Surveying our Guyana-based visual art community in 2023, must give one cause to pause. I recall having a conversation years ago with one of my artist mentors – a dear friend – about the state of affairs here. Then, we were surveying the community for established, emerging, and young artists because Guyana’s visual art sub-committee for Carifesta XII (2015) had put out a call for artists with clear criteria for these categories, and explicit intention to have a specially featured artist for each.
We listed a few resident established artists on one hand with fingers to spare and could not match this dismally low number with emerging artists – who had not yet established themselves nationally and who had been exhibiting consistently in the past ten years locally. On the other hand, we ran out of fingers for those who met the criteria of young artists.