Akima McPherson

Back in London in mid-1950, Denis Williams (1923 – 1998) continued to paint.

Denis Williams (1923 – 1998) received the first-ever British Council Scholarship granted to an artist from British Guiana in 1945.

June was an important month of anniversaries marking the losses of notable Guyanese stalwarts.

On January 31 this year, diaspora Guyanese artist Dudley Charles (b.

Are we Guyanese when defined by the lived experiences within the boundaries enclosing our 83,000 sq miles, or are we the sum of those with experiences in this geographical space, those who have journeyed away and returned, and our global diaspora that remains connected?

Picture a town, amidst hills and valleys, with waterfalls and gorges, alongside a lake.

Considering Guyana’s small population and its cultural and linguistic isolation on the South American coast, curiosity is always the order of the day for me when I learn of Guyanese in strange and far-flung places.

Monday morning, May 22, we all woke to shocking and horrific news!

On April 25, Guyanese-American artist Arlington Weithers’s first New York City solo exhibition since 2006 opened at the David Richard Gallery in Chelsea.

If only we could truly enter into the reservoir of an artist’s imagination, what an experience that would be.

In 2017, five years after the Guyana Women Artists’ Association’s (GWAA) initial accommodation of my contemporary approaches with provision of a small room to show.

In 2010, I left these shores, transiting through Barbados where I was held for a long while by immigration before being led into the departure lounge for my flight to Gatwick.

Akima: Did you go to the exhibition at Castellani House? Colleague: Yes, I did.

When I started writing this column in 2022, I began with a fundamental method of looking at works of art.

There is a term that gets bantered about a lot in Guyana.

It is indeed fantastic that we can celebrate those from among us who leave for greener pastures, “make it”, as we say, then return, however temporarily, for perhaps refuelling or grounding.

In a multicultural space such as ours, the world is at our doorsteps and in our backyards.

Art neither exists in a vacuum nor does it emerge from one.

The local saying, “What don’t kill does fatten,” clicked recently. This aptly describes enduring and succeeding despite challenging circumstances.

Writing this weekly column came about as a means to satisfy an itch to write about art in a less rigid and demanding way than academia requires.