Natalie Willis Whylly (she/they) is a queer British-Bahamian curator and cultural worker. Born and raised in Grand Bahama, she received her BA (Hons) and MA in Fine Art at York St John University in the UK before returning home, where she has worked since.
Following her 6 year tenure at National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Willis now primarily works independently as a curator, art + curatorial consultant, and writer. Most recently, she has taken on the role of Caribbean Editor-At-Large for Burnaway.
During her very formative time as Associate Curator at the NAGB, she sustained a concerted focus on writing aimed at decolonising and decentralising the art archive, adding to the literature on Bahamian and Caribbean visual culture, and developing her burgeoning curatorial practice. She was responsible for maintaining, documenting, researching and historicising the National Collection; and planning and installing exhibitions.
As an emerging curator desperately trying to not contribute to the brain-drain of the Caribbean, her practice has a concerted focus on knowledge building and access (through language) and speaking to the way the colonial tourism of the late 1800s shaped the cultural and physical landscape of the Anglo-Caribbean.
She was the first curator at the museum to include bilingual wall texts (in English and Haitian Kreyol), the first to have a group show dedicated featuring the work of Black Women artists of The Bahamas, and alongside colleague Abby Smith she developed the museum’s inter-island traveling exhibition as a way to combat the difficulties that the country’s archipelagic geography presents in providing access to cultural patrimony.
Image courtesy of Adrian Whylly.