Bookends presents the first in a once-monthly series of interviews conducted by visual artist and author Jacqueline Bishop with players in the visual arts in Jamaica. Today’s feature is a Q&A with Veerle Poupeye, executive director of the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ).

Veerle, thanks so much for the exhibition that closed recently at the National Gallery of Jamaica: Explorations 3 – Seven Women Artists. That exhibition raised, for me, several provocative questions that I would like to try and flesh out with you. To begin with, can you explain the role of the Explorations series of exhibitions within the overall goals of the National Gallery of Jamaica?

The Explorations series presents a new way of looking at Jamaican art history, in a way that is not didactic and linear but exploratory and engaging, by asking questions rather than prescribing answers, and by presenting diverse perspectives and encouraging diverse interpretations from our audiences. The series is open-ended and explores what we consider to be big themes and issues in Jamaican art and culture. Thus far we have had: Natural Histories; Religion and Spirituality; and Seven Women Artists. The next one, scheduled to open in December, will explore how masculinities have been represented in Jamaican art. We are presently in discussion about future editions but this will likely involve one on tourism and art. The Explorations series also serves as a way for us to rethink the organisation of our permanent exhibitions, which are presently being redesigned.

As well, can you explain why you decided to venture out to National Gallery West in Montego Bay, and whether there are plans for the National Gallery of Jamaica to be in parishes other than Kingston and Montego Bay?

We had for some time recognised the need to have a presence outside of Kingston and we briefly had a branch at Island Village in Ocho Rios in the early 2000s. There are significant and historically underserved audiences in other parts of the island that we need to reach, and our relevance to the tourism industry being also a consideration – western Jamaica is a major area in both regards. The possibility of having a branch at what was then the Montego Bay Civic Centre had first been considered in 2010 (and we actually had the inaugural exhibition of the John Pringle Collection of work by Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds there), but we were also looking at other options in the Montego Bay area and none seemed feasible at that time. It also would have been difficult for us to do this on our own.

In 2013, a partnership was formed between the St James Parish Council, the Tourism Enhancement Fund, and the Institute of Jamaica, including the National Gallery, and the result was the Montego Bay Arts Council, which manages what is now called the Montego Bay Cultural Centre, the former Civic Centre. The Montego Bay Cultural Centre was refurbished and equipped to operate as a museum space and it now houses National Gallery West and National Museum West, both of which opened in July 2014. While still a work in progress, National Gallery West is doing quite well and is obviously here to stay.

Whether there will be other branches is of course a matter of resources but we are certainly interested in possibilities. I could well see a branch in Mandeville, for instance, or in the St Mary/Portland area, but this would also have to be a matter of finding the right partners and a feasible way to operate it. And since we are headquartered in downtown Kingston, I also see the possibility of an uptown branch. I like the idea of a more decentralised approach, rather than consolidating everything we do into the single “big building,” since this allows us to reach deeper and more strategically into the various communities we serve, or ought to serve.

What would you say are the Gallery’s communities and how do you strategically try to meet the needs of these communities?

As a public (art) museum, the audience of the National Gallery is, at least in theory, open-ended and our mission statement includes the phrase “to promote our artistic heritage for the benefit of present and future generations” without specifying who those audiences might be. In practice, we of course have special target audiences and that is what I am referring to when I speak about the communities we serve and ought to serve. Roughly speaking, this would consist mainly of Jamaican and Jamaican diaspora audiences and also tourists and other visitors to the island. The NGJ has been criticised in the past for being elitist in its focus and for reaching only a small part of the demographic it ought to serve and we have made significant efforts in recent years to reach wider, more socially diverse audiences, geographically and socially. This is why we have initiatives such as National Gallery West and our free Last Sundays and Saturday Art Time programmes. Our active presence on social media is also part of this drive, as are the overseas exhibitions we support and also community projects such as the ones we had this summer (nationalgalleryofjamaica.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/6842/). It is a work in progress but I think we have seen a lot of positive change with broader audience engagement in recent years.

One of the things I noticed about your catalogue essay is that you framed the discussion about the work of the artists in the exhibition within that of feminism and feminist theory. Yet, later on in the essay you noted that most of the women in the exhibition were not feminist. So why that framing for this exhibition?

What we were doing was asking whether the conventional (if that is the appropriate way to put it) feminist frame was relevant to the local situation. It was really a matter of asking the question as part of the exhibition, as a way to stimulate discussion, and we left the answers to the artists and our audiences.

One of the things that several female artists in or from Jamaica often say to me when I talk to them is that there is parity between the genders in the visual arts in Jamaica, a claim I have often questioned myself. What your introductory essay does is break open those claims to expose that things are a lot more problematic than they seem on the surface for women artists in Jamaica. Specifically you note that “factors such as race and class” should be taken into consideration when looking at just who the women are who have risen to the forefront of the visual arts in Jamaica. Can you speak more to this issue, please?

I think that the apparent gender parity in Jamaican art really applies to the numbers only and is furthermore quite recent. I feel very strongly that the gender dynamics in Jamaican art cannot be understood if issues of race and class are not brought into the discussion. It has a lot to do with how art itself is conventionally understood in the Jamaican context, as “fine art” for consumption by those who can afford it and have the education to “appreciate” it. It also has a lot to do with how “appropriate” gender roles and professional choices are defined for women of different race and class backgrounds. This is not substantially different from what has been argued in the classical feminist literature on art but in the Jamaican and broader Caribbean context, this is complicated by the local race and class dynamics. There is admittedly some resistance to having that rather uncomfortable discussion, but acknowledging these issues does not mean that the work of those women artists who have gained public visibility and recognition (and, as my own case illustrates, other female professionals in the arts) is any less valuable or legitimate. It just means that we need to recognise and uncover the blind spots, in terms of the gender dynamics in the Jamaican art world; and relate these to the broader gender, race and class dynamics that shape contemporary Jamaican society.

You mention several women artists in your essay that I have never heard of before – Lady Barkly, Mrs Lionel Lee, Dorothy Henriques-Well and Rhoda Jackson – can you introduce us to who these artists are/were and the kinds of work that they do/did?

Lady Barkly was the colonial governor’s wife in the mid-19th century and she is known for a series of miniature landscapes of Jamaica. She appears to have been an amateur artist but she was a competent painter and we have several of her works in our historical galleries.

Mrs Lionel Lee was a painter and illustrator who was active in the late-19th century. There is not much information on her and her background but she may have been the wife of a colonial official. We know that she did some of her work in association with the first secretary of the Institute of Jamaica, the Englishman Frank Cundall, whose book Studies in Jamaican History she illustrated. We have one of her works in our collection, a portrait titled Fatima (Creole Girl), which is now on view in our historical galleries and was apparently shown at the Colonial and India exhibition in Kensington, London, in 1886. Academic work is being done on Mrs Lionel Lee and her Fatima portrait by Wayne Modest.

Rhoda Jackson (1913 – 1971) was a white Jamaican artist and designer from Mandeville; her uncle was also an artist, Harold Jackson, a watercolourist of some note. She had a degree in art from Reading University. She is best known for the murals she did for the tourism industry, for instance at the Tower Isle Hotel (and these were recently restored). She also did designs for embroidery, including for the Allsides workshop, and designed book covers. She also taught art at St Hilda’s High School in Brown’s Town, where Gloria Escoffery was one of her students. We only have one work by Rhoda Jackson in our collection, a painting titled Wash Day that is presently on view.

Dorothy Henriques-Wells is still around although she is no longer active. She is a watercolourist who is best known for her landscapes, floral studies and occasional portraits. She was a fellow student of Albert Huie at the Armenian refugee Koren der Harootian’s seminal private art classes in the late 1930s. She used to exhibit regularly in our Annual National exhibitions. She is the mother of the film-maker Mary Wells.

All four artists you asked about came from privilege but it is telling that none of them are very well-known, which shows how selective the recognition meted out to female artists has really been. Lady Barkly and Mrs Lionel Lee are both known by their married names only and because of the lack of biographical information on both artists, we get no sense of the person behind the name. As for Rhoda Jackson, I believe the reason she is not more recognised is that the cheerful, touristy depictions of Jamaica she produced did not match the nationalist ideology that dominated mid-20th century Jamaican art, but she was obviously a talented artist and an innovative designer. Her outlook may have been “colonial” and her work may have perpetuated stereotypes modern Jamaican artists have sought to challenge but she is certainly worthy of more attention as an artist, if only because of how her work and ideological choices compare with those of contemporaries such as Albert Huie or Edna Manley.

You mention, as well, the “high ratio of white expatriates” among female artists practising on the island. That made me wonder about how decisions were made as to who was included in this exhibition, and how the artists selected are in keeping with the overall goals of the National Gallery of Jamaica?

O’Neil Lawrence, who curated this exhibition, is better placed to answer specific questions about the selection process (and we deliberately assigned it to a male curator, to shake up things a bit). The brief was to select five mid-career female artists who were already well-established professionally but had not yet been shown comprehensively at the NGJ – we decided not to feature artists such as Edna Manley, Gloria Escoffery, Petrona Morrison, Laura Facey, Hope Brooks or, for that matter, Ebony G Patterson, who had already received major exposure in our exhibitions and collections but it was understood that what was selected would be presented in an implied dialogue with the work of these more established artists. We also deliberately omitted the younger generation, since we have been paying a lot of attention to that cohort in recent years and were planning a Young Talent exhibition to come right after (six of the 10 artists in Young Talent 2015 are female). We also wanted a selection that was representative of contemporary female artists in Jamaica, in terms of the range of media and practices and to a lesser extent also in terms of the backgrounds of the artists selected.

I am personally haunted by your discussion of the “countless anonymous, black female artists whose work is unrecognised and largely undocumented”. In your opinion what accounts for this erasure and how might it be tackled and overcome?

As I stated before, it has a lot to do with how “art” is defined, which has usually been in conventional “fine art” terms and based on the cultural standards of the middle and upper classes. It also has to do with how and to whom opportunities for professional development and exposure are available. The overlooked artists I am referring to have mainly produced work that falls outside of conventional “art” definitions. You have done a lot of work on quilts recently, mainly in the context of your own family history, but quilt-making has not received much attention or recognition in the Jamaican context. Think also of dressmaking and embroidery and of traditional crafts such as the African-derived ceramics, which has had a lot of female practitioners. In the contemporary context, there is for instance also hairstyling and wig-making. In documenting the history of art in Jamaica, the net needs to be cast more widely, a more balanced and inclusive picture and attention also need to be paid to providing opportunities for training, exposure and recognition where these are presently lacking. We will certainly be looking in this direction for our future exhibitions, which will include telling the “untold stories” of Jamaican art and visual culture.

You speak, as well, of the “social pressures and dangers that face particularly young girls in Jamaican society”. I could not thank you more for that observation. I have been watching with increasing horror the mounting toll of atrocities committed on and heaped onto the heads of young girls on the island. As I listen to people speak about the atrocities, too often I hear the same refrain of the girls themselves being blamed for what befalls them. “The little gal dem bad” is something I hear time and time again. This is a long way around to asking you about what you believe some of these pressures are specific to the young female child, and if you see these issue being tackled in the visual arts?

As we all know, sexual abuse and domestic violence are major issues in Jamaica today and this affects mainly, although not exclusively women. Young people are of course particularly vulnerable in this context, since they are not empowered to stand up to the adults around them. And it is after all the adults who need to take responsibility for such matters, not “the little gal dem”. Although there is now greater awareness about abuse and more recourse and care, there are new, harrowing stories every day and the number of young women I personally know who have suffered some form of abuse while growing up is simply staggering.

Art can help to raise awareness of these issues and can also give a voice to those who have been affected. The politics of the (female) body has been an important theme in contemporary art in and from Jamaica. In Explorations 3, this could be seen in the fibre work of Kereina Chang Fatt and Miriam Hinds-Smith, some of the photographs by Berette Macaulay. In Young Talent 2015, we see a similar thematic in the work of Katrina Coombs. Also in the Young Talent 2015 exhibition are Avagay Osborne’s haunting textile appliqué pieces, which illustrate that art can be a very powerful way to talk back to abuse and to heal and define oneself in the face of a history of personal trauma.

Finally, what do you think the “Seven Women Artists” exhibition tells us about the relationship among gender, art and Jamaican society? Did you, for example, find that notions of women’s art “are (still) relevant in the Jamaican context”? Did this exhibition give rise to the forthcoming “Masculinities” exhibition? Did this exhibition lead to the “fertile debate” on gender issues that you were hoping it would?

Actually, the masculinities exhibition was planned from before we decided to have the women’s art exhibition and the discussions about this exhibition, specifically about gender and art, contributed to the decision to have an Explorations edition on women’s art. The 2014 Biennial was another source, as we were looking for emerging themes and were struck by the strong representation of new fibre work, which happened to be by female artists.

All art deserves to be looked at on its own merit and the work in Explorations 3 was certainly compelling, without considering the gender of the artists or even the politics that surround their work. We did not set out to select artists or works that would conform to preconceived notions about women’s art and instead focused on selecting a representative sample of mid-career female artists. That we nonetheless ended up with a lot of work that spoke to women’s issues was no coincidence, however, and illustrates that female artists in Jamaica, no matter how they define themselves ideologically, do gravitate towards those issues as they encounter them in their own lives.

Sadly, there is not a lot of formal critical debate about art in Jamaica presently: art criticism is practically non-existent in the local media, who, generally speaking, merely report on cultural events, and people who are not professionally involved in art still seem to be shy about sharing their views publicly. There was a very insightful review by Tanya Batson-Savage in Susumba, and the statements by the artists we published in the catalogue and text panels were certainly part of the debate. The exhibition, however, also seems to have generated informal debate. We were very interested to see how many women visited, often in small groups, and had intense discussions in front of the works on display. I am a bit disappointed that not much of the debate made it to the written record but the exhibition nonetheless elicited strong responses and we hope that the conversations will continue in the context other exhibitions such as Young Talent 2015 and, of course, Explorations 4: Masculinities.