June 29, 2021
JAMAICA ART SOCIETY NAMES SIX IN FOCUS FELLOWS
Key emerging artists and curators tapped for nine-month professional development program
The Jamaica Art Society is delighted to announce its inaugural class of In Focus Fellows—an international cohort of emerging artists, curators, and writers who will participate in an unprecedented nine-month mentorship program aimed at promoting cultural exchange.
The six fellows—all of whom are Jamaican or of Jamaican descent—are artists Simon Benjamin, Camille Chedda, Jasmine Thomas Girvan, and Leasho Johnson, curator Jheanelle Brown, and writer and curator Rianna Jade Parker.
“We are proud to support this exceptional group of emerging leaders. The In Focus Fellowship program is at the core of the JAS mission. Our goal for the program is two-fold. The first goal is for our fellows to share the information they obtain widely among their peers to create a new generation of confident arts practitioners and the second is for their future work to directly impact and engage Jamaican culture.” said JAS founder Tiana Webb Evans.
Selected by a jury of JAS board members and guests, each 2021 fellow will receive a $2,500 stipend for participating in the program. (Details about the fellows and jurors follow below.)
This first edition of the IFF initiative will take place virtually, because of the ongoing pandemic, and run from September 2021 through June 2022. At its core will be two week-long symposia hosted with JAS’s Cultural Partners. There will also be cohort roundtables and one-on-one engagements.
The goal of IFF is for emerging leaders to learn from and partner with leading professionals in the global art industry, with the aim of contributing to Jamaica’s art ecosystem and expanding its visibility. At the conclusion of the program, fellows will present presentations about their experiences in the form of webinars, digital exhibitions, or essays.
JAS is honored to collaborate with the following IFF Cultural Partners: Artnet News, the Association of Art Museum Curators, BRIC Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, David Zwirner Gallery, Hyperallergic, the National Gallery of Jamaica, the New Museum, and the Armory Show.
The guest jurors for the 2021 class were three Jamaica-based figures—artist Deborah Anzinger, art advisor and founder of Suzie Wong, Presents Susanne Fredricks, and O’Neil Lawrence, the chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica—and the New York–based art writer Seph Rodney. They joined JAS advisory committee members Yona Backer (of Third Streaming), Craig Dixon (CEO of The St. James), Sean Green (CEO of ARTERNAL), Mark McIntosh (trustee of the Richard Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship), artist Nari Ward, and Tiana Webb Evans.
ABOUT THE FELLOWS
Camille Chedda was born in Manchester, Jamaica, and lives and works in Kingston, Jamaica. She graduated from the Edna Manley College with an Honours Diploma in Painting and received an MFA in Painting from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her works have been featured in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica, NLS Kingston, the Olympia Gallery, and the Museum of Latin American Art. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Albert Huie Award, the Reed Foundation Scholarship, the inaugural Dawn Scott Memorial Award, the British Council’s TAARE Program Award, and the Catapult SHAR Grant.
She has been an artist in residence at Alice Yard in Trinidad, Art Omi in New York, and Hospitalfield in Scotland, and has completed the Catapult Stay Home Artist Residency and the HOMO Sargassum Art Residency. She is the Project Manager of the Rubis Mecenat’s InPulse Art Project, and lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan was born in 1961 in Jamaica and has lived in Trinidad since 2000. A sculptor trained in jewelry and textile design, she received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York. Drawing from Caribbean history, myth, ritual, literature, and her own experience, her work has evolved from intimately sized, often wearable objects, to large-scale installations with multimedia elements. She was the recipient of the Tiffany Honor Award for Excellence while studying at Parsons and received a Commonwealth Foundation Arts Award in 1996. She received the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Aaron Matalon Award in 2012 and 2017, as the artist who made the most outstanding contribution to that year’s Jamaica Biennial. In 2014 she also received the Silver Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Thomas-Girvan has also completed a number of public commissions, one of which was presented to the Queen of England. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Jamaica, Trinidad, Venezuela, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.
Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and arts administrator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with special interests in the sonic in film, political film and media, and West Indian film/video. Brown is a board member and a programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts and a lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design. She has co-curated “Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today” and “Black Radical Imagination: Fugitive Trajectories,” the latter which screened at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, articule gallery, and Project Row Houses, amongst other institutions. At this moment, she is dreaming about cosmic marronage whilst trying to remember her terrestrial obligations.
Leasho Johnson, born in 1984, is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Johnson uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition within Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible at the same time. His work lives to disrupt historical, political, and biological expectations of the Black queer body. Johnson is currently a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021. A recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago 2018–2020, he has shown his work in exhibitions at the National Gallery of Jamaica and the New Local Space in Kingston, and spaces in Puerto Rico, Montreal, Paris, Miami, and Belfast, among other places.
Rianna Jade Parker is a British-born Jamaican writer, curator, and researcher based in South London. Her historical research and archival specialisms encompass Black feminist thought, visual cultures, Black modernity, and Caribbean studies. She has presented at the South London Gallery, Tate Britainٖ, Tate Modern, the Royal College of Art, and the ICA London, among other institutions. Her writing—including critiques on Frank Bowling, Simone Leigh, Kara Walker, and Steve McQueen—has been published in ARTnews, Frieze, Artforum, Aperture, Art in America, Artsy, and BOMB. She has written catalogue essays for institutions and publishers including Phaidon Press, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Tate Liverpool, Thames & Hudson, Camden Art Centre, Charleston House, and the Hayward Gallery. She is a Contributing Editor for Frieze and a founding member of the interdisciplinary art collective Thick/er Black Lines. Her first book, A Brief History of Black British Art, is forthcoming from Tate Publishing in 2021.
Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican artist and filmmaker invested in a research-based practice, whose work encompasses multi-sensory installations, sculptures, video, photographs, and printmaking. Using the framework of the sea and coastal space, his current body of work investigates the Caribbean’s complex relationship to trade, ocean travel, import-dominant consumerism, tourism, and other neo-colonial relationships that the United States and the West impose on Caribbean states. His work has been included in the Kingston Biennial, the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2021–forthcoming); The 92nd St. Y, New York (2020); Brooklyn Public Library (2019); Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY (2019); the Ghetto Biennial, Port Au Prince, Haiti (2018); Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica (2017); Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, (2019); New Local Space, Kingston (2016); and Columbia University, New York (2016). Simon is currently an LMCC Artist-in-Residence at the Arts Center at Governors Island in New York.