Floating Rib

Featured Artists: Margot Bethel, April Bey, Kendra Frorup, Tamika Galanis, Anina Major, Jodi Minnis, Khia Poitier, Tiffany Smith, and Averia Wright.

Location: The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas

Dates: April 15, 2021 through October 15, 2021

“I decided that for me, Akosua, I will be my own nation."

― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Nine Black women bring together their distinct voices to delve deep into the common ground of their experiences navigating life as Caribbean women. “Floating Rib”, as the name suggests, looks at the feelings of displacement of Black women in The Bahamas. Theirs is an existence suspended between the margins of gender and race, both abroad and on our home limestone. The artists, diverse in demographic and aesthetics, give us deeply personal offerings of shared struggles and injustices endured. They also, however, illuminate and celebrate the collective feminine spirit, strength and intuition that passionately protects them in sacred sisterhood.

The concept of “home” offers both comfort and contention for the history of women: home as the domestic space, home as a place of grounding and lastly home as a place of origin and identity. All are made even more complex through the lens of a Caribbean identity, layered with historical and contemporary issues alike. Whether it is the sense of being sidelined for rights as a citizen or as a migrated woman marginalized even further as an “outsider” in the diaspora, the feeling of “home” does not come easily. The sense of placelessness and the entitlement of others to the Black feminine body (in labour, physicality and even emotionally), makes moving through the world as a Black Caribbean woman a consistently challenging terrain to manoeuvre.

The Caribbean experience as a whole, in all its brilliance, is marked by difficulties around ownership: of landscape, of governance, of how our histories get told and often of ourselves. Accessibility can feel unattainable. Further, if we look at the Caribbean as a space colonized - formerly or by new world powers - then the Black feminine body too often becomes a site where body and gender politics are most palpably felt.

This sense of homelessness faced, a sort of Lilith’s wilderness, brings a few shining gifts: fluidity, flexibility and a formidable sense of self that can only come from cultivating “home” as an internalized feeling rather than a physical place. Here, home is a thing to be carried, to be made, to be mobile, to be negotiated and altered.

Moving through the tying threads between the women of this sisterhood, this coven, we see the magic of their criticality towards the postcolonial landscape; the Black femme body colonized and reclaimed and the irrationality of the gender binary. They are Black women who, both sharply and sensitively, are exploring ideas of roots, bodies and belonging, homecomings and goings. This cohort shows us that softness is our human birthright and it is a strength built on feminine terms rather than colonially-imprinted patriarchal standards and something to be fiercely protected.

Margot Bethel creates abstract and functional object-based work that is often interactive and involves a sound component. A carpenter and builder by trade, Bethel's understanding of material is evident in her meticulous craftsmanship. She uses utilitarian materials and tools in both targeted and playful ways to engage with themes of gender, sexuality, relational grief, and healing, often with underlying humor. In her early twenties, Bethel worked at The Nassau Guardian as a reporter and shortly thereafter migrated to her mother's homeland, Canada. In Toronto, she worked with a number of artists and designers in furniture and retail design and in the film and television industry. She also studied Permaculture at the Ecology Retreat Centre and Architecture at Ryerson University.

April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, contemporary pop culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism and constructs of race within supremacist systems. Bey’s work is in the collection of The California African American Museum, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Fullerton College Art Gallery, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, and more. Bey has exhibited in biennials NE7, NE8 and NE9 in The Bahamas. Bey has also exhibited internationally in Italy, Spain and Accra Ghana, West Africa. Bey is both a practicing contemporary artist and art educator having taught a controversial course at Art Center College of Design called Pretty Hurts analyzing process-based art and Beyoncé hashtag faux feminism. Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.

Kendra Frorup (nee Hamilton) was born in and raised in Nassau, Bahamas. She graduated from Queen’s College in Nassau, earned a BFA from University of Tampa and an MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida. She teaches beginning and advanced sculpture and exhibits her art internationally. Frorup describes teaching as her “ultimate job” and is inspired, most of all, by her students. As an artist who grew up in The Bahamas, Frorup was always interested in the influences of culture on expression. Though defining these influences can be a challenging activity, she feels that culture, to a large degree, helps to create the field from which artists draw formal and intuitive responses. In 1989, Frorup embraced the opportunity to study art and live in the United States. In an atmosphere of possibility and experimentation combined with traditional methods of casting and carving and construction, she began to create representational images or the essence of forms that are considered a commonality within Bahamian culture. Frorup has exhibited in over 50 exhibitions in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe and The Bahamas including the Fourth National Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, the Global Caribbean Exhibition in Miami, FL, Sete, France and San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Trieneionale del la Caraibe in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Mythologies de Femmes, Femmes en Mythologie in Paris, France. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas in Nassau.

Tamika Galanis is a documentarian and multimedia visual artist. A Bahamian native, Tamika’s work examines the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns. Emphasizing the importance of Bahamian cultural identity for cultural preservation, Tamika documents aspects of Bahamian life not curated for tourist consumption to intervene in the historical archive. This work counters the widely held paradisiacal view of the Caribbean, the origins of which arose post-emancipation through a controlled, systematic visual framing and commodification of the tropics. Tamika’s photography-based practice includes traditional documentary work and new media abstractions of written, oral and archival histories. Tamika earned a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University.

Anina Major is an interdisciplinary artist who primarily works with clay. Her practice investigates the relationships between self and place as a way of cultivating moments of reflection and acceptance. Major studied at the College of The Bahamas, earned a Bachelors Degree in Graphic Design from Drexel University and a Masters of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award for Sculpture, the Watershed Summer Residency Zenobia Award and MassMoCA Studio Artist Program. Her work has been exhibited in The Bahamas, across the United States and Europe.

Jodi Minnis is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator. Her practice investigates the intersection of gender, race and culture. Through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, video and performance, she scrutinizes the traditional representations and tropes around Black, specifically Bahamian, women. Minnis holds an Associates of Arts: Fine Arts from the College of The Bahamas (2015). Having worked in national galleries within The Bahamas, Minnis developed a curatorial practice. Her practice produced exhibitions within those spaces - most notably the From Columbus to Junkanoo exhibition co-curated with Averia Wright which opened in Santiago, Cuba in 2015 and was exhibited again in 2016 at the NAGB. She was awarded the Popop Junior Residency Prize in 2014, and participated in the Caribbe- an Linked III residency programme in 2015. Most recently, Minnis received The Charlene Gordon Award in Visual Art from the College of Arts and Letters of University of Tampa where is pursuing a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts. She also received the National Youth Award for Arts and Culture and the prestigious Prime Minister’s Cup award from the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture in The Bahamas. Minnis is currently the Gallery Manager of TERN Gallery in Nassau, The Bahamas.

Khia Poitier is a multimedia artist and performer based in Nassau, Bahamas. Working primarily in digital and mixed media collage, her work responds to and celebrates her identity as a Queer Black woman. She has exhibited at galleries in The Bahamas, The United States and Germany. Poitier has performed as a recording artist under the moniker “Keeya” since 2016. Her sound mixes RnB with Caribbean influences. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she brings a strong creative voice and hands on approach to her music projects. She is credited with much of her own design work and more recently, a lyric video shot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. She enjoys partnering with other artists to create her striking visuals and has acted as muse and model for several of her contemporaries. She released her debut EP ‘Paradise’ with Alacran records in 2020, and is currently working on her first studio album.

Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora working in photography, video, installation, and design. Using plant matter, design and home decor elements, pattern, and costuming as cultural signifiers, Smith creates photographic portraits, site responsive installations, user engaged experiences, and assemblages focused on identity, representation, cultural ambiguity, and displacement. Visual references from an array of multi-cultural influences inform constructed environments that serve to articulate cultural subjectivities that oscillate between visitor and native roles. Smith’s practice centers on what forms and defines communities of people of color, in particular; how they are identified and represented, and how they endure. Smith received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA in Photo/Video from School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally including shows at National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The National Gallery of Jamaica, MassArt, St. John’s University, Smack Mellon, Fjord Gallery, The Wassaic Project, Spring Break Art Show, Garner Arts Festival, Photo NOLA and Photoville. She has presented public art installations in Newark Penn Station through The Gateway Project/P.E.S. and in Marcus Garvey Park during Flux Art Fair. Recent solo exhibitions include Recess Assembly, and Montserrat College of Art. Tiffany Smith is a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work from The New York Foundation for the Arts, a Bronx A.I.M. (37) alum, and a 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellowship Awardee. Tiffany Smith is currently a Co-Director of Ortega y Gasset Projects and based in Brooklyn, NY.

Averia Wright is an interdisciplinary artist known for her sculpture and ceramic artworks. Wright graduated from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio with a Masters of Fine Art in Sculpture and Expanded practice, May 2018 and BFA with concentration in Ceramics from the University of Tampa, Florida, May 2009. Upon graduating from UT in 2009, Wright worked at Doongalik Studios Art Gallery as a curatorial assistant under the expert guidance of cultural activist Pamela Burnside and the late artist/architect Jackson Burnside. In 2011, Wright moved to The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB) on the curatorial team and left in 2015 in the position of assistant curator and registrar to pursue her masters. Inspired by folklore and Bahamian history, Wright's previous sculptures draw from tribal imagery and organic forms. Familiar forms resemble local flora and fauna, deep sea creatures and dancing bodies, but they do not fully reveal themselves; always becoming, but never being. Wright’s current practice delves into a criticism of the geopolitical nature of the Bahamas and other countries in the region using her upbringing through the straw market industry.