freeport, Grand Bahama, visual artist Dede Brown studied interior design and photography at the Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, Georgia for four years.

It was in 2010, after three years as an interior designer, she made the life changing decision to become a self-employed artist, designer and photographer.

For the past three years and at present she works out of her studio at Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts. In April 2008 she was one of four Popop-based artists invited to create artwork for the new phase of the Airport Project.

In 2009, she participated in her first exhibition with artist Dylan Rapillard, at the Central Bank of The Bahamas. The work exhibited was a series of portraits, exploring Brown’s fascination with the human spirit and how it is reflected in facial expression and human form.

In 2010, she unveiled her ‘Cherry & Puppet Series’ as part of another dual exhibition with Rapillard entitled ‘Dichotomy’, again exhibited at the Central Bank of The Bahamas.

This body of work explored the iconography of the cherry and the nature of women in pop culture, drawn as puppets. This series continued into ‘Peep Show’ an exhibition held earlier this year at PopopStudios.

Brown recently participated in an Artists-in-Residence exchange programme between the Ipswich & Colchester Museum Service and A Fine Line Cultural Practice in England, and Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts in Nassau.

It is part of the ‘Stories of the World’ programme, a project at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

The residency is entitled Material Response and in it Brown is exploring her Bahamian identity in a foreign place by incorporating aspects of Junkanoo as a symbol that represents ‘Bahamianness’ and gives Bahamians that unique identity that is different from anywhere else in the world.

It is Dede’s artwork that appears on the promotional material for PTAP’s Bahama Mama exhibtion.

Kachelle is a 21-year-old aspiring artist based in Nassau, Bahamas. She completed her Associate of Art Degree at the College of the Bahamas in June 2011.

She has been accepted into the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon as an illustration major for spring semester 2012.

Pursuing a career as a professional artist, she has already been featured in numerous exhibitions and has worked as an intern at Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts for over a year.

Kachelle is the youngest participant in PTAP’s ‘Bahama Mama’ exhibition.

Textile artist, quilt maker and the newest member of the Popop art community Jan Elliott, spent Sunday September 11 at Popopstudios making flag garlands adorned with peace symbols to mark the anniversary of this world-changing event 10 years later.

A few members of the public dropped in and participated in the activities.