Sweeping sand.
Slaying dragons.
Savoring color.
It’s all in a day’s work to make art in the Bahamas.
These jobs come to fruition in the art for WORK! at Diaspora Vibe Gallery, organized with Popopstudios in Nassau. It’s a challenging show of art made with sand, color and even a dragon—but this beast is more verbal than vicious. It appears as a word on a painting by John Cox, who founded Popopstudios eight years ago in Nassau.
It makes sense that art from the islands comes to Diaspora Vibe in Miami’s Design District. ‘’I’ve been exposed to so many Caribbean artists by coming here,’’ Cox said at the opening party on Aug. 9. ``I’ve met artists here from St. Martin, Trinidad and Cuba. Miami is definitely a hub for the Caribbean.’’
‘’It’s a smaller version of the world,’’ said Heimo Schmid, another artist in the show. ‘’The Bahamas is extremely diverse. . . . We have Germans, Americans, Canadians, Jamaicans, Haitians, people from Europe and Asia.’’ Cox named Popopstudios for the grandfather he never knew, a furniture maker who died before Cox was born. For a time Cox, who studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, made furniture in his no-nonsense building.
About 2 ½ years ago, Cox, Schmid, and the others in WORK! got together in the place and started talking about how they might broaden their audience. Artists Blue Curry, Toby Lunn, Jason Bennett and Michael Edwards have been friends for years with Cox and Schmid. Their resumes show they’ve had sophisticated art education and exhibits far beyond their island home. All but one of the artists came home to make art in Nassau full-time.
Back in the Bahamas, they ran into the same barriers.
‘’We have similar struggles to identify ourselves,’’ Cox said. ``We’ve been around. But when you go back home you have to fight to validate yourself all over again. It’s like meeting someone for the first time over and over—every time you see them, you have that same conversation.’’
The audience for contemporary art in the Bahamas is limited. Most tourists want to take home predictable art: easel paintings of sand, sea and sun with lots of color. To most Bahamians, what’s made for tourists defines artworks. To Cox and his artist friends: ``We created a word for them. We call them brochuristic. The subjects are very nostalgic, romantic, idealistic—the good old days in the Bahamas.’’
Their talks about art at Popopstudios grew into a creative, collaborative spirit made for and by forward-thinking Bahamian-born artists. Cox and the five others in this Diaspora Vibe show nurture Bahamian artists by creating a community to support experimental work that gets little recognition on their home turf but wins respect in the United States and Europe.
Although they’ve had shows of their own beyond the Bahamas, their show at Diaspora Vibe is the first time they have traveled together as an artist collective.
The art in WORK! centers around a common theme: the struggle to be heard at home as professional artists respected beyond the Bahamas. Some artworks are more dynamic than others, but none looks like illustrations on brochures to market an island paradise worth millions of tourist dollars.
Struggle and work play out as visual metaphors in Cox’s Dragonslayer. Construction workers’ materials are metaphor: Instead of the stretched canvas, he has used a painter’s drop cloth. Two plumb lines hang from each side of his mixed media painting. A system of pulleys and strings connects these tools to another system of branches and coral rocks.
This system of objects plucked from landscape and toolbox frames the central imagery of Dragonslayer, two men boxing each other in a tense face-off. Look hard and you’ll see that the men are identical. Both are self-portraits of Cox, a metaphor for a region fighting for its own still-under-construction identity.
The short video by Michael Edwards, Lundby Strand, works as a visual poem about change. It gives a nuanced view of heavy machinery and workers tearing apart an old warehouse used for shipbuilding in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Compelling artworks in the show are Schmid’s drawings of dead or sleeping dogs. To make them, he photographed dogs sprawled motionless by the road, a common sight in the Bahamas, where dogs aren’t pets.
‘’I don’t remember if this dog was alive or dead,’’ he says of one. His art, he explains, is about ``a certain disrespect for life. I know the Bahamas is projected as a paradise, but the murder rate is . . . high. That’s something you never see in the advertising.’’
Photographs and video by Blue Curry are fascinating. They document his conceptual piece, Like Taking Sand to the Beach. They show Curry and workers excavating 500 pounds of sand from a postcard-perfect Bahamian beach, pouring it into 165 plastic bags, and then pouring sand on the parquet wood floor of a gallery in Germany. It stayed there six weeks for his show.
Curry’s video shows a child in a red coat making a sand angel and giggling. Even though the room was chilly with fluorescent lighting, kids and grown-ups couldn’t resist playing in the sand. ‘’People laid on the sand and they covered themselves in it,’’ he recalled.
After six weeks, the sand was swept back in the bags and ‘’released’’ on the same beach in the Bahamas. About a quarter of the sand was gone. It had left the gallery in Germany, clinging to people’s shoes or tucked in their pockets.
Light glinting on sand, sea, and colorful flowers is another Bahamian sight that’s touted to tourists. This magical light and color, in different ways, pervades mostly abstract paintings by Toby Lunn and Jason Bennett.
ELISA TURNER