Art

Up & Coming Artists: The Best And The Brightest Part 1

YardEdge welcomes a new guest blogger, Petrine Archer-Straw who will be profiling some of the up and coming young artists  to watch on the local scene.

Petrine Archer-Straw
Petrine Archer-Straw

Petrine Archer-Straw is an art historian, lecturer and curator who currently teaches in the Department of Art History at Cornell University. Trained at the Courtauld Institute, University of London she is one of the most prolific scholars in the field of African Diaspora Visual Culture. Among her significant books are Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (London, 2005); Fifty Years-Fifty Artists, Kingston 2000; Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London, 2000) and Jamaican Art (Kingston 1990). Her latest projects involve the development of distance learning materials for online teaching see: diasporadialogs.com and petrinearcher.com.




Up & Coming Artists: The Best and the Brightest…

Some of the best exhibitions recently have been mounted by younger artists keen to revolutionise the way Jamaicans look at art. As discussed in Diaspora Dialogs, they are mixing media and harnessing ideas from popular culture to show that art does not have to be divorced from the rest of society. I’ve put together a shortlist of the best and the brightest of these artists to watch… For more about their work check out my Caribbean Artists A-Z or visit their pages and websites.

1ebony-patterson-from-the-gangstas-for-life-series-2007

Ebony G. Patterson recently held her first solo exhibition at the CAGe in Kingston. The show titled Gangstas, Disciplez + Doiley Boyz a show dominated by portraits of young Jamaican men who bleach their skin, pluck their eyebrows and wear ‘bling’ jewellery in defiance of racial and sexual stereotypes. Ebony finds beauty in their psychic violence glamourizing them with glittered halos and luscious lipstick. Through these paintings she questions why young black men, especially those related to Jamaica’s dance hall culture, are regularly viewed in terms of aggression. She re-balances this male macho personna with feminine touches and homo-erotica.

Check out this video by Petrine which looks at the work of Ebony Patterson.

www.yardedge.net/art/ebony-g-patterson-looks-at-jamaican-dance-hall-through-her-art

1aknolly-moses-ebony-and-gangsta-portrait-2009

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2 Comments

  1. September 5, 2011 at 10:43 pm — Reply

    Hi Petrine,
    Petrine,
    You are invited attend the opening of an exibition to be held ,at the “Painting Center” in Chelsea New York on SEPTEMBER 8th,5:00pm to 8:00pm. The Title of Exhibition is “Jamaica to China,A New Evolution”
    “, which include Ebony Patterson, Camille Chedda and myself. Four artists from China are also included. The show was generiously funded by the “Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation. Please see more details at: http://www.thepaintingcenter.org.

  2. […] For Part 1 in this series – Ebony Patterson  […]

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