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Fellowship
Het Nieuwe Instituut has joined forces with Tilting Axis to offer a Fellowship to one mid-career to established applicant based in the Caribbean. The Fellowship is supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut as lead partner and host, and will include collaborations with The Amsterdam Museum, De Appel, The Black Archives and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.
Deadline for submission is 17 November, 2019.
Tilting Axis Collections & Commissioning Fellow, 2019, Scotland
It is a great honor to receive the Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellowship 2019, Scotland. I am more than thankful and look forward with great delight to participating in a cross-cultural discourse stemming from the creative ecology of the Caribbean. More so, I look forward to meeting you all! During this fellowship I promise to do my best to absorb everything there is to learn from this experience as well as to contribute to the intelligent imagination that I believe cultivates our realities. To be terse: I am so excited! Let’s do this!
Lisandro Suriel is a Photographer and Artistic researcher born and raised in Saint Martin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and received his Master’s of Art by research in Arts and Culture: Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. As part of his Master’s thesis he analyzed early twentieth century illustrations of West-Indian mythology in relation to cultural aphasia. This research forms the foundation of his on-going artistic research project Ghost Island in which he visually deconstructs the New World-imagination of the African Diaspora. Lisandro Suriel proposes that the imaginative lens is arguably the best with which to view how folkloric figures act as an agent in history and animate cultural memory. Lisandro Suriel seeks to employ the Caribbean’s own unwritten vestiges of ancestral memory and colonialism imbedded in landscape, architecture, and people to generate imaginative linkages to a political past and social identity.
The Tilting Axis Fellowship is a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meetings in 2015 at Fresh Milk in Barbados, in 2016 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and in 2017 at The National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. For its 2019 iteration, Scotland based cultural partners including the Glasgow School of Art, The School of Art History at the University of St Andrews, CCA Glasgow, LUX Scotland, Hospitalfield and curatorial duo Mother Tongue have come together to offer support for a research fellowship to Scotland for an emerging contemporary art practitioner living and working in the Caribbean to share knowledge about current approaches towards commissioning and collecting in the arts.
The competition was stiff—reflecting the wealth of talent, and need for increased opportunities, for curators in the region. We are happy to announce that this year’s Tilting Axis 4 Curatorial Fellowship sponsored by and to take place at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded to—Natalie Willis, Assistant Curator at the National Gallery of The Bahamas. At the University of Texas at Austin with access to collections of work by African American and Caribbean artists, Natalie hopes to look beyond nationalist dialogues and examine how shared history presents itself in different cultural phenotypes. As she says, “One root leads to many rhizomes and proliferations of blackness.”
We notified Natalie earlier today—and of her own volition, she wrote the following message:
Tilting Axis
Curatorial Fellow:
Natalie Willis
I am still, frankly, in disbelief. I, perhaps wrongly, didn’t think I would have these opportunities when I moved back to The Bahamas after school. The constant worry for young Caribbeans going off to study who “dare” to come back is that you will hit the ceiling, that you will not have any real chances of upward movement in your career, that you only return at a deficit and for a love of this place.
You can love this place, and it can love you back, and that love requires heartfelt work.
The work that dedicated and fierce people have been toiling at for the last 30 years means that you give newer generations unbridled hope at the possibility, care, and freedom of being Caribbean-based cultural workers. I am humbled and so deeply grateful that you are taking a chance on me when it was never “taking a chance” to come back home, it is the work that needs to be done.
I am overwhelmed, overjoyed, and looking forward to the day I can help some other young Caribbean mind and heart get this feeling of support. Thank you.
Biography
Natalie Willis is a British-Bahamian curator and cultural worker. Born and raised in The Bahamas, she received her BA (Hons) and MA in Fine Art at York St John University in the UK. Willis is currently working as an Assistant Curator at National Art Gallery of The Bahamas with a concerted focus on writing aimed at decolonising and decentralising the art archive, and adding to the literature on Bahamian and Caribbean visual culture and developing her burgeoning curating practice. Somewhere in a parallel universe, she still makes artwork.
As an emerging curator desperately trying to not contribute to the brain-drain of the Caribbean, she has dedicated her time at the NAGB to focusing on knowledge building and access through text and speaking to the way the colonial tourism of the late 1800s shaped the cultural and physical landscape of the Anglo-Caribbean.
Willis has been an invited speaker at the Caribbean Studies Association Conference (2017), the Museums Association of the Caribbean Annual Conference (2016). Most recently, she took part in the Goldsmiths + British School at Rome Summer Intensive Course, themed “Curating the Contemporary”, in Rome in 2017.
As a direct outcome of the Tilting Axis meeting held at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in May 2017, the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Art Galleries at Black Studies has come together with Tilting Axis to offer a Curatorial Fellowship to an emerging curator living and working in the Caribbean.
This Fellowship opportunity focuses on curators living and working within the Caribbean region, and is both research and practice-led, and mentor-based. The Fellow will receive a maximum of USD$5,500 towards a fee, travel, accommodation and living costs. The Fellowship is supported by University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Art Galleries at Black Studies. Read more →
About Nicole Smythe-Johnson:
Nicole Smythe-Johnson is a writer and independent curator, living in Kingston, Jamaica. She has written for ARC magazine, Miami Rail, Flash Art, Jamaica Journal and a number of other local and international publications. She is currently Assistant Curator on an upcoming exhibition of the work of Jamaican painter John Dunkley at the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She is also working on an Institute of Jamaica publication looking at Jamaica’s National Collection. nicolesmythejohnson.com
About CCA:
The Centre for Contemporary Arts is Glasgow’s hub for the arts. The building is steeped in history and the organisation has played a key role in the cultural life of the city for decades. CCA’s year-round programme includes cutting-edge exhibitions, film, music, literature, spoken word, festivals, Gaelic language events and performance. CCA also provides residencies for artists in the on-site Creative Lab space, as well as working internationally on residencies with Palestine, the Caribbean and Quebec. CCA curates six major exhibitions a year, presenting national and international contemporary artists, and is home to Intermedia Gallery showcasing emerging artists. cca-glasgow.com
About Fresh Milk:
The Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. is a Caribbean non-profit, artist-led, inter-disciplinary organisation that supports creatives and promotes wise social, economic, and environmental stewardship through creative engagement with society and by cultivating excellence in the arts. Fresh Milk spans creative disciplines, generations, and linguistic territories in the Caribbean by functioning as a cultural lab, thriving as a dynamic space for artists through local, regional, and international programming including residencies, lectures, screenings, workshops and projects. We aspire to be a sustainable organization contributing to a healthy cultural ecosystem. freshmilkbarbados.com
About Hospitalfield:
Dedicated to contemporary art and ideas Hospitalfield is a place to work, study, learn, visit and enjoy. Hospitalfield is an artist’s house in Arbroath, on the east coast of Scotland, with a captivating cultural and social history that spans many hundreds of years. The contemporary arts programme is anchored in the visual art yet encourages interdisciplinarity, supporting the production of new work and providing space for debate and learning through residencies, a summer school and four public projects with new commissions each year. The organisation maintains strong national and international working partnerships with the aim of making Hospitalfield a meeting place and cultural catalyst in the working lives of artists, students and creative professionals in Scotland and far beyond. hospitalfield.org.uk
About Mother Tongue:
Mother Tongue is a research-led, independent curatorial practice formed by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Since 2009, they have produced exhibitions, screening programmes, discursive events, essays and texts, working in partnership with galleries, museums, festivals, and publishers. Mother Tongue's practice in exhibition-making intersects with research interests – including, but not limited to – post-colonialism, language, translation, heritage, identities, indigenousness, migration, and movement. They are currently researching the presence, work and exhibition histories of artists of colour in Scotland, working towards a future 'AfroScots' exhibition project. mothertongue.se
About Tilting Axis:
Tilting Axis is a roving project conceptualised by ARC Magazine and the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. The first iteration was hosted at Fresh Milk in Barbados in February 2015 under the banner Tilting Axis: Within and Beyond the Caribbean | Shifting Models of Sustainability and Connectivity. Tilting Axis 2.0 was hosted by the Pérez Art Museum Miami in February 2016. This meeting explored the current state of cultural work in the Caribbean, and aimed to fortify networks, increase administrative and programming capacities, as well as transfer knowledge and funding opportunities to those working in the region. The Tilting Axis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship developed out of the second iteration and the next edition of the meeting is slated to take place in April 2017, hosted by the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands (NGCI). tiltingaxis.org
About The British Council:
The British Council is the United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations. The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide. We call this cultural relations. We build trust and understanding for the UK to create a safer and more prosperous world. In terms of our reach and impact, we are the world’s leading cultural relations organisation. Cultural relations is a component of international relations which focuses on developing people-to-people links and complements government-to-people and government-to-government contact. We use English, Arts, and Education and Society – the best of the UK’s great cultural assets – to bring people together and to attract partners to working with the UK. The British Council has over 7,000 staff working in 191 offices in 110 countries and territories. britishcouncil.org
