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Jamaican Intuitives on Display in London
| Article
# : |
10284 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
1,988 Words |
| Author
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Jean Mellanby
Jean Mellanby is a writer and critic living in Cambridge, U.K.
Trained as a medievalist, she now focuses on the relationship
between art and society. |
Suffering perhaps from tunnel vision, the Western intellectual establishment has been slow to recognize signs of emerging cultural identity in the Caribbean. Concentration on politics, and in Britain the difficulties of mutual adjustment to ethnic minorities, have minimized appreciation of the lifestyle, the cultural heritage, and the burgeoning literary and art movements associated with the former British colonies in the Caribbean. These attitudes have had to undergo modification, however, as a result of a major program of events in London and throughout Britain organized by the Commonwealth Institute in London, which included two major art exhibitions: Caribbean Art Now in the summer, and Jamaican Intuitives in the autumn.
The Commonwealth Institute has a very wide scope of responsibilities, as there are forty-nine different peoples in countries within the Commonwealth of Nations, and the Institute exists to foster mutual knowledge and understanding, particularly of each others' culture, aspirations, and achievements. It has a splendid new building with a useful library and information room, well-organized display galleries, and a separate exhibition room designed specifically for the display of paintings. The 1986 program, entitled Caribbean Focus, concentrated on works from the former British colonies of that area, and though it finished in November, it is greatly to be hoped that the impetus will not be lost and an ongoing interest will be maintained.
Though the former British colonies have not achieved political integration and display a multiplicity of coalescing traditions, it seems there is now a cultural surge, a search for an authentic voice, a crisis of identity. This is a period of creative tension between old and new,
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