National Art Gallery Of The Bahamas (NAGB)
Downtown Nassau
West & West Hill Streets
Historic Charles Town District
New Providence
The Bahamas
After a national and international search, the Board of The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) is extremely pleased to announce the appointment of Ms. Holly Bynoe as Chief Curator.
Holly Bynoe is a curator, writer and visual artist from St. Vincent and the Grenadines who, for several years, has lived and worked across the Caribbean, creating a strong network of ties throughout the region. Bynoe is the co-founder and director of ARC Magazine, a visual art and culture publication focusing on contemporary art throughout the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is a graduate of Bard College | International Center of Photography where she earned an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies.
As editor and director of ARC, Bynoe has organized and curated various exhibitions and programmes across the Caribbean and the diaspora in collaboration with several formal and informal art spaces, including New Media, an annual collaborative exhibition held in conjunction with the trinidad+tobago film festival and Caribbean Linked, a residency programme held in Aruba in collaboration with Atleliers ‘89, The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc., the Stichting DOEN Foundation and the Mondriaan Foundation. She is a co-director of a regional meeting of art professionals titled Tilting Axis, which had its inaugural conference in 2015 and will continue to be hosted in various locations throughout the region, the NAGB among them.
Bynoe has had close collaborative relations with The Bahamas for several years, having curated shows for the annual, cross-island Transforming Spaces art tour for the last three years and coordinated panel discussions at the NAGB, as well as having organized small shows for The PS room, or project space. In the summer of 2015, she will also take the work of a Bahamian artist to MoCADA NY in New York City as part of the upcoming exhibition Field Notes: Extracts.
“I feel honoured to be joining the talented team at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas,” says Bynoe. “The Bahamas is becoming a critical creative beacon in the region, and I look forward to the challenge of engaging with this extraordinary community and its cultural landscape.”
Her most recent collaboration with the NAGB was acting as co-curator for its latest show, the seventh national exhibition titled NE7, The Antillean: An Ecology, which asked artists to respond to ideas of Bahamian and Caribbean identity as seen through the lenses of race, economy, class and privilege. The catalogue for the NE7 is being released to coincide with her appointment, starting May 1.
NAGB Director Amanda Coulson stated, “It’s an exciting time for the NAGB as we expand our audience locally and take our artists internationally. Ms. Bynoe and I have a history of collaborative projects behind us, and I am enthusiastic and positive about the direction we can steer the institution together and to which level we can take it.”
The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas is one of the premiere art institutions in the Caribbean and aims to cultivate awareness of Bahamian fine arts both at home and abroad. For the past 11 years, the NAGB has committed itself to fostering local artists who continue to push the frontiers and foundations of culture across the islands. The institution assumes a critical role in the development of visual arts and devotes itself to exchange, the shoring up of national identity, scholarship and education. Housed in the historic Villa Doyle—built in the 1860s and lovingly restored in the 1990s—the NAGB preserves the National Collection of Bahamian Art, part of which is on permanent display on the ground floor. A project space engages with younger, experimental positions, rotating monthly while the upper galleries engage the history of Bahamian art and visual culture, supporting contemporary movements and experimental art practice through temporary exhibitions lasting three–four months each.
