Remembering Albert Huie (1920-2010)

This post is the NGJ’s tribute to Jamaican master painter and printmaker Albert Huie, who passed away on Sunday. It was written by David Boxer, Chief Curator, and Veerle Poupeye, Executive Director.

Albert Huie - Crop Time (1955), Collection: National Gallery of Jamaica

Albert Huie was born on December 31, 1920 in Falmouth, Trelawny, and moved to Kingston in 1936. Within months of his arrival in Kingston he completed his first painting The Dancers. This precocious painting by the sixteen year old was to be the “launching pad” of a prodigious career.  Huie himself related his “discovery” by H. Delves Molesworth, the then Secretary of the Institute of Jamaica:

In the beginning I bought enamels in small tins from a hardware store and this was the medium I used to paint The Dancers after I had observed the scene in a downtown piano bar. Not long afterwards, I took this painting along with a couple others and my sketches, to the Institute of Jamaica to show them to Delves Molesworth. I was almost thrown out of the  Institute. Mr. Molesworth himself interceded, looked at what I had brought to show him and expressed an interest. He invited me to his house and commissioned a portrait to be done of his wife. During this time he began introducing me to his circle of friends, which included the Manleys. His property adjoined Drumblair. My long association with the Manleys began after this.

Albert Huie’s first landscape was painted at Drumblair and is in fact titled Drumblair. A regular visitor to Drumblair in the late thirties, Huie also recalled that his first woodcut was done in Edna Manley’s studio.

The National Gallery of Jamaica at 35

Inside the NGJ entrance lobby

We could not let the year come to a close without acknowledging that 2009 marks the 35th anniversary of the NGJ. This post is based on a press release we have sent out to mark the occasion and provides an overview of the NGJ’s key achievements and activities.

The National Gallery of Jamaica was established in 1974, as the first national art gallery in the Anglophone Caribbean. National galleries have since been established in Guyana, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and soon also in Barbados but within the Caribbean region, the National Gallery of Jamaica is second only to the art museums of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in terms of the size of its facilities and collection and the scope of its operations.

Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds in the NGJ Collection

Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds, Be Still, 1970, Larry Wirth Collection, NGJ

This is the first of two posts on Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds. In this segment, we focus on Kapo’s work in the collections of the NGJ. The second post will focus on his biography.

In 1974, when the National Gallery of Jamaica was established and the collections of modern Jamaican art transferred from the Institute of Jamaica, Kapo in terms of numbers was one of the better represented artists. There were five sculptures and seven paintings but the quality was uneven and there had been little attempt at exploring the wide range of Kapo’s iconography, his subject matter. While the fledgling National Gallery went on to acquire two further paintings directly from the artist – the large Orange Paradise and the superb Silent Night, Kapo’s unique treatment of the traditional Christmas nativity scene – it was clear that the very best Kapos of the previous decades resided in private collections. In Jamaica none could rival the collection deposited in the rooms and public spaces of the Stony Hill Hotel, domain of the inveterate Kapo collector, Larry Wirth.

Institute of Jamaica Research Symposium – October 28, 2009