Fresh Milk and the Barbados Museum & Historical Society (BMHS) are honoured to invite you to an evening celebrating the memory of Colleen Lewis, and her enduring legacy in the Colleen Lewis Reading Room located at Fresh Milk, Walker’s Dairy, St. George.
Painting featured: “Deux femmes causant au bord de la mer, Saint Thomas” (Camille Pissarro, 1856. Accessed from wikicommons.
As part of the 2026 Slow Reading Programme, we will share critical reflections on the history of how our landscapes have been shaped by the foreign gaze, using Colleen’s 2004 essay ““Pictorial Depictions of the West Indian Landscape in the 18th century and early 19th century: the sublime, the picturesque, the romantic” as a point of departure.
RSVP HERE!
Hosted in the Sir Trevor Carmichael Walled Garden Theatre at the BMHS, panelists Dr. Geoffrey Ward, Peter Thompson, Anne Bancroft, and Alissandra Cummins will share a diverse cross-section of perspectives on the topic and its relevance both in our historical and current setting.
Creative responses crafted in Fresh Milk’s collective writing workshop in January, inspired by the calypsonian tradition and a guided walk through the Barbados Trailway in St. George, will be read by poets Cyndi Celeste and Stacey Alvarez. The full series of poems by all participants will be shared via a print fanzine.
We invite you to take part in this Slow Reading Process; take the time to read Colleen’s article available to download in our RSVP form. We also ask for you to share any questions to panelists beforehand, which you can submit by writing to freshmilksocials@gmail.com.
Send us your RSVP by Monday April 13th! See you then!
About the panelists:
Alissandra Cummins, GCM, FMA, is Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and serves as Vice President of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience as well as the Barbados National Commission for UNESCO. She was elected President of the International Council of Museums (2004-2010) having previously served as Chairperson of its Advisory Committee for six years. A recognized authority on Caribbean heritage, museum development and art, and was awarded the Barbados Governmen’s Gold Crown of Merit in 2005. She was elected a Fellow of the Museums Association (UK) and as a member of the Commonwealth Association of Museums’ eminent Cowrie Circle. Ms. Cummins lectures part time on Heritage and Museum Studies at the University of the West Indies. She has served as chair/vice chair and/or member in a number of regional and international heritage programmes and publications, instruments and entities, including President of the Executive Board of UNESCO (2009-2011) and Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Intangible Heritage.
Anne Bancroft is a collection care specialist with over 20 years’ experience in the heritage sector. She has worked internationally as a preservation and conservation consultant across the West Indies, India, Italy, and the UK. Anne currently serves as Head of Collection Care and Conservation at both the Barbados Museum & Historical Society and ROADs National Digitisation Programme. She holds two masters degrees in conservation from Camberwell College and the Courtauld Institute of Art, with a focus on technical art history. In addition she has a Bachelor’s of Arts from BCC. She has previously worked with leading institutions including the V&A Museum and Tate Britain. Her research focuses on sacred objects, and she brings a forensic, materials-based perspective to the understanding and preservation of cultural heritage.
Geoffrey Ward completed his undergraduate degree in History at the University of Western Ontario in Canada before returning home to Barbados. He was awarded his PhD from the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus) in 2022, investigating the political, social and economic interactions between the Barbadian Populace and British naval personnel in the American Revolution. He recently completed an R.L. Seale / University of the West Indies post-doctoral fellowship, investigating the relationship between Rum and the Barbados plantation economy between 1775 and 1815.
Peter L. Thompson grew up in Barbados but fled the day after he wrote his last secondary school exam. He departed with the certainty and irrevocability of every teenage heartbreak… Yet even as Air Canada turned to the final north, affection strained, but space and time couldn’t snap it. He returned at last to his native land nine years ago, after a many decade long art gallery/management consulting career in Canada. He works now to understand how to take risks in the pursuit of meaning. His love affair with Barbados is unrequited, still.
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