Works Available 2026
CURRENT SELECTION OF AVAILABLE WORKS
Albert Huie
BIOGRAPHY
Albert Huie (1920–2010) occupies a foundational position in Jamaican art history and is widely regarded asthe “Father of Jamaican Painting.” Born in Falmouth, Trelawny, in 1920, Huie moved to Kingston in 1936 and began painting almost immediately. His early talent attracted the attention of H. Delves Molesworth of the Institute of Jamaica, through whom he became connected to influential members of Jamaica’s emerging nationalist cultural movement. Huie received early instruction from Koren der Harootian, who conducted art classes at his St Andrew home in the late 1930s, and subsequently participated in Edna Manley’s Junior Centre classes. He later studied at the Ontario College of Art in Canada and the Camberwell School of Art in London on a British Council scholarship. He became one of the founding lecturers at the Jamaica School of Art and Craft in 1950. Huie’s importance to Jamaican modernism lies particularly in his insistence that ordinary Jamaican life could itself be the subject of serious modern painting. His portraits, landscapes, market scenes, agricultural workers and depictions of rural life transformed local subject matter into ambitious compositions that combined observation with formal simplification and rhythmic structure. Works such as The Counting Lesson, The Vendor, Noon and Crop Time established an iconography of Jamaican people and labour that became central to the nationalist school. His Crop Time (1955), in the collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica, is particularly significant: its compressed figures, rhythmic movement and monumental treatment of agricultural labour demonstrate how Huie transformed everyday Jamaican experience into an expansive modernist vision. Huie’s work is extensively represented in the National Gallery of Jamaica, including Crop Time, The Vendor, Noon and his 1940 portrait of Edna Manley. He was the first modern Jamaican artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Institute of Jamaica, in 1943, and was the subject of a major National Gallery retrospective in 1979. He received the Silver and Gold Musgrave Medals and numerous other honours. Place in Jamaican modernism: Huie is one of its central architects. If Edna Manley provided much of the movement’s sculptural and ideological vocabulary, Huie established a powerful pictorial language through which Jamaican people, labour and landscape could become the subjects of a distinctly national modern art.
Rhoda Jackson
BIOGRAPHY
Rhoda Jackson (1913–1971) is one of the more intriguing and under-researched figures in Jamaican twentieth-century art. Born at Gilmock Hall, St Elizabeth, in 1913, she was active from the mid-1930s through the 1960s and lived primarily in Mandeville. She studied at Hampton High School, Reading University Arts School in England and the Art Students League in New York. Jackson was both painter and designer, and her importance extends beyond easel painting. She created murals, advertisements, postcards, book covers, textiles and embroidery designs, many of them associated with Jamaica’s developing tourism industry. She was among the earliest professionally trained designers recorded in Jamaica. Her visual language drew heavily upon an idealised Jamaica: gingerbread houses, waterfalls, fishing beaches, cane fields, mountains and picturesque rural communities. Her simplified, patterned compositions often resemble tapestry or decorative design. The National Gallery of Jamaica owns Washing by the River (1945), one of her most important paintings. The work is particularly revealing when considered alongside Albert Huie’s Noon, since both address Jamaican rural labour but from radically different ideological perspectives. Jackson’s Jamaica is picturesque and idyllic, while Huie’s workers are represented as modern citizens engaged in productive labour. Her work therefore occupies an ambiguous position within Jamaican modernism. It participated in the creation of a recognisable Jamaican visual identity, yet it also reproduced some of the romanticised colonial imagery that nationalist artists sought to challenge. Place in Jamaican modernism: Jackson is important precisely because she complicates the conventional story. Her work reveals the tension between national identity, tourism, colonial representation and modern design, and deserves substantially more scholarly attention.
Alexander Cooper
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Cooper (1934–2020) was a Jamaican painter whose career extended from the formative period of Jamaican modernism into the international art world of the later twentieth century. Born in Enfield, St Mary, in 1934, he developed his interest in painting partly through observing artists such as Ralph Campbell and Osmond Watson. Cooper received a government scholarship to attend the Jamaica School of Arts, graduating in 1959. He subsequently moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts. His work is characterised by painted genre scenes documenting Jamaican rural and urban life. He was particularly influenced by Albert Huie and Ralph Campbell, and his paintings continued the modernist project of making Jamaican experience a legitimate subject for fine art. Cooper also developed an international profile. In 1962 and 1964 he won first prize in the Jamaica National Fine Arts Competition. In 1965 he became the first Jamaican artist invited to exhibit at the United States State Department in Washington, D.C. His work was subsequently exhibited in New York, Mexico, Canada, London and Germany. The National Gallery of Jamaica holds Cooper’s work, including Port Royal Tower (1961), and his paintings form part of the Gallery’s historical account of the development of Jamaican modernism. Place in Jamaican modernism: Cooper represents the generation that inherited the nationalist modernist vocabulary of Huie and Campbell but expanded it through international training and exposure. His career demonstrates the transition from a primarily Jamaican modernism towards a more internationally connected Caribbean art world.
Rita Genet
BIOGRAPHY
Rita Genet occupies a somewhat different position from the other artists in this group. Born in Rhode Island and educated in the United States, she came to Jamaica in 1972 and subsequently made Jamaica her home and principal artistic subject for approximately two decades. Genet studied at the University of Connecticut and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she earned a BFA in painting. Originally working as a textile designer in New York, she became captivated by Jamaica during a visit in 1972 and eventually moved to Ocho Rios to concentrate on painting. Her paintings developed a highly recognisable Caribbean idiom: tropical landscapes, houses, trees, angels, figures and village scenes rendered in intense colour and simplified forms. Her work has been described as a form of “sophisticated naivety”, occupying an interesting space between fine art, folk imagery and the commercial visual culture surrounding Caribbean tourism. During her Jamaican period, Genet exhibited at venues including Harmony Hall, the National Gallery, the Bay Gallery and Round Hill, as well as internationally. Her work entered corporate and private collections in Jamaica, the United States and elsewhere. She also produced designs for UNICEF, the Jamaica Association for the Deaf, hotels, corporations and charities. Unlike Huie, Pottinger or Abrahams, Genet is not generally positioned as a foundational figure in Jamaican modernism. Her importance lies instead in the way she participated in the international circulation of a recognisable Caribbean visual language during the late twentieth century. Her paintings helped construct and disseminate an idealised, colourful vision of Jamaica for both local and international audiences. Place in Jamaican art history: Genet is useful as a counterpoint to the nationalist modernists. Her work raises questions about the relationship between Caribbean identity, tourism, outsider artists, popular imagery and the international market—issues that became increasingly important to Caribbean art after Independence.
Gaston Tabois
BIOGRAPHY
Gaston Lascelles Tabois (1924–2012) was one of Jamaica’s most distinctive Intuitive painters, although the artist himself resisted the labels of “primitive” and “naïve” that were frequently applied to his work. Born in Trout Hall, Clarendon, in 1924 and raised in Rock River, Tabois was largely self-taught. He worked in the civil service and eventually became Acting Chief Draftsman in the Ministry of Construction, while developing his painting independently. His first solo exhibition was held at Hills Gallery in Kingston in 1955. His early paintings depict Jamaican rural life with extraordinary attention to detail. His deliberately unconventional perspective and disregard for academic scale gave his landscapes and figures a distinctive visual energy. Over time, however, Tabois’s work became increasingly complex and at times almost surreal, with light, architecture and minute details acquiring an uncanny presence. The National Gallery of Jamaica holds significant examples of his work, including Road Menders (1956), John Canoe in Guanaboa Vale (1962), Dunn’s River Falls (1971) and Fruit Seller (1976). Road Menders became particularly iconic: it was reproduced on a Jamaican postage stamp in 1986 as part of a set celebrating Intuitive painters alongside John Dunkley, Kapo and Sidney McLaren. Tabois participated in all three editions of the National Gallery’s important Intuitive Eye exhibitions, in 1979, 1987 and 2006. He received the Silver Musgrave Medal in 2010. Place in Jamaican modernism: Tabois demonstrates that Jamaican modernism cannot be understood solely through academic or European-derived ideas of modern art. His work belongs to the parallel and highly significant Intuitive tradition, where memory, observation, imagination and self-taught practice generated an alternative modern visual language.
Carl Abrahams
BIOGRAPHY
Carl Myrie Abrahams (1911–2005) was one of the most singular and difficult-to-classify figures of early Jamaican modernism. Born in St Andrew in 1911, he received basic art instruction at Calabar High School but largely pursued his artistic development independently. He began his professional career as a cartoonist and illustrator, contributing to publications including The Gleaner and West Indian Review. A visit by the British painter Augustus John to Jamaica in 1937 encouraged Abrahams to pursue painting. After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, he returned to Jamaica and developed a highly individual practice that remained somewhat apart from the organised art movements and institutions of the period. Abrahams admired John Dunkley, and, like Dunkley, developed an intensely personal visual language. His paintings combine religious imagery, Jamaican history, popular culture, satire and fantasy. Biblical subjects such as The Last Supper, The Ascension and Thirteen Israelites coexist with paintings dealing with Marcus Garvey, Rastafari and the destruction of Port Royal. His significance to Jamaican modernism is precisely in this eccentric refusal of conventional modernist categories. His flattened spaces, distorted figures, cartoon-like outlines and surreal transformations of history anticipate aspects of later Caribbean approaches to memory, spirituality and popular culture. The National Gallery of Jamaica holds a substantial body of Abrahams’s work, including Thirteen Israelites, The Ascension and The Destruction of Port Royal. The Gallery mounted its first full retrospective of an individual Jamaican artist in 1978 in honour of Abrahams. His work was also included in international exhibitions at the New York World’s Fair and San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition. Place in Jamaican modernism: Abrahams represents one of its most original countercurrents. Where Huie sought a dignified pictorial representation of Jamaican life, Abrahams used humour, distortion, religious symbolism and historical fantasy to expose the contradictions of Jamaican society.
David Pottinger
BIOGRAPHY
David “Jack” Pottinger (1911–2007) is one of the great chroniclers of twentieth-century Kingston and a central figure in the formation of Jamaican modernism. Born in downtown Kingston in 1911, he initially trained as a house and sign painter. In the early 1940s, Ralph Campbell encouraged him to attend Edna Manley’s classes at the Institute of Jamaica’s Junior Centre. By 1945 Pottinger had become a key member of the Institute Group, alongside artists including Albert Huie, Ralph Campbell and Henry Daley. This group is regarded as the first coherent movement of Jamaican modern art and was closely connected to the cultural nationalism developing in the years preceding Independence. Pottinger’s great subject was Kingston itself. For six decades he painted its streets, lanes, yards, markets, buildings, vendors and residents. His work offers an extraordinary visual record of a Kingston that has largely disappeared. Rather than treating the city as merely picturesque, Pottinger made its everyday social life the central subject of his art. The National Gallery has described him as the urban counterpart to Albert Huie, whose principal subject was the Jamaican rural landscape. The National Gallery of Jamaica collection contains numerous important Pottinger paintings, including Backyard (1945), Nine Night (1949), Trench Town (1959), Studley Park Road (1960), Four O’Clock (1965) and Snapper Time (1970). Pottinger’s style became increasingly abstracted and expressionistic during the 1960s while retaining its commitment to realism. He received the Silver Musgrave Medal and Order of Distinction, and the National Gallery mounted a major retrospective in 2001 to mark his ninetieth birthday. Place in Jamaican modernism: Pottinger is indispensable to understanding the nationalist school because he made urban Jamaican experience itself a modernist subject. His paintings constitute both an artistic achievement and an invaluable social history of Kingston.
