Art Exhibition
Is All of We, is we in Truth.
Central Bank Museum of Trinidad & Tobago
01 – 23 May, 2025
Curatorial Statement by Adeline Gregoire
To read, it is said – is to travel without leaving home.
To read Earl Lovelace, I believe – is to pick up a magnifying glass, sliding it slowly over the surface. Watching the skin, texture, colour, irregularity, fault lines, constellations. The sensitivity of our interior landscapes, where a wound used to be. Same time, paying attention to the pleasant familiarity, discomfort, memory and soundscape that this exercise creates.
Earl Lovelace’s literature is alive, with the joys, ugliness, glitter, grime, pleasure, aching and sweet bacchanal of being human: in all our brilliance and with all our stupidity.
The story of Us and how we came to be in islands like Trinidad & Tobago, Caribbean (Hi)story and histories, Indigeneity, colonial legacies, aspirations, challenges, liberation…his innermost hopes for us as Caribbean people, people of Trinidad and Tobago, the belief that we are more than what meets the eye, burn bright on the pages of Lovelace’s poems, novels, essays, plays…
The more I have read and listened to Earl Lovelace, the more it has become clear to me, that what distinguishes and makes the literature of Lovelace unmissable and unforgettable is the way in which Lovelace has written and shared about the people like you and me, me and you, the very ordinary people in our everyday lives – with a level of meticulousness, attention to accuracy, keen observation of individuals, human beings, places, things.
Toco, Tobago, Morvant, Belmont, Valencia, Rio Claro (the place Lovelace began to write), Matura, Cascade…just a few of the places with special meaning for Lovelace here in Trinidad and Tobago. Over the years, Lovelace has searched for, observed and found us: as a community, as a whole village, as a body.
But why? Why stop and wait? Why watch us for so long?
And Lovelace responds: “Everybody is Somebody…we have to see them.”
There is much to be said about the special alchemy existing between the written word and the image. The textual and the visual are constantly engaged in a symbiotic relationship; mutually informing and shaping each other. Language-s, vocabulary, storytellers, stories (and the way these stories are told) conjure images for us – and inversely, paintings, pictures, movies, objects help us find the words to describe other realities, other feelings, other selves.
And so, for this exhibition Artists were invited to share works inspired by, or in relation to the literary works of Earl Lovelace. We also had the privilege of selecting artwork from the incredible Central Bank Art Collection, as a way to read these works anew through Lovelace’s thematic lens. It was important for us to create an intergenerational dialogue, among some of the pioneers of Trinidad & Tobago’s Art History and contemporary Trinbagonian artists, living and working in Trinidad. A Circle and circularity in time.
A big part of this exhibition is therefore about a cross-generational response to the literary works of Earl Lovelace, the relevance, timelessness and permanence of certain things. I wanted to emphasize the extraordinary quality of our own Art History here in Trinidad & Tobago: while highlighting artmaking as a trajectory and process, linking subject matter, concerns and musings of our artists over the past six decades….
The result: works of over 35 Artists, a range of media and technique responding to the many worlds and lives of Earl Lovelace.
On Representation, Selfhood – Nationhood, This Land – Place – Space, complexity to the layers of our existence.
As Guest Curator, there are a few themes which I found interwoven in Lovelace’s literature and discourse. The will to see, seeing Us – observation and recognition as acts of care, grounded in love and decoloniality, in sharp contrast to methods of erasure and invisibility; our Land and landscapes (past – present – future, the way we exist within them, freedom and unfreedom); Cultural production or the things we make as a collective and our acknowledgement of their value (Art, Literature, Calypso, Carnival, Steel Pan, Music, Dance, Song, our capacity for celebration, cultivating joy and magic… and lastly, “What have we done with what we have done?” after Lovelace, thinking about responsibility, Reparation, Futurity and Monumentality.
The Caribbean is no joke, not a monolith. No, is not just a movie this time.
Each one of these pieces invites us to look at and address all the parts of Us, in our fullness, contending with all the layers. As in Lovelace’s writing, the Artists here have imagined, dreamt of and made more than visible, works that speak to relationships, our Caribbeanness, the island gaze, expressing what it means to be Human and our potential to become…This too constitutes a form of “Nation language” as described by poet, writer, Scholar Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados, 1930 – 2020) which enables us to confidently assert our place in this world.
Who is we?
How come we reach here?
Where we going?
We do hope this exhibition rekindles hope and a real love for Us, inspiring us all to take a deeper look at ourselves, and as Lovelace asks: “What do we see as our responsibility to each other?”
Where Barbadian scholar, writer George Lamming, Lovelace’s fellow counterpart from the Matura days, speaks of the different “ways of seeing” the collective and ourselves, in his novel Salt (1996) Lovelace talks about a “a new way of welcoming each other,” a “new world.”
The portal of this new world is made accessible by letting go of preconceived notions of self and of others whom we think we know. Only then can we see each other in truth, and for true – with the promise and the challenge that it presents.
Earl Lovelace
Born in July 1935 in Toco, Earl Lovelace spent a formative part of his childhood with his grandparents in Tobago, returning to Trinidad at the age of 11. After working as a newspaper proofreader and forest ranger, Lovelace began writing in his 20s, and his first novel While Gods Are Falling won the 1962 T&T Independence literary competition. His subsequent novels — including classics like The Dragon Can’t Dance, The Wine of Astonishment, Salt, and Is Just a Movie — as well as his short stories, essays, plays, and poems, have won him international acclaim, a devoted readership, and awards such as the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.