JACQUELINE BISHOP: Song of The Banana Man

ABOUT “SONG OF THE BANANA MAN”

More on Jacqueline Bishop HERE

For many years I have explored the Caribbean marketplace as a site where history survives in everyday acts of cultivation, exchange, and care. My work has centered on the market woman as a keeper of cultural memory, preserving knowledge through the circulation of food, plants, and handmade goods. Song of the Banana Man returns to that history by tracing its beginnings in the provision grounds cultivated by enslaved Africans throughout the Caribbean. These small plots of land, worked during the limited hours allowed outside plantation labor, became spaces where enslaved people grew food to sustain themselves, preserved agricultural knowledge, and created possibilities for economic independence. From these provision grounds emerged informal economies that would become an important part of Caribbean life. The banana man therefore embodies a continuity of Black cultivation in the Americas. He stands as a descendant of those early cultivators whose labor transformed survival into self-sufficiency and helped lay the foundations for the Caribbean marketplace as we know it today.

The history of the banana itself reflects the layered histories of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Introduced to the Caribbean by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the banana became entangled with plantation economies and, later, with the expansion of American commercial interests throughout the region. The fruit therefore carries histories of conquest, adaptation, labor, resistance, and globalization. Growing up in Jamaica, I remember the china cabinets that occupied so many homes. Inside were plates, reserved for special occasions and decorated with European landscapes, figures, and motifs. On these plates I did not see images that reflected the people or histories that surrounded me. My great-grandfather, uncles, and other relatives whom I visited during my summer holidays were banana men. Their lives and labor became the genesis of this body of work. I wanted to place our histories and my story where I had so often encountered someone else’s.

My choice of ceramic for Song of the Banana Man is both historical and deeply personal. The plates used in the series were manufactured in Portugal, one of the earliest European maritime powers to establish trade routes that connected the Atlantic world. The ceramic therefore functions as a material witness to histories of exploration, commerce, and colonial expansion. By placing Black agricultural histories upon these domestic objects, I seek to reverse the visual language of the empire. For centuries, porcelain carried European stories into Caribbean homes. These works return Caribbean histories to the surface, transforming an object associated with colonial taste into a vessel for Black memory.

The banana man is at once an ancestor, a worker, a cultivator, and a keeper of memory. His presence insists that the history of the Caribbean is not only found in plantations, archives, and monuments, but also in the hands of those who cultivated the land and made a way to live within and beyond systems designed to constrain them. Song of the Banana Man is therefore both an act of remembrance and a reclamation: an attempt to place Black labor, family memory, and Caribbean history at the center of the objects through which history is seen.

–Jacqueline Bishop, 2026

RECENTLY ON VIEW

JACQUELINE BISHOP in: After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora

2026 | Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) | San Francisco, CA

September 30, 2026 – May 30, 2027

Featuring Jacqueline Bishop 

View the exhibition page HERE