NLS

Upcoming film screening + New podcast episodes + Sylvia Monasterios: The map is not the territory -

Upcoming film screening + New podcast episodes + Sylvia Monasterios: The map is not the territory Open call opportunities | New podcast out now | and more ...

This week we are excited to have São Paulo-based curator and cultural producer, Sylvia Monasterios in the NLS library. We’re thankful for her generous donation of a number of titles from the Museo Afro Brasil, and for the book Arte Energia Relação/Art Energy Relation, for which Sylvia did translation work.

Sylvia Monasterios is the 2023/2024 NLS Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow and her work focuses on art practices of migrant artists in South America and the Caribbean. Her visit to Kingston also includes studio visits and research in the library of the Education Department of the . É um prazer recebê-la, Sylvia.

New in our library.

New in the library… Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, edited by Carla Acevedo-Yates

New addition to the Library: Surrealism and Us— Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940, Maria Elena Ortiz, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

(new normal)

2024 Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow - https://mailchi.mp/3a72ac9ecf95/autumn-knight-guest-talk-16187093

Now in our library: The Black Geographic—
Praxis, Resistance, Futurity. Editors: Jovan Scott Lewis and Camilla Hawthorne

Contributors: Danielle Purifoy, Anna Livia Brand, CNE Corbin, Diana Negrín, Lindsey Dillon, Chiyuma Elliott, Ampson Hagan, Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta, Judith Madera, Jordanna Matlon, Solange Munoz, Sharita Towne

Photos from the public open studio of artists-in-residence, Michaella Garrick, Sheldon Green, Suelyn Choo and Sonn Ngai. 📸 by Jayson Tucker

Tomorrow: OPEN STUDIOS - http://eepurl.com/iFiWm6

Group Residency public Open Studio. This Sunday, December 3. 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. Learn about the work in progress of Suelyn Choo, Michaella Garrick, Sheldon Green and Sonn Ngai.

Free and open to the public. Complimentary refreshments served. RSVP link in bio.

New Local Space
190 Mountain View Ave
Kingston 6

Image courtesy Michaella Garrick.

Group Residency public Open Studio:

Sunday, December 3
10:30 am to 1:30 pm

Learn about the work in progress of Suelyn Choo, Michaella Garrick, Sheldon Green and Sonn Ngai.

Free and open to the public. Complimentary refreshments served. RSVP link in bio.

New Local Space
190 Mountain View Ave
Kingston 6

Image courtesy Suelyn Choo.

NLS is pleased to invite you to the Group Residency public Open Studio on Sunday, December 3 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. Learn about the work in progress of Suelyn Choo, Michaella Garrick, Sheldon Green and Sonn Ngai.

Free and open to the public. Complimentary refreshments served. RSVP link in bio.

New Local Space
190 Mountain View Ave
Kingston 6

Image courtesy Sonn Ngai.

OPEN STUDIOS | Sunday, December 3 | See what current artists-in-residence are working on. RSVP here: https://tinyurl.com/NewLocalSpace-open-studios- https://mailchi.mp/f388b92037d7/openstudioevent2023

NLS is pleased to invite you to the Group Residency public Open Studio on Sunday, December 3 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. Learn about the work in progress of Suelyn Choo, Michaella Garrick, Sheldon Green and Sonn Ngai.

Free and open to the public. Complimentary refreshments served.

New Local Space
190 Mountain View Ave
Kingston 6

Image courtesy of Sonn Ngai.

Sustainable Sculpture Residency awardees announced + Group Residency open studio Sunday, December 3 - http://eepurl.com/iEWgZo

Sustainable Sculpture Residency awardees announced + Group Residency open studio - https://mailchi.mp/156a780dfdc2/sustainablesculptureawardees

The public open studios are an opportunity for you to come and learn about what all four of the current artists-in-residence are working on and how they create. Come by on Sunday, December 3 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm to learn about the work in progress of Michaella Garrick, Sonn Ngai, Suelyn Choo and Sheldon Green. New Local Space, 190 Mountain View Avenue, Kingston 7.

Michaella Garrick works primarily with woven sugar cane, a commercial plantation crop embedded in her family’s history across generations. With sugar cane as a material Michaella develops a sculptural language that provides Black women, her primary audience, with space to acknowledge and account for intergenerational trauma and violence endemic to post-plantation society. Her work attempts to reconcile social conceptions of family and gender (particularly maternal labour and paternal absenteeism) through engagement with audience participants. During her residency Michaella further researches and examines what it takes to account for personal and generational trauma and what it takes to heal socially and personally.

See you at the open studios.

1, 2, 3, 4, Michaella Garrick in studio during residency images courtesy the artist
5, 6. Michaella Garrick thesis work at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts
All images courtesy the artist.

Special thank you to visiting artists Autumn Knight, Guadalupe Maravilla, Karyn Olivier as well as art historian and curator Nicole Smythe-Johnson

NLS’ 2023 programming is made possible in part by a grant from the

In the NLS library: Lorna Simpson, Latoya Ruby Frazier, El Anatsui

The Group Residency public open studios take place on Sunday, December 3 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. Come and see the work of all four artists-in-residence, Sonn Ngai, Suelyn Choo, Sheldon Green and Michaella Garrick at New Local Space, 190 Mountain View Avenue, Kingston 7.

In the studio, current artist-in-residence Sonn Ngai, who works primarily in paper-based and new media, speaks of the myths we tell ourselves and exchange with each other daily. He records some of these from his everyday conversations, in taxi rides or earnest conversations with friends, and introduces them to his mystical visual language of chimeric beings.

Sonn engages the psychological phenomena of “derealisation” (a mental state of feeling detached from one’s surroundings), as well as the philosophical and creative fields of Pan-Africanism and Afrosurrealism to examine what he calls "the feeling of having been a part of something much greater and more fulfilling than your current cultural reality and wishing deeply to return to that previous state but not being able to remember what that was because you have been so long removed from it, with only dreamlike impressions remaining".

Using paper-making, printmaking, audio and paint, Sonn probes Caribbean indigeneity using visual references to the folkloric, mythology and collective social identities, focusing specifically on the mythologisation of the natural, mundane and lived realities present within Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.

See you at the open studios.
1. Sonn Ngai at NLS 📸 Mint Collective
2, 3, 4, 5. Sonn Ngai in studio during residency images courtesy the artist

The Group Residency public open studios take place on Sunday, December 3 from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. Come and see the work of all four artists-in-residence, Sonn Ngai, Suelyn Choo, Sheldon Green and Michaella Garrick at New Local Space, 190 Mountain View Avenue, Kingston 7.

In the studio, current artist-in-residence Sonn Ngai, who works primarily in paper-based and new media, speaks of the myths we tell ourselves and exchange with each other daily. He records some of these from his everyday conversations, in taxi rides or earnest conversations with friends, and introduces them to his mystical visual language of chimeric beings.

Sonn engages the psychological phenomena of “derealisation” (a mental state of feeling detached from one’s surroundings), as well as the philosophical and creative fields of Pan-Africanism and Afrosurrealism to examine what he calls "the feeling of having been a part of something much greater and more fulfilling than your current cultural reality and wishing deeply to return to that previous state but not being able to remember what that was because you have been so long removed from it, with only dreamlike impressions remaining".

Using paper-making, printmaking, audio and paint, Sonn probes Caribbean indigeneity using visual references to the folkloric, mythology and collective social identities, focusing specifically on the mythologisation of the natural, mundane and lived realities present within Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.

See you at the open studios.

now in the NLS library.

What a week Jamaica. A few minor damages here and there but we are all still here for the most part solid as a rock. Colour for Colour Skin for Skin: Marching with the Ancestral Spirits into War Oh at Morant Bay written by Clinton Hutton now in the NLS library! 🔥

Most recent issues of are now in the NLS library

So humbled and happy to be able to welcome our very first artists-in-residence in Maroon Town, St. James in the Cockpit Country Protected Area. We have been working for years (!!) to be able to make the Sustainable Sculpture Residency a reality. We invited artists to participate in experimenting with sustainable materials and sustainable technologies, and to help with reforestation efforts. Look out for the announcement of the 2023 inaugural awardees, coming soon! So much gratitude and appreciation to our enduring community for helping NLS with this dream.

NLS’ 2023 programming is made possible through a grant from the Open Society Foundations, and community partnerships including the Just Futures Project: Dispossessions in the Americas (University of Pennsylvania), Creative Sounds Ltd, Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, members of the Maroon Town community.

Now in the NLS library! David Hammond: Body Prints, 1968 - 1979; Mixed Company: Three Early Jamaican Plays; Beverly Buchanan: Marsh Ruins; Simone Leigh; After Man Towards the human— Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter; Glitch Feminism

We are pleased to announce the Group Residency awardees: Suelyn Choo, Sheldon Green, Michaella Garrick, and Sonn Ngai.

Suelyn Choo was “literally brushed with a gust of wind... confronted with guilt. The guilt of not trying harder to connect with my grandmother while she was alive…" During the residency Choo will research experiential characteristics of air, wind and myths of god/goddess of wind/storms of cultural origins including the Tainos’ Hu-Rakan and Guabancex; the Yoruban Oya; the Chinese Fei Lien and the Indian/Hindu Vayu.

Sheldon Green plans to work with kite-making methods, playing with representations of human skin, and alterations in its appearances, such as bleaching, tattooing and disease. Green's practice reintroduces and engages kite flying as a culturally significant communal activity, engaging the imagination and serving as a means of escape.

Michaella Garrick uses woven sugar cane to develop an architectural language that provides Black women, her primary audience, with safe space to work through inherited generational trauma endemic to post-plantation society. Garrick’s work attempts to reconcile conceptions of family, heritage, paternal absenteeism and labour through social connection.

Sonn Ngai, in describing what he calls “the feeling of having been a part of something much greater and more fulfilling than your current cultural reality and wishing deeply to return to that previous state but not being able to remember what that is because you have been so long removed from it, while only dreamlike impressions remain”, uses various media including paper-making, printmaking, audio and paint, to explore Caribbean indigeneity using visual references to the folkloric, mythology and collective cultural identities. Ngai focuses specifically on the mythologisation of the natural, mundane and lived realities present within Jamaica. During his residency he plans to work on a multimedia installation titled “A Fear of Lizards”.

NLS 2023 programs are made possible by support from OSF, Creative Sounds, and contributions from members of the public.

1. Ngai, Garrick, Choo, Green

Group Residency Awardees Announced + Deadline Extension - http://eepurl.com/iytZ1k

NLS has EXTENDED the OPEN CALL, accepting submissions for the 2023/2024 Curatorial and Art Writing Fellowship to September 30, 2023.

The Curatorial & Art Writing Fellowship is a 5-month long intensive programme intended to support emerging writers and curators based in the Caribbean with the outcome of developing regional curatorial and writing talent here. One early career fellow will be selected per year to work with a professional curatorial mentor in the development of the fellow’s project.

The Curatorial & Art Writing Fellowship awards a work stipend of JMD $300,000, professional development from an experienced mentor, access to Creative Sounds audio recording studio for podcast recording, and a project space for the final project ex*****on and public talks.

In the NLS library. We Must Learn to Sit Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Decolonizing Essays 1967-1984 by Sylvia Wynter