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 challenges facing education, the arts, culture and media for survi val into the post pandemic planet inspires this recollection on the encounter and reencounter with education luminary Sir Ken Robinson.
The presentation on the prospects for the creative economy, revisioning accounting and representation still holds as we address the challenges of the post pandemic planet. For more visit https://krisrampersad.com/ah-drinking-babash-in-dis-fo-rum-creative-masks-of-satire/
Requests Semianrs Workshops Webinars Courses all Ages, All Sectors, All Industries at The Academy at the GloCaL Knowledge Pot https://krisrampersad.com
Dear Mayor, and noble and other honourable citizens of the colourless world
I see there is a call for suggestions on how to treat with the colonial legacy and monuments - which must be close to the millionth such call to which I have responded. But now aware that there will be no action along the lines that I have used, tried and tested with other similarly trauma-inflicted communities of our region, I am not even tempted to point out that most times I feel like I have been talking to stone or that we only reaping the whirlwind that will continue to gather strength as we add fury to savagery, I propose the following as a preliminary list for your immediate action to assuage the bloodthirsty masses. I am sure these would meet with nods and applause of approval from noted historians, educators, leaders, opinion leaders and the like from whom you seek counsel. This list is to exorcise the ghosts roaming Port of Spain, while I compile the much larger list for exorcism across the country, and beyond, Dear Mayor. I come, you see, Mr Mayor, to not praise, but bury Columbus, along with the colonial legacy embedded in our psyche, landscapes and institutions and monuments of memory.
More at: https://krisrampersad.com/exorcising-historical-trauma-black-white-of-monuments-memory/
In celebration of Independence, Demokrissy is migrating!
Loyal followers of Demokrissy have been enquiring about the State of the State at Independence.
While the State itself might be slow to evolve, we are continue our revolution, smashing walls and barriers (read more and Subscribe https://krisrampersad.com/)
"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.