The Women’s Day 

By Alim Hosein
(This week, Alim Hosein reviews the work of the Guyana Women Artists Association exhibited at a special show mounted in honour of International Women’s Day (March 8) 2008 at the Centre of Brazilian Studies in Georgetown. Alim Hosein is a linguist, an artist, a critic of art and literature and has been a fine art correspondent associated with the Sunday Stabroek Arts. He is attached to the Division of English in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana.)

The Guyana Women Artists Association (GWAA) has to be ranked as one of the most consistent and long-lived artist groups in Guyana. The association actually comes out of a long history of women-artist groups functioning in then British and now independent Guyana. In fact, women can be found among the exhibitors from the art exhibitions in Guyana during the early decades of the last century, and women artists were present in the first local exhibition in 1930. After a lapse in such involvement in the art scene, a significant revival occurred in April 1988 when the Guyana Women Artists Association was launched.