A visceral journey of Jamaica’s art evolution can be found on the hallowed walls of the storied downtown Kingston law firm Myers, Fletcher & Gordon. At 21 East Street, the firm’s legal eagles, their clients and art insiders had long appreciated and savoured the extensive art collection of The Rock’s great masters — Manley, Watson, Kapo, Abrahams, Parboosingh among the prolific roll call — accumulated over seven decades.

The artistic beauty enveloping the office space was not lost on senior associate Simone Bowie Jones. The beautiful go-getter adored seeing it all, day in, day out. The attorney-at-law also thought of leveraging the inhouse collection as a springboard for a showcase to celebrate the impressive artistic assets, but also to reel in clients of a younger demographic. Bowie Jones beseeched her superiors for seven years to host a showcase and they finally relented three months ago, giving her the go-ahead, alongside fellow associate Danielle Stiebel, to mount the exhibition titled Trajectories, curated by Nicole Smythe- Johnson that opened last Friday.

Housed on the fifth floor of the law firm where the litigation department once occupied space, Bowie Jones and Stiebel ushered us into the curator’s converted gallery (artfully rendered by stylist Carol Grey) that was a mishmash of 45 selected pieces from Myers, Fletcher & Gordon’s collection paired with the works of new and emerging artists Leasho Johnson, Phillip Thomas, Marvin Bartley, Onika Russell, and others.

“This is the first time that the firm is having an exhibition and it’s the perfect time being our 70th anniversary,” an excited Bowie Jones told SO.

“I am excited about this opportunity to showcase 21 East Street to a whole wider margin,” she explained, noting that while Myers, Fletcher & Gordon is a known name in the established business community and older age groups, she wants to expose the younger generation to the firm and change the perception of inaccessibility.

“We want to show them that we are an approachable firm and we are not just about large commercial transactions and mergers and acquisitions but we are also about intellectual property and we believe in the artistic community and what we have to offer artistically.”

For Stiebel, the firm’s youngest associate and granddaughter of founding partner Douglas Fletcher, working on the Trajectories exhibition made her “appreciate the immense contribution the firm has made to the local creative industries”.

Stiebel foresees a seismic shift for the creative industry by the turn of the next decade. “It will be a primary source of revenue once given the value and management deserved,” she opined. It’s a sentiment shared by the exhibition’s curator, too.

“A big part of why I took on this project is that it’s a big jump for me,” Smythe-Johnson said. “I generally work in galleries where there is a lot of infrastructure.

Here it was very different and I was a little daunted by that, but it was an opportunity to do what so many people in the private sector and the creative industries constantly talk about, which is the partnership between both entities.

“It is something we hear and talk about all the time but nothing really concrete has been done in Jamaica that I am aware of to show the potential of that partnership, so I am really proud of this exhibition precisely because it shows how something like that may happen.” It’s a step in the right direction as far as we’re concerned.

— Omar Tomlinson