Copy the page URI to the clipboard
Wainwright, Leon
(2023).
URL: https://periodicos.ufba.br/index.php/af/article/vi...
Abstract
The uses of art to commemorate resistance to slavery has a complex history in the Caribbean. Two artists, Aubrey Williams and Philip Moore, both born in the colony of British Guiana (subsequently independent Guyana), employed painting and sculpture during the 1960s and ‘70s in order to visualise the historical events of 1763, when enslaved Africans staged a failed yet heroic rebellion against Dutch planters. Williams and Moore were committed to making art in a stridently anti-colonial mode, in their attempts to comment on present-day political circumstances by way of attention to the historical past. Two of their artworks – one produced before, the other after the watershed of Guyanese Independence – bear fruitful comparison as equally unsuccessful gestures. Williams’s painting was withheld from public view for much of the 1960s, while Moore’s monumental public sculpture met with wide disdain. Such unhappy relations between artworks and their various viewers demonstrate the frictions between modernism and the process of historical remembrance with regard to slavery. Ultimately examples from Williams and Moore show that there are limitations that surround art when it is used for memorialisation, and how this process is integral to the Caribbean’s history of art.