Tuesday 7 March 2023
5.30-7.00pm GMT / 1.30-3.00pm AST / 3.30-5.00pm ADT
Online via Zoom
Please Register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/curating-practices-in-the-caribbean-tickets-558623165927
The St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the new online MLitt module Caribbean Cultures and Heritage (University of St Andrews and University of the West Indies) and the project Shared Island Stories Between Scotland and the Caribbean: Past, Present, Future, warmly invites you to join us for an evening of lively discussion and conversation about curating practices and the Caribbean with practitioners Katherine Kennedy, Nicole Smythe-Johnson and Yina Jiménez Suriel, chaired by Holly Bynoe Young and Catherine Spencer.
Katherine Kennedy is a Barbadian cultural practitioner who is dedicated to and passionate about Caribbean contemporary practices. She graduated with a BA in Creative Arts (First Class Hons.) from Lancaster University, UK, and has exhibited broadly locally, regionally and internationally. She works for the Fresh Milk Art Platform in Barbados as the Communications and Operations Manager, and formerly contributed to ARC Magazine of contemporary Caribbean art as a Writer, Editor and the Assistant to Director. Through these platforms, she has coordinated and managed programmes such as six editions of the Caribbean Linked residency & exhibition programme at Ateliers ’89, Aruba, and the biennial Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE) international video, film and new media exhibition. Katherine’s writing has been published with platforms such as Sugarcane Magazine (Volume 1, Issue No. 3); Robert & Christopher Publishers in the A-Z of Caribbean Art; and the Caribbean InTransit Journal (Volume 3, Issue No. 6). Curatorial credits also include exhibitions commissioned by the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados, and in 2021, she was selected for the CCCADI Afro-Caribbean Art Curatorial Fellowship. She is currently a part-time history/theory tutor in the Division of Fine Arts at Barbados Community College for the BFA in Graphics and Associate Degree in Visual Arts programmes.
Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and curator from Kingston, Jamaica. She was on the curatorial team of the 2022 Kingston Biennial and worked on John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City (2017-2018). She is currently a curatorial fellow at the Visual Art Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is a doctoral candidate in the department of art history.
Yina Jiménez Suriel is a curator and researcher with a master’s degree in visual studies. Her practice is an ongoing investigation into emancipation and the construction of imagination. She is the curator for The Current IV by TBA21-Academy, a three years research project entitled otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua. She is Associate Editor of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) for Latin America and the Caribbean. Among the exhibitions she has curated are: Vehículos. Una revisión (2018) at Casa Quien (Dominican Republic); one month after being known in that island (2020) at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (Switzerland) curated with the artist Pablo Guardiola and co-produced by Caribbean Art Initiative; and the first chapter of the research project de montañas submarinas el fuego hace islas (2022) at Pivô (Brazil) co-produced with Kadist. She was part of the summer season of 2022 in the residency program at the Delfina Foundation. She has collaborated in public programs and workshops at Beta Local, La Cresta, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, among others. She is part of the curatorial team for the section Opening at ArcoMadrid for the editions of 2023 and 2024 Yina has written for exhibition catalogues of the HEK-Haus der Elektronischen Künste, the Denver Museum of Art and the San Luis Obispo Museum, and on contemporary art and visual culture in publications such as Foam Magazine, Terremoto, Contemporary And, and Revista de Arte de la UNAM. Yina lives and works in the Dominican Republic.
Holly Bynoe Young is a curator, writer, spiritualist, Earth Ally and researcher from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Bynoe is the co-founder of ARC Magazine, and co-director of Caribbean Linked, a regional residency program held in Aruba supporting cultural exchange, and Tilting Axis, the annual meeting charting arts activism, decolonial methodologies and models of creative sustainability across the region. In 2020, she joined arts non-profit, The Hub Collective Inc, an arts non-profit based on her home island of Bequia, to build its sustainable, regenerative, environmental and heritage pillars. Holly co-founded Sour Grass, a curatorial agency supporting contemporary Caribbean art practice, and is currently a PhD Candidate in the “Shared Island Stories Between Scotland and the Caribbean: Past, Present, Future” at the University of St. Andrews and is living and working between Scotland and the Caribbean.
Catherine Spencer is an art historian and writer based at the University of St Andrews. Her book Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. In 2021 she co-curated the exhibition Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library. Her essays have appeared in Art History, Art Journal, ARTMargins, Tate Papers, Parallax and Oxford Art Journal, and her art criticism in Artforum, Art Monthly, Burlington Contemporary, Burlington Magazine and MAP Magazine. In spring 2023 she is a researcher on Shared Island Stories Between Scotland and the Caribbean: Past, Present, Future.
The Shared Island Stories Between Scotland and the Caribbean: Past, Present, Future research project is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) with project reference: EP/X023036/1 and is coordinated by the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews.