Art About Arawaks: New site from Penny Slinger

In previous years, dating almost to the inception of the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink, we featured some of the paintings of Penny Slinger, a British artist who for many years resided in different parts of the Caribbean. The paintings we directed attention to focused on images of Arawaks, as they might have been preceding the arrival of Europeans. Penny Slinger has clearly dedicated a great deal more attention to these themes and has recently produced a large new website featuring a vast array of her images, including blockprints, drawings, pastels, paintings, and a video. Her site encompasses two themes: Arawak Art, and what she calls Island Art.

Penny Slinger's Arawak Art can be seen at: http://www.arawakart.com/

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Untold Origins -- Caribbean Indigenous Museum Exhibition

"Untold Origins," an exhibition dedicated to indigenous Caribbean heritage and identity, took place under the auspices of the Cuming Museum in Southwark, London, from October 19, 2004 to February 26, 2005.

The Cuming Museum sought to challenge several myths of Caribbean history, such as those of the cannibalistic Caribs eating their way through docile Arawak communities, or those pertaining to the often repeated notion that indigenous peoples in the Caribbean are extinct. In this vein, the organizers of the exhibition explain, "the Cuming Museum wanted to explore their survival in more depth and to discover whether there are any echoes of indigenous culture surviving in Southwark's Caribbean culture today." The Untold Origins exhibition was originally presented for Black History Month in 2004. It sought to explore "the untold history of the indigenous people of the Caribbean and their contribution to the Caribbean culture of today." An attempt was made to join reflection of Caribbean indigenous survival with contemporary ways of making sense of one's identity, and how movement and cross-cultural contact could affect the process of making one's identity.

The Cuming Museum has since decided to provide online the various photographs and information boards that were used for the exhibition, for the sake of those who could not have been present.

These materials include the following:

• The tradition of cassava production (1mb)
• Untold Origins introduction (742kb)
• The Schomburgk collection (624kb)
• History of migration from South America (165kb)
• The shared culture (152kb)
• Women’s' role in indigenous culture (1mb)
• The impact of European contact and conquest (280kb)
• Resistance and survival (280kb)
• The indigenous craft tradition (96kb)
• Indigenous contributions to Caribbean culture today (96kb)
• The continuity of Caribbean indigenous people (196kb)
• The gli-gli carib canoe project (136kb)
• Useful websites and references (1mb)

Please click here to go to the original site for the exhibition.