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T&T artist Wendy Nanan’s statement “your reaction is just as important as my reaction. Fifty percent of the work is your (the audience’s) response” is the inspiration behind a bi-annual series of conversations on art, called Articulate Caribbean, which will be launched on March 9 at the Medulla Art Gallery, Woodbrook.

The project is the brainchild of Dr. Marsha Pearce, Cultural Studies Lecturer at UWI, St. Augustine. The inaugural event will be called “From the White Cube to Society: Art and Social Consequence – A 50/50 Approach.”
Pearce said Nanan’s remark, made at an artist’s talk in 2016, sparked in her a desire to have a conversation about how local people engage with art in T&T, and so she organized a talk called 50/50, with artists Edward Bowen, Adelle Todd, Richard Mark Rawlins, Alicia Milne and poet Andre Bagoo which drew a huge crowd. Following this, Pearce saw a comment online which said that those sorts of public conversations about things that really matter to the arts community were rare. “The talk was broad, it wasn’t speaking to just one particular show, but it was actually this bigger conversation about artists and audiences and that included the media as an audience. Some artists spoke about sometimes they feel like they don’t get an engaged and deep response from the media in terms of responding to their art.” Pearce said she also realized that because conversations of this type are so few and far between, they tend to be repetitive when they do happen.
Medulla Gallery was receptive to conducting bi-annual talks, but Pearce said the idea really crystallized when she went to the Edinburgh Arts Festival as part of their international delegates program, Momentum. There she heard a presentation by the director of an organization called Deveron Projects in Scotland, which spoke about the 50/50 approach used in their model called “The Town is the Venue.” She said Deveron Projects is located in a small town called Huntly in northeast Scotland, which doesn’t have any galleries. “Under their philosophy, any space in the town is open for the public to engage with art, it could be in a shoe shop, the grocery, the community centre. They have an artist residency program where if they’re inviting an artist from other parts of the world, the work must be socially engaging. You must come in, get to know the community and think about art that can really connect with the people in the community.”
Pearce said she thought this 50/50 idea was a good way to extend the conversation from looking at audiences and begin to think about how artists engage with communities. She reached out to the British Council who arranged for the director of the Board of Deveron Projects, Mary Bourne, to talk about the practices and approaches of the organization at the inaugural lecture. Pearce said the aim of the conversation series is to ask the question “how do we rethink approaches or models that we have here in the Caribbean? Sometimes it’s not about re-inventing the wheel but tweaking certain things so that we can better our approaches and I just feel that there can be a strong articulation between our space and spaces elsewhere. I think in having Deveron Projects come in, it can have scope for us to think about how we approach our communities here and perhaps in her engagement with our audiences here, there can be stuff she can learn and take back to her organization. In future, in addition to local artists, we would want to have articulations between islands and between islands and continents, because we have a huge diaspora of people living across the world.”
Pearce said while art can seem very elitist or it’s for a particular circle, the inaugural talk will focus on speaking to artists about how their work can impact and affect their communities, so that “communities can see that art is accessible and approachable and is something that can provide a way of understanding the world in which we live, understanding our particular society and that it can address our concerns. We see the talks or the presentations, the series we’d like to have, as this sort of catalyst or the conditions for making worthwhile or meaningful changes in our art sector.”
The launch of Articulate Caribbean will take place on March 9 at 7 pm at Medulla Art Gallery, Woodbrook. For more information, find Launch of Articulate Caribbean: A Series of Talks on Art on Facebook or call Medulla Art Gallery at 740-7597.