Season’s Greetings!

Isaac Mendes Belisario – Koo-Koo, or Actor Boy (From Sketches of Character, 1837-38), Collection: NGJ

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 19^th 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.

“Marcia Biggs: Impressions of Life” Opens on December 18, 2016

National Gallery West

The National Gallery of Jamaica is pleased to announce the Marcia Biggs: Impressions of Life exhibition, which will open at National Gallery West at the Montego Bay Cultural Centre on Sam Sharpe Square on Sunday, December 18, 2016. The exhibition explores the work of the popular Montego Bay-based artist Marcia Biggs, through examples borrowed mainly from private and corporate collections in Western Jamaica.

Marcia Biggs was born in 1960 in Montego Bay, where she was based for most of her life. She was trained at the Mico Teachers’ College, and she was tutored by Cecil Cooper and served as an apprentice with Barrington Watson. She taught art at the Herbert Morrison High School from 1983 to 1987, after which she became a full-time artist. She participated in several of the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Annual National exhibitions and had noted solo exhibitions at the Bay Gallery in Montego Bay and…

View original post 178 more words