Category: Caribbean

Sacred Practices Reading Group

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Join us for a series of sessions facilitated by our current international resident artist Daisy Diamond, applying traditional spiritual reading practices to non-religious, contemporary or critical material focused on arts, culture and Caribbean thought collaboratively selected from Fresh Milk’s Colleen Lewis Reading Room. These collective ways of reading will be used to analyze and have meaningful, open ended conversations about the texts and how they may relate to lived experiences. The first session will be held on Thursday, May 17th, 2018 from 6pm-8pm at Fresh Milk.

RSVP to freshmilkbarbados@gmail.com to confirm your interest! Directions can be found on the ‘About Page’ of our website.

Statement from Daisy about the Reading Group:

Come together in an open-ended conversation where we will select a text to treat as “sacred” by guiding our reading with a series of spiritual reading practices. The texts will not be religious in content. We will just use these traditionally religious tools to analyze, dig deeper, and test our assumptions. The only requirements for this are an open curiosity and a commitment to dialogue within a community.

As an introduction to sacred reading practices, here are two examples which enable a semi-structured study of texts without a teacher/student hierarchy. Havruta is an ancient, Jewish practice where one student within a group poses a question about a text the group is familiar with. The student who asks the question then proposes one potential answer to their own question and explains their reasoning to the group. The group then challenges, opposes, or builds upon the initial response to the question. This platform for conversation builds both nuance and clarity. Lectio Divina is a Catholic practice for studying Scriptures. One person in the group will randomly select a sentence from the text. We will then pause on it and discuss what the word or passage is calling us to do or become. The random selection generates a surprising point to intentionally and thoughtfully build on.

The point of these practices is not to come to one, unified conclusion. Meaning and purpose proliferate in the disagreement, conversation, and unfolding exploration of interpretations and applications. I am not a theologian, but I am a student interested in building upon my understanding of engaging with texts intentionally and passionately within a community. If you have an understanding of tools to study texts, please come and be a part of this opportunity to teach and learn with others!

I’m interested in discussing a text from the Colleen Lewis Reading Room at Fresh Milk related to creative rituals, collective art practices, arts and revolution, or the influence of cultural tradition on contemporary artists. If any of these topics interest you, or if you have another direction you would like to go in, please join me Thursday, May 17th, 2018 to begin to discuss which text we will use and the methods for sacred reading.

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About Daisy Diamond:

Daisy Diamond is a painter, animator, and student originally from Philadelphia who values interdisciplinary and intersectional collaborative exploration. She is currently pursuing a BA in Studio Art from Bates College and spent this past year as a visiting student at Rhode Island School of Design. While she is a resident at the Fresh Milk space, she plans to research the history of Judaism in Barbados and the relationship between ritualistic sacred practices and artistic creation.

 

Fresh Milk hosts ‘A True & Exact History’ by Sonia Farmer

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On Monday, April 30th, 2018 Fresh Milk hosted an exhibition & panel discussion around ‘A True & Exact History‘ – an erasure poem by Bahamian writer & artist Sonia Farmer, using Richard Ligon’s publication A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657) as its source material.

Sonia was in conversation about her work with Ayesha Gibson-Gill, Cultural Officer for Literary Arts at the National Cultural Foundation, and Tara Inniss-Gibbs, Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.

Thanks as always to our photographer Dondré Trotman for these images!

Artist Statement for A True & Exact History

I consider my writing practice a tool for disrupting and investigating existing narratives, forming a response that is not necessarily preoccupied with making new narratives to replace them, but rather exposing different narratives as a parallel, ultimately calling into question the inherent power structure in the existing narrative (such as historical accounts, folktales, mythologies, canonical books, etc). Experimental process of generation, such as erasure, found text, mistranslation, technological intervention, or other restrictive methods, are especially exciting opportunities to create direct responses to existing narratives by using its own language against itself. The resulting text then becomes the content for my final projects.

The core of my artist book A True & Exact History is an erasure of one of the most formative descriptions of the English Caribbean in the seventeenth Century, Richard Ligon’s 1657 guidebook, “A True and Exact History of Barbadoes.” This project began during March 2016 at a writing residency at Fresh Milk, an art platform in St. George, Barbados, where I encountered Ligon’s book through their Colleen Lewis Reading Room. Using the language, imagery, and thematic drives at the core of this text to disrupt the teleology of colonial Caribbean history, these unbound poetic fragments scattered among a shifting landscape simultaneously re-create and resist narrative as a device of cohesive history, ultimately calling into question what it means to write “a true and exact history” of anything.

TVE Exhibition at Deakin University

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Fresh Milk is pleased to share that one of our partner institutions, Deakin University, Melbourne, recently hosted another iteration Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE) from April 11th-27th, 2018 in ‘The Project Space‘, the contemporary & experimental exhibition space at Deakin’s Geelong Waterfront Campus.

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TVE is a collection of recent films and videos from artists practicing in the Caribbean, Oceania and their diasporas. The project aims to negotiate the in-between space of our cultural communities outside of traditional geo-political zones of encounter and trade, intending to build relations and open up greater pathways of visibility, discourse and knowledge production between regional art spaces and their networks.

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On Thursday, April 26th, there was a special viewing and floor talk led by Dr. Torika Bolatagici, Lecturer (Art and Performance) at Deakin University, and our core partner for all of the Melbourne screenings of TVE.

Enormous thanks to all of the participating Caribbean and Oceanic artists, and to the team at Deakin for facilitating TVE reaching broader audiences!

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Tilting Axis Curatorial Fellowship 2018 Open Call

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As a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meeting held at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in May 2017, the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Art Galleries at Black Studies has come together with Tilting Axis to offer a Curatorial Fellowship to an emerging curator living and working in the Caribbean.

This Fellowship opportunity focuses on curators living and working within the Caribbean region, and is both research and practice-led, and mentor-based. The Fellow will receive a maximum of USD$5,500 towards a fee, travel, accommodation and living costs. The Fellowship is supported by University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Art Galleries at Black Studies.

This Fellowship includes round-trip airfare from any country within the Caribbean to Austin, Texas, where the Fellow will have access to private accomodation, in the award-winning home of Susanna and Richard Finnell, local collectors, for a period of four weeks. During this timeframe, the Fellow will be able to view and work with the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Art Galleries at Black Studies’ Collection along with the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies Collection, and the campus libraries.

This Fellowship also includes access to the 800-piece private Christian-Green Collection comprised of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American art works, with a dedicated focus on works from Haiti. The Fellow will also have access to the Christian-Green’s Reading Room and will be mentored by Lise Ragbir, the Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies at UT, with whom he/she will work to produce a fully funded exhibition in the Warfield Center’s Idea Lab Gallery, in the Fall of 2019.

Application Process:

Proposals will be judged by an international jury consisting of curators, academics, and museum professionals, after which shortlisted candidates (3) will be invited for an interview via Skype.

The Fellow will be selected on the basis of a letter of interest stating how this opportunity and access to collections and archives would inform and develop their curatorial practice, and why they think they would be a good candidate. The proposal should be no longer than 1000 words, and can be submitted to: tiltingaxis@gmail.com.

Please enclose CV and two references.

The Fellowship will be conducted over a four week period in either the Fall semester of 2018 or the Spring semester of 2019. Exact dates to be determined in consultation with the mentor.

The submission deadline for applications is May 18th, 2018, and the Curatorial Fellow will be announced at the upcoming Tilting Axis 4 meeting in the Dominican Republic on May 31st – June 2nd, 2018.

Jurors will be:

  • Lise Ragbir, the Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies at The University of Texas at Austin
  • Eddie Chambers, Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
  • Holly Bynoe, ARC Magazine, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and Tilting Axis co-founder
  • Tobias Ostrander, Senior Curator, PAMM
  • Mario Caro, board member of Res Artis, Tilting Axis partner
  • Annalee Davis, Fresh Milk Barbados, Tilting Axis co-founder
  • Natalie Urquhart, Director, The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands
  • Sara Hermann, Visual Arts Consultant, Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes
  • Joel Butler, Visual Arts and Exhibitions Coordinator, Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes

 

A True & Exact History – An Exhibition & Poetry Installation by Sonia Farmer

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Fresh Milk is excited for our next public event, an exhibition & panel discussion on A True & Exact History – an erasure poem by Bahamian writer & artist Sonia Farmer, using Richard Ligon’s publication “A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes” (1657) as its source material.

The opening night & artist talk will be held at 6:30 PM, Monday April 30, 2018 at Fresh Milk, Walkers Dairy, St. George, Barbados,  and the exhibition will also be open for viewing on
Tuesday May 1, 2018 between 10 AM – 2 PM.

Sonia will be in conversation about her work with Ayesha Gibson-Gill, Cultural Officer for Literary Arts at the National Cultural Foundation, and Tara Inniss, Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.

This event is free and open to the public. Directions to Fresh Milk can be found on the ‘About Page’ of our website here.

RSVP to the event on Facebook here.

Artist Statement for A True & Exact History

I consider my writing practice a tool for disrupting and investigating existing narratives, forming a response that is not necessarily preoccupied with making new narratives to replace them, but rather exposing different narratives as a parallel, ultimately calling into question the inherent power structure in the existing narrative (such as historical accounts, folktales, mythologies, canonical books, etc). Experimental process of generation, such as erasure, found text, mistranslation, technological intervention, or other restrictive methods, are especially exciting opportunities to create direct responses to existing narratives by using its own language against itself. The resulting text then becomes the content for my final projects.

The core of my artist book A True & Exact History is an erasure of one of the most formative descriptions of the English Caribbean in the seventeenth Century, Richard Ligon’s 1657 guidebook, “A True and Exact History of Barbadoes.” This project began during March 2016 at a writing residency at Fresh Milk, an art platform in St. George, Barbados, where I encountered Ligon’s book through their Colleen Lewis Reading Room. Using the language, imagery, and thematic drives at the core of this text to disrupt the teleology of colonial Caribbean history, these unbound poetic fragments scattered among a shifting landscape simultaneously re-create and resist narrative as a device of cohesive history, ultimately calling into question what it means to write “a true and exact history” of anything.

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About Sonia Farmer:

Sonia Farmer is a writer, visual artist, and small press publisher who uses letterpress printing, bookbinding, hand-papermaking, and digital projects to build narratives about the Caribbean space. She is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a small and independent press located in Nassau, The Bahamas, which produces handmade and limited edition chapbooks of Caribbean literature and promotes the crafts of book arts through workshops and creative collaborations. Her artwork has been exhibited throughout Nassau including at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. She is the author of “Infidelities” (Poinciana Paper Press, 2017) which was longlisted for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She has also self-published several chapbooks. Her poetry has won the 2011 Prize in the Small Axe Literary Competition and has appeared in various journals. She holds a BFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and is currently pursuing her MFA studies in Book Arts at the University of Iowa. 

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About Ayesha Gibson-Gill:

Ayesha Gibson-Gill M.A Arts Management (Greenwich), B.A Theatre Studies (Acadia) is a writer, director, actor, drama tutor, arts administrator, producer, former radio announcer, sometime vocalist and always mother.   In 2017 she conceptualized and artistically produced a signal CARIFESTA XIII event, Word for Word- Night of the Literary Masters, along with other literary engagements. She has been the Cultural Officer for Literary Arts at the National Cultural Foundation Barbados since 2012.

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About Tara Inniss:

Tara Inniss is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy at Cave Hill Campus, The University of the West Indies (UWI). Her focus areas include: history of medicine; history of social policy; and heritage and social development. In 2002-03, she received a Split-Site Commonwealth PhD Scholarship to study at the UWI/University of Manchester. In 2007, she completed a Masters in International Social Development at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Dr. Inniss has served as a delegate for the Government of Barbados on the World Heritage Committee, and was a member of the Research Team which assembled the Nomination Dossier for UNESCO World Heritage Property Historic Bridgetown and its Garrison. She currently sits on several committees for the Barbados World Heritage Committee, Barbados Museum and Historical Society and is Secretary-Treasurer of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH).