COVID closures came and left. With their departure, the doors to art exhibitions opened. In Guyana, the first such was the E R Burrowes School of Art (BSA) Tutor’s Exhibition in August 2022. Then, in September 2022, the Guyana Women Artists’ Association (GWAA) hosted an exhibition as part of a jazz, fashion, and art event to inaugurate the reopening of the newly renovated National Gallery of Art (NGA), Castellani House. (The remodelling had started in early 2020.) When the NGA reopened, the two ground-floor galleries had been reconfigured into one and the space was now more open to exciting possibilities.
Shortly, thereafter, the University of Guyana (UG) hosted its annual art exhibition and featured only the work of the BA in Fine Art Graduating Class of 2022. The two young women who constituted that class demonstrated different visions for their art. Their work beautifully occupied the ground floor. One explored an East Asian cultural myth while the other attempted a reconciliation with a West African spiritual past. One engaged with installation art while the other experimented modestly with painting displays. Fast forward to two years later and the UG again hosted its annual art exhibition at the NGA. While the UG’s 2023 exhibition was also hosted there, this third consecutive exhibition featured noteworthy work from two young women. Their work meaningfully veered from the local norms and forecast exciting new directions. Sharing a feminist ethos, one celebrated Caribbean female literary voices while the other attempted to articulate the silenced voices of a particular (raced) female collective. These four young women should be exciting to follow if they can build on the momentum started during their final year of undergraduate study.
As I contemplate the fate of these young women artists in a Guyana where art hardly matters and serious art matters even less, I wonder, where is the Guyana Women Artists’ Association? The GWAA was among the first to mount an exhibition when our solitary art space reopened in September 2022, but they have since resigned to a long silence. No exhibitions in 2023. None so far in 2024. With the end of 2024 fast approaching, I wonder will the GWAA pull its act together and try to reclaim something of its former glory. Will the GWAA be able to reach back to times not long before COVID closures when they hosted exhibitions that mattered, excited, and encouraged? Even in 2019, the GWAA faltered in hosting a one-day/half-day exhibition as its annual exhibition.
As a student of the BSA at a time when there was no internet and the available books on art were few and old, getting inspiration from other women in visual art was necessary to stay the course. Art school was not without the strangling presence of male chauvinism. Aside from encouragement from the tutors who chose to offer it, the work shown in the context of the GWAA was an important source for young women aspiring to art. I remember looking around at an exhibition GWAA hosted at the Umana Yana, impressed by the one-point perspective in a landscape by O’Donna Allsopp and curious about Margaret Duncan’s boaters on a river. I recall wanting to be privy to the conversations in Maylene Duncan’s paintings and marvelling at the delicacy of Irene Gonsalves’s ceramics with Timehri motifs. I have a distinct memory of telling myself, work so one day your work will hang in an exhibition alongside the work of these women. GWAA in those days was a coveted destination point! Now I question what it is. I suspect our dear formidable founding mothers are rolling around in their graves.
Without GWAA, I doubt my art practice would have had the space to grow. With GWAA, I knew I had to produce quality work annually for the exhibitions. I could not show the work I had shown last year or the previous years. With GWAA, I knew the annual exhibition opportunities meant regular feedback on my work and thus chances to grow my practice. And with GWAA’s provision of space to exhibit annually, I could experiment with themes, approaches, and formats and quickly know how the new directions were resonating. GWAA allowed me to show work more regularly in spaces I could not rent on my own and to grow in the ways possible by exhibiting without the pressure to produce a body of work to host solo exhibitions.
So, as I think about the aforementioned young women who recently graduated or will soon graduate from UG, I ask where is the GWAA? As I consider the women graduates of the BSA, I ask why is GWAA dormant? Without GWAA, who will give these young women the space they need to develop their voices? But while I wonder about the GWAA’s existence, I worry that its members may sacrifice quality to host a show. Quality may be sacrificed in the name of resuscitating the association which, I am dismayed to say, on its 2022 outing appeared to be on life support.
As a former member (repeat President even) of GWAA, I know there is an aversion within the association to jurying. In 2008, when we hosted an exhibition for International Women’s Day at the Centre for Brazilian Studies the exhibition was juried. Shortly afterward, an art commentator remarked about the evenness and quality of the exhibition. Later in 2008, on the occasion of Carifesta X, GWAA again juried the exhibition. The jury comprised the aforementioned art commentator, an established independent artist, and an older non-practicing member of GWAA. The exhibition was strong and well-received. On their 2022 outing, it was clear that jurying did not happen. And these days one wonders whether the previous procedures are followed in growing GWAA’s membership. In the past, prospective members were nominated by a member in good standing and presented a portfolio of work to be reviewed by the association’s executive. Now I’m wondering if friendship and other relationship ties are the determinant, whether modest facility with media is a minimum, and whether the will to call oneself an artist is all that suffices to gain membership. Time to wake up, members of GWAA!
