Jamaican Artfiles from EMCVPA

Visit this site to find profiles of 50 Jamaican artists written by Petrine Archer-Straw.

in 2004 I was asked to oversee the development of an on-line library and a digital Caribbean Archive to be the largest repository of images on Caribbean art in the region. This project was funded by the Jamaican government's Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education (CHASE) Fund and is an extensive resource not only for Edna Manley College students, but for students of art internationally. Prompted by the lack of, and growing need for, documentation and reference material on contemporary Caribbean art history and criticism, the plan was to establish a digital database initially focusing on the work and biographies of fifty contemporary Jamaican artists, and documentation of five of the nations most important art collections, including that of the National Gallery of Jamaica, School of Visual Arts Collection, The Wallace Campbell Collection, The Vivian Virtue Collection and the David Boxer Collection. I was directly responsible for selecting artists, preparing digital CVs and essays on their work, researching and itemising collections and images, and liaison with the web developers responsible for building the site. The material can currently be viewed on this site (see: Caribbean Archive). The archive aims to disseminate information about art and artists in the region while providing a virtual framework for them to network and display their work. It is an important research tool that will prove useful to  art critics, art historians and other art specialists throughout the world.  In addition to its historical information, dating artists as far back as the the turn of the 20th century, there is also an emphasis on including and documenting contemporary artists who will be increasingly added to the database once the initial infra structure is in place. The database is perceived as a living archive that can showcase work as well as serve the needs of  all islands across the region.

Each profile consists of a brief resume and biography as well as light box images. Some biographies cannot be appropriately viewed, these are being reformatted for the web by the EMCVPA.