Can the Kingston Biennial Reimagine the Caribbean Beyond the Tourist Gaze?

Following its predecessors, the Annual National (1977–2000) and Jamaica Biennial (2002–2017), The National Gallery of Jamaica’s second Kingston Biennial was publicly announced in The New York Times in August 2024, to much excitement and no small dose of scepticism. Speculation persisted until the list of participating artists and a full curatorial statement were shared less than two weeks before opening on 15 December 2024. Titled ‘Green X Gold’ – a reference to the colours of the Jamaican national flag and its official interpretation – ‘The sun shineth; the land is green; and the people are strong and creative’ – the theme felt only marginally more ambitious than the 2022 edition’s slogan ‘Pressure’, both reliant on Jamaican idioms verging on the cliché.

Co-organized by the National Gallery of Jamaica’s chief curator, O’Neil Lawrence, and Guggenheim associate curator, Ashley James, ‘Green X Gold’ features 28 artists from the Caribbean region and its American diaspora. According to its curators, the exhibition highlights ‘artists who assume a critical, refractive or otherwise inquisitive relation to the environment’, seeking to critique the tourism-fed unreality of the Caribbean as a commercialized ‘paradise’ – especially by travellers who have little regard for local realities. Yet while Krista Thompson’s ever-relevant 2007 text, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque provides a fitting framework, the show rarely extends or challenges Thompson’s theory; its reinterpretation is relevant but, ultimately, unmoving.

There are some striking contemporary works punctuated throughout – video, installation, painting, textiles, assemblages, photography, sculpture – though the exhibition would have benefited from didactics both in the gallery space and online. Such materials could have better unpacked each artist’s positionality and provided vital context. Divided into six thematic subcategories – ‘Poetics and Politics of Extraction’, ‘Critical Paradise’, ‘Technological Terrains’, ‘New Horizon Lines’, ‘Feminist Ecologies’ and ‘Land Re-formations’ – over 80 works highlight the precarity of Caribbean landscapes, labour and built environments. But the overall mood is one of unrealized potential rather than rigorous criticality.

The biennial’s saving grace is found in ‘Land Re-formations’, which commands the ground-floor galleries. Self-taught Jamaican artist Gaston Tabois’s painting, Dunn’s River Falls (1972), captures a tourist icon in its post-independence heyday – the same year it was acquired by the Jamaican government for public use. Father of Jamaican landscapes, Albert Huie’s scene Crop Time (1955) is a near-cubist composition of Black field workers hoeing, planting, reaping and bundling sugar cane, against a backdrop of factory chimneys. Robin Farquharson’s black and white photography of field workers in Walkers Wood is equally incisive and energetic, while Malene Barnett’s ‘Yabba Series’ (2023–ongoing) of beautiful terracotta vessels with Egyptian-blue glazed interiors, honours the long tradition of ceramics in Jamaica.

Painted after moving to the verdant Saint Ann parish, Everald Brown’s visionary canvas, Bush Have Ears (1976), thrums with a palpable sense of landscape-as-spirit. Every inch hums with figures, rocks and foliage rendered in vibrating green tones. The work draws its title from an old Jamaican proverb, reminding us that the land bears witness.

Among the most compelling pieces is an 1891 bookshelf of local hardwoods by Unnamed Woodworkers. The spines of each book are stamped with the names of indigenous timbers: Wild Orange, Rush Wood, Lemon. Conceived for Kingston’s Great Exhibition of 1891 (inspired by the 1851 Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace), this object was acquired by Jamaica’s Public Works Department and has since only been displayed on one other occasion, the Institute of Jamaica’s 2007 show ‘Materialising Slavery: Art, Artefact, Memory and Identity’, curated by artist Fred Wilson. Western art historical traditions are often more valued in Jamaican society, leading to the erasure Black makers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from formal canonical timelines – rendering them nameless.

Given the pedigree and regional connections of the curators, this iteration feels woefully under-realized. What else is there to say about Caribbeanness beyond the deeply ambivalent discourse of ‘tropicality’? The 17th-century legacies of European conquests – deforestation, monocropping, displaced ecologies – still reverberate in today’s climate crisis with many of the local audience still living in the aftermath of Beryl. Yet, too often this show skirts those difficult histories.

Despite the hefty $160,000 budget – the largest in its history – and a generous six-and-a-half-month run, the biennial failed to generate sustained public discourse or robust engagement, either online or in person. Programming was limited; its symposium was announced just five days in advance, despite featuring Thompson herself as keynote speaker.

Founded in 1974, the National Gallery of Jamaica is still a young institution, but its short history has been an impactful one. If the aim of its biennial programme is to pique the interest of international audiences in the Caribbean regional art scene, a longer germination period is needed for ideas to take shape and grow. This will allow curators and artists the time to deepen the discourse and make the most of the biennial cycle.

For 2026, it is crucial for the National Gallery of Jamaica and their collaborators to squarely face the curatorial challenge – cultivating a visual literacy of Caribbean art and its contexts primarily for local viewers, knowing that a richer, more considered discourse will resonate far beyond its borders.

‘Green X Gold: Kingston Biennial 2024’ is on view at the National Gallery of Jamaica until 29 June 

_{Main image: 'Green x Gold', 2024–25, exhibition view. Courtesy: Kingston Biennial; photograph: Rebecca Meek}