Annalee Davis Uses Art to Unearth and Interrogate

by Jacqueline Bishop,

Author, Artist, NYU Professor

—

2016

For Annalee Davis, the land, especially the island of Barbados, is often a baseline issue in her work; as are issues of race, class and gender. This might be so because she was born into a large white creole family of five children on a sugar cane estate in Barbados.

Annalee remembers her childhood as carefree, and spent largely outdoors with regular trips to the beach. Both her father and a brother were farmers and she credits that early primary relationship with the land as informing much of the work that she would produce as an artist. She remembers too that when she was a child, there was a Haitian woman who used to visit her parents. This woman was an artist who intrigued her. She liked how the Haitian woman responded to society. The memory of this woman stayed with her for a long time, and, in large part became the reason why Annalee chose to be an artist.

View fullsize

View fullsize

Annalee Davis’s early schooling on the island was lackluster, in large part because there was not much emphasis on the arts or arts education. As a student, she could find no outlet to express herself in the visual arts and was continually frustrated in her attempts to realize her dream. She would eventually complete high school in Canada, which was a good move for her.

“I really enjoyed my time in Canada,” she told me, “because it was here that I started having an understanding of the social and political context of art. In Canada, I was introduced to art history and there was a teacher at the high school I attended who took my desire to be an artist seriously. It was that teacher who suggested that I do my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which was one of the finest art schools in the United States at the time.”

View fullsize

At MICA, Annalee spent a lot of time developing her skills, focusing specifically on drawing, painting and printmaking. Following her time at MICA, Davis went on to do her MFA at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which offered proximity to New York and the opportunity to observe the art scene there. Rutgers also had solid art professors, a small student body, huge libraries, and access to numerous resources.

“Rutgers was a very rich environment for me and soon a shift started to happen in my work. I started to tackle ideas around gender, race and class. That language began to develop there. I also began to think of myself as a minority. To many people I am just a white Barbadian. It was at Rutgers that I really began to unpack what this all means.”

View fullsize

The result of her time at Rutgers can be seen most convincingly in a painting she did around that time entitled Putting on my Blackness in which a lone, white, nude female in a plantation house is putting on what appears to be black skin. In the background of the house is the British flag. The figure looks out through a window at several black figures, a plantation with small presumably slave cottages, the wide blue Caribbean ocean and the flag of Barbados. It is a haunting political work.

For Annalee, being a white Caribbean person means being a member of a misunderstood minority group. In an intervention called White Creole Conversations that the artist instigated — a suite of 25 conversations with Caribbean people seen as white — she sought to address the awkwardness and uniform presentation of white creoles in the Caribbean. She maintains that, “The Caribbean is too often seen as a homogenous black place. I think that in the ways that blackness has been studied, whiteness too should be studied in the Caribbean. In the variety of conversations that is offered in White Creole Conversations, I seek to unpack the white Caribbean experience to show that there is more complexity in the experience of whiteness than has thus far been presented. In doing so I hope to combat the stereotyping that often results in reading whiteness in a simplistic and singular manner in the region.”

View fullsize

To me, though, the project is riddled with unintentional confusions and obfuscations. To begin with, though race has long and often been debunked as a construct, what is stunning in the portrayals in White Creole Conversations is that almost all of the respondents adhere sharply to their definitions of whiteness without seeking to critique the category at all. In addition, while many of the respondents complain of a minority status in the Caribbean, they conflate being a member of a minority group with lacking power and privilege in society. Oftentimes in the conversation there is no examination of the ways in which power and privilege are being reinscribed by the very actions that the respondents take. The end result of all of this is that the project feels more like a place to complain.

This critique however should not negate all the work that Annalee Davis has done and continues to do in seeking to build community in the Caribbean. Following her time at Rutgers she returned to the Caribbean — teaching for a number of years at a secondary school in Barbados; then leaving to set up the print shop at the Edna Manley College of Art in Jamaica before returning to teach at the Barbados Community College. Today she is Caribbean Arts Manager for the British Council, a position in which she is developing art programming for the Caribbean hinged on reciprocity and bridge building.

She has also continued creating her own art, producing, among other work, a stunning suite of creole Madonnas, in which she assumed a regional identity in the form of a White, Black, Indian, and Indigenous Caribbean woman. These creole Madonnas were Annalee’s way of intervening and insinuating herself into and onto a larger Caribbean narrative.

View fullsize

In fact, being and becoming part of a larger Caribbean narrative has always been a goal in Annalee Davis’s work. In the exhibition now on show at The Idea Lab, at The Warfield Center, at The University of Texas, in Austin entitled The Ground Beneath My Feet — A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands, the artist uses drawings, ledgers and historical artifacts to try and transform how a particularly painful site may become a more nurturing place.

For the past two years, Annalee, who now lives on a property that used to be a plantation and has been in her family for the last 100 years, has been walking in the fields and collecting shards she finds on this land for an apothecary and bush tea service as a push back on history.

“When the sugar industry was on its last legs and a lot of the fields were abandoned,” Annalee shared with me, “medicinal plants started coming up among the sugar canes that were now abandoned. I like to think how these medicinal plants completely ignored the rules of segregation initially imposed upon them, and, for me, these plants represent the robust traditions specific to the black Barbadian experience that have been passed down and thankfully preserved for generations.”

View fullsize

View fullsize

Her new exhibition consists of large, gorgeous drawings of wild plants linked to British tea and blood-sweetened sugar. When she first showed the work in London, Davis was surprised at the lack of knowledge within London, specifically, and throughout the United Kingdom more generally, of England’s participation in the slave trade in the Caribbean. For the artist, there was a shocking erasure and lack of awareness in England that it took some getting used to. In time, her serving of bush tea in London became a discursive project with shards from the past embedded in it.

View fullsize

“For years now I have been working with a group of archeologists doing digs to find the voices of those who have been silenced, those who have been made invisible. In London, I came to realize that this is what I am most preoccupied with in my art practice right now. I am one of those who is very involved in unearthing voices.”

Until next time.