New art competition for Guyana

Emerson Samuels

By Alim Hosein

Guyana has a long history of visual art competitions, going back to the colonial days. Even the young movements of local artists in the 1930s and 1940s saw regular exhibitions of artwork. Among our local art exhibitions, the National Exhibition of the Visual Arts (NEVA) is the best-known by contemporary Guyanese. This is because it was the most recent, and also the largest, of these exhibitions. The NEVA became a national institution and was one that was looked forward to. Artists such as Hubert Moshett, Stanley Greaves, Ron Savory, Philip Moore, Marjorie Broodhagen, Emerson Samuels, and later Basil Thompson, Angold Thompson, Dudley Charles, Bernadette Persaud, and many others, became household names in good part because of the popularity of the NEVA which they had entered.  Much later, towards the end of its heyday, other artists emerged and these marked the new crop of top-class Guyanese artists. Such artists include Colin Warde, Ossie Hussein, Desmond Ali, and others.  But the NEVA began to fall on difficult times in the 1990s. Various attempts were made to change the design