Thru Novel Lenses! New Vision New Perspectives New Ideas New Directions For the New World! Futuring Sustainable Development in the Post Pandemic Planet From Pre School to Policy Making
The colour question surfaces as one of the most pernicious issues in the 2020 US Elections.
What novelties emerge from the changing of the guards in the US Elections?
Demokrissy begins introspection and projections on the challenges ahead and implications for multiculturalism gender under President and Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, respectively implications of diasporic reach India, Africa, Americas, Caribbean, Europe ... insights from LiTTributes to the Americas and beyond.
Through Novel Lenses Creating Synergies through Culture Heritage Media: Knowledge is Empowerment: A Revolution Through Reading a new phase of engaging Glocal districts and local creative talents and energies through LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago, LiTTours - Journeys Through the Landscapes of Fiction and LiTTributes. Discover worlds of the Imagination. With the invigorating designs for the book and the launch by Sonja Wong, an inspiring cast of children supported by their parents who mirror the potential of our creative genius during the Anniversary of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The ceremony was dedicated to local authors, local talent, local design, décor, arts and entertainment, and local cuisine with doubles, corn soup, a range of local sweets and refreshments, including sno cone, fudge, sugar cake and toulum forming the main fair. We brought the book to life, making the fiction real at the Trinidad and Tobago’s premier symbol of power – the White Hall – on the occasion of our 50 Anniversary of Independence. In the last few years’ LiTTscapes moved through realising several elements of the vision that inspired its efforts to provide stimulating engagements for youths between ages 3 and 103. In its second phase we launched LiTTours – Journeys through the Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago exploring those landscapes in ways never experienced before – making the fiction real. The third component was the launch of LiTTributes – literary heritage tributes to the icons and Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago, with the then First Lady of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Mrs Jean Ramjohn Richards, on the occasion of Republic Day aided by an equally incredible cast of creative talent with the help of friends and well wishers. Since then, we have staged LiTTributes across the region and internationally too. LiTTribute The Mainland, in Guyana (2013) evoked the unworldly commendation with theatrical interpretations of its contents by the Guyana Theatre Guild. Moray House and the independent review from the head of the Guyana Prize for Literature. LiTTribute to the Antilles was staged at the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda with interpretations of TTscapes by the Young Poets of Antigua and a range of seasoned and new talent again with the support of colleagues in the heritage sector. LiTTribute to LondonTTown saw collaborations in London with BBC’s Ros Atkins, the Director of the Commonwealth Foundation, local London-based author Lakshmi Persaud, film director Roy Heath and the London High Commission. In 2014, we launched the LiTTscapes-inspired LiTTerary Lifestyles Collection.
It has generated blushing reviews from across the local and global media, international journals and publications For More go tohttps://goo.gl/J1EFn5. See more @krisramp FB krisrampersad1 LinkedIn/Instagram: KrisRampersad visithttps://goo.gl/J1EFn5
From Beirut to Port of Spain: How the West Was
One Pelaufrom-beirut-to-port-of-spain-how-west.htmlThe-price-of-passion-awards-and-rewards
https://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-price-of-passion-awards-and-rewards.html
"What is currently the
home of the National Museum and Art Gallery has, as a building, outgrown its
walls and its floors. So we are looking to a state of the art building or
system of buildings that can house what we are also trying to currently define
as the National Collection... and to
chronicle, document and interpret events and experience"
Experiencing the
Art in State of the Art
Opening Remarks, Chair, National
Museum and Art Gallery, Dr Kris Rampersad
EYE...HAYTI...CRIES...EVERYWHERE...
Symposium on the Exhibition by LeRoy Clark,
May 19, National Academy for the Performing Arts, Port of Spain
Happy International Museum Day! Thank you for that
invocation for reminding us that we are a part of something larger that came
before us and that we ourselves come from something larger in our ancestry.
It has been a
distinct honour that one of the first acts of the new Board of the National
Museum and Art Gallery (NMAG) was to host this phenomenal exhibition of Chief
Ifa Oje Won Yomi Abiodun—Master Artist, Le Roy Clarke EYE...HAYTI...CRIES...EVERYWHERE...
The breadth and
depth of artistic vision are as much in each individual piece as in the
collective of some 105 drawings in black and white which encapsulate and exude
the spirit, resilience and potential of the civilisation and people who inspire,
even with their tears, in Clarke’s symbolic Hayti. That is the overpowering
sense when you enter the art gallery - that Hayti is all around us, and we are
in it! Everywhere. That is the singular power that this exhibition: EYE...HAYTI...CRIES...EVERYWHERE...exudes.
I hope you have
all had the opportunity to not just view but experience the exhibition before
coming here – and if you haven’t yet, it is still open at the National Museum
and Art gallery for another month.
It is in this
context that I invite you to listen to the presentations and participate in the
discussions that will follow. We. You Me all of us are not isolated or
insulated from all of it. We are very much a part, participant, player and
protagonist as we are audience, recipient and receptacle. This is a symposium
about everywhere, as much as it is about the here and the now, and the actual
country, our neighbour Haiti, that inspire it.
As we speak, we
are confronting the tragedies of humanity that bring us to despair, to tears. I
do not have to list them. They are personal and they are national and they are
universal. That you are here means you must feel some of it, and want to impact
upon it. And it is that eternal resilience to search out, to quest and to
question and in doing so to transcend that this exhibition also celebrates.
At a time when
the arts is the first – the first – to feel the axe of funding cuts and budget and
other adjustments, we are trying to make the National Museum and Art Gallery
into a state of the art institution. But what is state of the art? Which art?
Whose art? It is a phrase often used loosely without thinking of what it really
means:
The standard
definition of state of the art is: the most recent stage in the development of something
incorporating the newest ideas and features.Newness,
innovation, and technology feature in every definition, but what of history,
heritage, legacy? What of art?
Where is the
place for art in state of the art?
It is indeed a reflection
that seems apt standing here in a building like this that houses the National
Performance Art Academy. Is this state of the art? Isn’t that a discussion, a
dialogue, we should have had a long time ago, and is somewhat long due: the
conversation between the centuries old building next door, known as the Royal
Victoria Institute and headquarters of the National Museum and Art Gallery, and
this ultra modern state of the art one here? And isn’t there a dialogue and
conversation that should be happening between our institution next door, and
institutions like this one, the University of Trinidad and Tobago and the other
one up the road, the University of the West Indies.
Where is the
art in state of the art?
When we talk of
a state of the art, we at the National Museum and Art Gallery envision an
institution that is aptly fulfilling its role in all the dimensions and
expectations such an institution is supposed to offer. It is a building yes –
but it is not just a building. We are well aware that what is currently the
home of the National Museum and Art Gallery has, as a building, outgrown its
walls and its floors. So we are looking to a state of the art building or
system of buildings that can house what we are also trying to currently define
as the National Collection. And we hope that can be equipped with the latest
technologies and equipment and devices that define the modern age.
But that would
be nothing, a void, like the echoes that emanate from the cries within Clarke’s
drawings, if we do not also fill that building/those buildings with events and
occasions like these: to reflect, to interrogate, to elucidate, to educate on
the state of the art, the state of our art, and the state that we are in as a
people, the role of the State and the role of the people in the state of the
art. We welcome partnerships in this so we can have more of these, more
engagement, more interaction, more discussion, articulation, interrogation so
we could better understand ourselves and this place we call our society, and
our world.
It allows us an
opportunity to remind ourselves, and others, of the role of the arts: to
chronicle, document and interpret events and experience; to bring people closer
together to understand each other: to promote cross cultural understanding because
art reaches out from canvas and makes the looker-on, the onlooker – a
participant. Isn’t that true of the exhibition next door? It encourages us to
find creative solutions to challenging situations which we are here to do at
this symposium.
To me, ultimately,
art, all art, is not techniques and buildings and technology but experience.
Through it an artist expresses an experience that he or she often cannot even
fathom – his/her experience of an emotion or thought; and through it we
participate in an experience that may be larger and inaccessible to us in our
daily lives.
As we reflect
on, discuss, debate, project and contemplate the artist’s work here, examine
and scrutinise where it came from, what it has become, where it will go; where
we have come from, what we have become, where are we going as a people, let us
also reflect on the state of the art: The state of the art that a Museum and
Art Gallery represents, should represent.
And I invite
you to join us in helping to take it there. It is a cry, my cry, for all of us
to recognise that perhaps we would not have so many tears if we had such an
institution that could hold together all the fraying and flaying strands of our
society and from its chaos create the kind of art we see in the exhibition: EYE...HAYTI...CRIES...EVERYWHERE...
I thank you for
taking the time and effort to be a part of this; and the University of Trinidad
and Tobago and the Ministry of National Diversity and Social Integration for
partnering; Legacy House for inspiring us and I look forward to the
presentations and your partnership and collaboration as we move forward towards
better appreciation of the state of the art. We appreciate and welcome your
understanding of this as a collective responsibility as we move to form
alliances and partnerships that would help us fullfil the esoteric and exoteric
place a museum assumes in the lives of citizens.
We invite you
to join us in forging opportunities for our National Museum and Art Gallery to
grow in stature as a place to explore and interrogate ourselves as much as it is
to celebrate and transform the worst in and of us into the best of us, so that
we too become state of the art.
The Walcott Files
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