Natalie Coleman, NGCI president and Simone Scott, NGCI Sister Islands Representative.

By Simone Tatum
simone@caymannetnews.com

On Wednesday, 16 September 2009, the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI) travelling art lecture was held by at the Heritage House in Cayman Brac.

The lecture is part of an ongoing exhibition in Grand Cayman, with the theme “Paradise (re)Visited.

Natalie Coleman, NGCI director, lectured on the History of Jamaican art from the early colonial period to the present day and showed 19th Century Jamaican Landscapes from the collection of Hugh and Pam Hart.

Because the original paintings are too delicate to travel, the travelling art lecture shows digital photographs of the paintings, using a projector.

“Part of the National Gallery’s mission to promote the visual arts in the Cayman Islands involves travelling lectures and exhibitions to the Sister Islands as often as possible, to supplement the monthly art classes that are run by the NGCI’s Sister Islands Officer Simone Scott,” says NGCI director Natalie Coleman.

“There is a vast amount of creative ability in the Brac and Little Cayman and these programmes provide opportunities for both established and budding artists of all ages to further their talent. Over the forthcoming year we hope to travel more and more one off workshops to both Sister Islands, highlighting different artistic mediums, and encourage the community to contact the gallery with their specific areas of interest,” she continued.

MS Coleman said that in the course of developing exhibitions at the National Gallery, it is unusual to come across a local collection that is as rare and historically significant as Hugh and Pam Hart’s group of 19th Century Jamaican landscape prints.

Featuring works by renowned artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, and including supporting work by Belanger, Robertson, Hakewill, Whitty, Cartwright and Duperly, she said the collection represents some of the best known early pictorial representations of the Jamaican landscape and society at that time.

As with all NGCI exhibitions, an extensive education programme has been developed for Paradise (re)Visited that is targeted both at school students and the wider public. The NGCI ‘teachers pack’ contains educational activities that start in the gallery and end in the classroom with cross curricular follow up projects relating to both Jamaica and Cayman’s cultural and society during the early 19th century. These can been booked through the NGCI education department.