Akima McPherson

Considering Guyana’s small population and its cultural and linguistic isolation on the South American coast, curiosity is always the order of the day for me when I learn of Guyanese in strange and far-flung places.

Monday morning, May 22, we all woke to shocking and horrific news!

On April 25, Guyanese-American artist Arlington Weithers’s first New York City solo exhibition since 2006 opened at the David Richard Gallery in Chelsea.

If only we could truly enter into the reservoir of an artist’s imagination, what an experience that would be.

In 2017, five years after the Guyana Women Artists’ Association’s (GWAA) initial accommodation of my contemporary approaches with provision of a small room to show.

In 2010, I left these shores, transiting through Barbados where I was held for a long while by immigration before being led into the departure lounge for my flight to Gatwick.

Akima: Did you go to the exhibition at Castellani House? Colleague: Yes, I did.

When I started writing this column in 2022, I began with a fundamental method of looking at works of art.

There is a term that gets bantered about a lot in Guyana.

It is indeed fantastic that we can celebrate those from among us who leave for greener pastures, “make it”, as we say, then return, however temporarily, for perhaps refuelling or grounding.

In a multicultural space such as ours, the world is at our doorsteps and in our backyards.

Art neither exists in a vacuum nor does it emerge from one.

The local saying, “What don’t kill does fatten,” clicked recently. This aptly describes enduring and succeeding despite challenging circumstances.

Writing this weekly column came about as a means to satisfy an itch to write about art in a less rigid and demanding way than academia requires.

Writing on the heels of moderating a discussion on “The State of Art” for the “Reimagining Borders: Talking Art…” event hosted from January 27 to February 3, 2023 – a collaboration between Rufaro Centre and the Roots and Culture Gallery – gave way to many negotiations to adequately represent the proceedings in the following paragraphs.

I remain distracted by the knowledge that select visual artists were called into a meeting with the high-level official in December.

The Rufaro Centre? I admit that until the email came to my inbox in late December, I had no idea what the Rufaro Centre was.

In the intervening weeks between our conversation in mid-November focused on the Old House series and our follow-up fully two months later, Dudley Charles and I engaged in very fluid discussions on art in Guyana and circumstances for artists.

This concludes Akima McPherson’s conversation with Guyanese artist Dudley Charles. Charles, a self-taught artist, who was born in 1945, has been painting for at least 60 years and has exhibited his work in several countries around the world.