PORTLAND, ME (PNAN) – Set to open at the Portland Museum of Art on Friday, October 6, 2023, “Fragments of Epic Memory” will be an immersive encounter with the Caribbean and its diaspora that vividly intertwines past and present, memory and myth, and continuity and change, creating a testament to the enduring power of art to illuminate the complexities of personal experience.
Photographs, paintings, and video installations by a multigenerational group of artists such as Sandra Brewster, Vanley Burke, Christopher Cozier, Jeannette Ehlers, Nadia Huggins, Leasho Johnson, Ebony G. Patterson, Peter Dean Rickards, Paul Anthony Smith, and Rodell Warner, engage with legacies of slavery, environmental decimation, and ongoing colonial power dynamics, ultimately platforming Caribbean perspectives.
These captivating contemporary works from leading artists of Caribbean descent are placed in dialogue with more than 100 photographs from the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs of the Art Gallery of Ontario, document the emergence of photography alongside the unfolding of emancipation.
The exhibition is as much an exploration of what was lost as what has survived. Each artist’s work comes together in a multifaceted presentation of the Caribbean as a site of cultural exchange and self-determination.
From the streets of Jamaica to the shores of Trinidad and Tobago, Fragments of Epic Memory connects, contextualizes, and complicates historical depictions of the Caribbean region as a place for colonial profit and tourist pleasures.
By combining historical and contemporary materials, the exhibition transforms stagnant and biased narratives into multifaceted and revelatory ways of understanding the region’s history.
For more information on Fragments which is curated by Julie Crooks, PhD, Curator, Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora at the Art Gallery of Ontario and organized by Anjuli Lebowitz, PhD, the Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Photography, see www.portlandmuseum.org.
About
The Montgomery Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) includes over 3,500 historical images from 34 countries, and primarily focuses on the aftermath of enslavement in the region. British emancipation in the Caribbean (1838) coincided almost exactly with the invention and proliferation of photographic technologies (1839), and this unique collection provides a visual archive of colonialism, evoking new ways to consider the region’s histories and cultures.