A gaggle of tertiary-level students has been advised to all the time explore new opportunities and avenues during which to reveal their art.
Curator for the Season of Emancipation exhibitions, Oneka Small, also encouraged them to feed their artistic appetite to develop new ideas and skills along their creative journey. Small was talking to the eight Barbados Community College students as they toured the “Our Land” the third exhibition within the series of the Central Bank Crop Over Visual Arts Exhibition on the Queen’s Park Gallery on Tuesday.
“It’s very necessary that artistic students come and see what the practising skilled creatives are doing within the country, to be inspired or simply get different ideas, to see what levels they may even have to start out pitching at or working towards, because on this show now we have a variety of skill sets.
“It shows them that as artists you have got to maintain working, keep showing your work, and keep being an inspiration to other artists,” she said. Small told the scholars of the importance of using their circumstances including events resembling the pandemic to be inspired to advance their craft.
“I feel what the pandemic did is that it pushed lots of us right into a place of reflection about what we actually need out of life and what life is admittedly about. We began to actually see the fragility of it… [Artists] have been inspired by that point inside.
“I’m very completely happy to see the range of creativity that has happened in Barbados and that now we have shown within the showcases [here].”
Cultural Officer for Visual Arts on the National Cultural Foundation (NCF), Rodney Ifill, offered his support to the scholars’ visit to the exhibition which featured several local pieces from each new and more seasoned artists. He said BCC and other institutions proceed to supply a much-needed platform for local artists to flourish.
“Being a former BCC student together with many other individuals working within the cultural industries [and] the museum circuit, we’re all the time proud that in Barbados now we have a variety of educational institutions and wonderful tutors creating wonderful arts programmes where creatives like ourselves can come and express and get serious careers either as academics, curators or conservators in positions as they present themselves.” (SB)
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