The National Gallery of Jamaica wishes its friends and stakeholders all the very best for the Holiday Season and for a happy and prosperous new year in 2017.
Jamaica is blessed with rich Christmas-time traditions–seasonal food and drink traditions, Grand Market, Jonkonnu, and the religious observations that mark the season, to mention a few–and we invite you to recognize and celebrate the unique cultural dimensions of the Holiday Season in Jamaica. It is in this spirit that we have illustrated this message with one of the most famous Jonkonnu-related images, from Isaac Mendes Belisario’s Emancipation-era Sketches of Character (1837-38).
The Holiday Season is also a great time to visit the National Gallery, and to bring along any visiting family or friends. At the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston, we have on display Spiritual Yards: Home Ground of Jamaica’s Intuitives – Selections from the Wayne and Myrene Cox Collection, which explores the tradition of creating spiritual yards through the work of ten self-taught, Intuitive artists with art works and documentary material from the Wayne and Myrene Cox Collection. The ten artists are: Errol Lloyd Atherton, Vincent Atherton, Everald Brown, Pastor Winston Brown, Elijah, Reginald English, Leonard Daley, William “Woody” Joseph, Errol McKenzie, and Sylvester Stephens. We also have on view our Historical Galleries, with works of art from the Taino to the late 19th century; the Edna Manley and Kapo Galleries; the A.D. Scott Gallery, which explores art around Independence; the early Intuitives Gallery; and a temporary display with Selections from the Permanent Collection–together these exhibitions provide our visitors with a comprehensive overview of Jamaican art history. At National Gallery West at the Montego Bay Cultural Centre, we have just opened Marcia Biggs: Impressions of Life, which features select paintings, drawings and watercolours by the popular Montego Bay artist Marcia Biggs, who passed away unexpectedly at age 38 in 1998.
Our Holiday opening hours at the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston are as follows:
- Saturday, December 24: open from 10 am to 3 pm
- Sunday, December 25 to Tuesday, December 27: closed
- Wednesday, December 28 and Thursday, December 29: open from 10 am to 4:30 pm
- Friday, December 30: open from 10 am to 4 pm
- Saturday, December 31: open from 10 am to 3 om
- Sunday, January 1 and January 2: closed
At National Gallery West, the opening hours will be as follows:
- Saturday, December 24: open from 10 am to 5 pm
- Sunday, December 25 to Tuesday, December 27: closed
- Wednesday, December 28 to Saturday, December 31: open from 10 am to 5 pm
- Sunday, January 1 and January 2: closed
We resume regular opening hours on Tuesday, January 3 at both locations.
And in the next year, we will be preparing for the Jamaica Biennial 2017, which will open with a sequence of functions in Kingston and Montego Bay from February 24 to 26, and which will feature ambitious and thought-provoking works of art by a wide range of Jamaican, Jamaican Diaspora and other Caribbean artists.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
National Gallery of Jamaica 