2011 Exhibitions

Kendal Hanna - Happy Birthday to Me

Retrospective Exhibition

July 2011 – January 2012

The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas was proud to stage the long-anticipated Retrospective Exhibition of Bahamian Master Kendal Hanna entitled "Kendal Hanna - Happy Birthday to Me" which featured the drawings and paintings of this brilliant and prolific abstract expressionist artist.

The exhibition was superbly curated by outgoing Director/Curator Dr. Erica James who had interviewed Hanna in numerous sessions over a 7-year period in preparation for a retrospective show she had in mind just for him. It was a celebration of the life of a man whose work is carefully considered and contemplated, provocative and masterful.

Kendal Hanna was born on June 25, 1936 in Nassau, Bahamas. This exhibition was timed to coincide with the artist’s 75th birthday and features key works from his almost sixty-year career.

Hanna always had an experimental mind and at an early stage became immersed in the ideas and possibilities of Abstract Expressionism. While he concedes that his work may be difficult, he surmises:

“Everybody is more familiar with what is visible in an object, what the eye is focused on outwardly. When people express themselves like this it does surprise them. It is my subconscious mind expressing itself on the canvas. People will be faced with the unknown…

“One thing I’m quite certain of is my identity exists in these works. People looking at these works will know that I am a black man and that I am Bahamian.”

A beautifully designed and thorough exhibition catalogue – with a foreword by Dr. Gail Saunders, Chairman of the Board of the NAGB, and text by Dr. Erica James – is available through the NAGB Store.

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Bahamian Modernism 

February 2011 – June 2011

If one looks at art only in the traditional sense of painting and sculpture and defined “Bahamian Art” according to strict geo-political borders, notions of nationhood and citizenship, then “Bahamian Art” would be a post 1973 phenomena. However, such parameters affect a far too narrow view and do not consider the complexity of Bahamian cultural history, to which Bahamian visual history and art history are intimately tied. 

Rather than support a grand mythology of creative spontaneity (post independence) that distorts rather than expands one’s understanding of Bahamian culture, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas seeks to examine the whole and reveal the intimate connections between what is present and what is past, what is understood as “native” and how that has been informed by what is commonly understood locally as “foreign”. 

From the position of the viewer, this exhibition hopes to muddy the waters, question the limits, and insist on the complexity of Bahamianness and Bahamian art in a way in that considers The Bahamas as a historic space occupied and contested by many peoples over the past five hundred years; a space impacted and shaped by monumental forces of conquest, genocide, slavery, colonial expansion, war, plantation economies, capitalism, tourism, independence and globalism. 

The Bahamas is a nation with a living, moving culture. Like the art representing it and coming out of it, it does not exist apart from the world but in dialogue with and sometimes in opposition to it. This exhibition utilizes the holdings of the National Collection and several private collections to tell a story of modern and contemporary Bahamian Art.