Fresh Milk in partnership with Poinciana Paper Press and supported by the Panta Rhea Foundation are delighted to announce an 8-week Lucayan Archipelago Residency which will take place in The Bahamas between September and November 2024.
In response to the critical need for exchange across creative and environmental ecosystems, this residency brings together a writer and a visual artist from the Caribbean to imagine and co-create a critical cultural dialogue with the environment and resources in The Bahamas through the crafts of book arts. Our two residents are Ark Ramsay (Barbados) and Jocmarys Viruet Feliciano (Puerto Rico).
Ark Ramsay (Bridgetown, 1994), is a non-binary writer based in Barbados. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The A-Line: Journal of Progressive Thought, Small Axe, Gertrude Press, Meridian, Adda, The Rumpus, Passages North, and The Gulf Coast. They have been a finalist for the Inaugural Story Foundation Prize through Story Magazine, an honorable mention in Ninth Letter’s 2021 Literary Award for Nonfiction, and shortlisted for the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Award. They have received an MFA from The Ohio State University.
Puerto Rican-based Jocmarys Viruet Feliciano, a visual artist from Puerto Rico focuses on hand papermaking and book arts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, Center of the Book. Jocmarys worked as an intern at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio and has been an assistant at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Her first experience with handmade paper was in 2014 as an exchange student in South Korea. Jocmarys has taught several bookbinding and handmade paper workshops in Puerto Rico and in the United States. Her artist’s books are part of special collections such as University of Miami, University of Iowa, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.
Together, Ark and Joko while based in Nassau will explore some of the family islands of this 700-coral island archipelago, meet with contemporary visual artists and writers, ecologists, and environmentalists to understand the ecological reality of the Lucayan Archipelago that sits within the Atlatnic Ocean. We can hardly wait to see what emerges from this collaboration!
About Fresh Milk:
Fresh Milk is an artist-led, non-profit organisation founded in 2011 and based in Barbados. It is a platform which supports excellence in the visual arts through residencies and programmes that provide Caribbean artists with opportunities for development, fostering a thriving art community. Fresh Milk offers professional support to artists from the Caribbean and further afield and seeks to stimulate critical thinking in contemporary visual art. Its goal is to nurture artists, raise regional awareness about contemporary arts and provide Caribbean artists with opportunities for growth, excellence and success.
About Poinciana Paper Press:
Located in the capital of the archipelagic nation of The Bahamas, Poinciana Paper Press provides opportunities to engage with books and their allied crafts to empower people to share their narratives in a region that has historically erased, marginalized, and exploited the culture and lived experiences of its inhabitants.
Bahamian writer and artist Sonia Farmer created Poinciana Paper Press as an independent book publisher in 2010, releasing handmade limited-edition chapbooks and artists’ books of Caribbean poetry, short stories, and experimental writing. Her vision is to advance the diversity of narratives and publishing modalities in The Caribbean.
In 2022, she established Poinciana Paper Press as the first Center for Writing, Book Arts & Publishing in The Bahamas—arguably, in the wider Caribbean—to expand this vision, developing visibility in the literary and book arts from within the Caribbean cultural ecosystem.
A major collaborator in the literary and visual arts communities in the region, Poinciana Paper Press facilitates programming aligned with its mission by providing opportunities to engage with the form of the book and its allied crafts of writing, bookbinding, letterpress printing, handmade paper, printmaking, book design, and calligraphy. This includes workshops, community outreach and engagement, exhibitions, publications, and residencies.
About Panta Rhea Foundation:
Mission: To catalyze a just and sustainable world through food sovereignty, community power building, and grassroots liberation around the globe.
The Panta Rhea Foundation (PRF) was established in 2001 as a private foundation devoted to researching issues and analyzing the operations, goals and potential of organizations committed to building a more just and sustainable world. The Foundation advises individual donors and other charitable entities on grantmaking strategies and specific grants.
We believe that lasting, authentic change must come from the grassroots; from the organized efforts of people and organizations to enliven the social imagination and envision a better future, to experiment with new ideas, and to hold elected leaders and corporations accountable to the communities they serve.
Our foundation name, Panta Rhea, is inspired by Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. It roughly translates to “You never step into the same river twice” or “All things change, all things flow”—suggesting both inherent constancy and change as a fundamental of life itself.
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