Current Show Feature:
JACQUELINE BISHOP in: if you should forget me for a while
June 27 through September 29, 2024
At Sienna Patti Contemporary
Lenox, MA
Featuring work by Jacqueline Bishop, Melanie Bilenker, Venetia Dale, & Lauren Kalman
AVAILABLE ARTWORKS & EDITIONS
Jacqueline Bishop
Fauna (Cup & Saucer, Sugar Pot)
2024
digital print on porcelain, gold lustre
various dimensions
Recently acquired by the Harris Museum, April 2024
Jacqueline Bishop’s interdisciplinary practice is focused on making visible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, in telling untold stories and voicing voicelessness. Bishop is acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider having lived longer outside of her birthplace of Jamaica than on the island itself. This has allowed her to view a given environment from a distance.
Fauna arises out of Bishop’s long-standing questions about the position of black women in Caribbean society. Her first collection of poems published in 2006, also titled ‘Fauna’, used Caribbean flowers as metaphors to explore the lives of enslaved women. Bishop sees this new commissioned work as a visual manifestation of these poems. Further research revealed that prior to the ending of the slave trade there was no attention given to either the maternal health of pregnant women or their babies.
Where and to whom did enslaved women turn when they were trying to conceive, could not conceive or found themselves with unwanted pregnancies? The answer lay in the plants, flowers, fruits and herbs of Jamaica. Each one contained a unique botanical element that could either end an unwanted pregnancy or encourage fertility. In Fauna Bishop has surrounded the women and their children with healing and protective herbs. Indeed, in one case, the mother is offering her child up to the arms of the natural environment.
Fauna was commissioned by The Harris and will go on display when the museum re-opens in Spring 2025. Unveiling overlooked and brutal histories of slavery and colonialism, Bishop’s work is an important acquisition for The Harris’ ceramic collection. Creating dialogues with other pieces in The Harris’ collection, most importantly an oil painting recently identified as ‘A Jamaica Landscape’ (c. 1774), attributed to George Robertson, Bishop said that her work “intervenes in the idyllic presentation of slavery and enslavement of the painting to present enslaved women using the environment to shield themselves and their children. Both works speak to each other.” Both works will be displayed together as this timely acquisition will play an integral part in a new display exploring the global history of tea, weaving together histories of British Empire, Colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
-The Harris Museum
Jacqueline Bishop
Keeper of All The Secrets
2023
digital print on commercial porcelain
various dimensions
1/3 edition
Jacqueline Bishop’s tea service, The Keeper of All The Secrets continues her series of porcelain plates, tableware and textiles based on the most known Caribbean image, the Market Woman. The first works in the series, a series of plates History at the Dinner Table was followed by The Market Woman’s Story.
These works draw from deep research into the role and position of black women in Caribbean society and their images in paintings, prints and photography. The Market Woman first crossed the Atlantic from West Africa as an enslaved individual and played a critical role in Atlantic World societies. Using the source imagery, Bishop’s collages weave together histories of the British Empire, Colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
The porcelain tea service, The Keeper of All The Secrets and Fauna intentionally use the forms themselves to make the point that enslavement, colonialism and the trade economy of sugar, tea and slavery which gave rise to luxury commodities, were enjoyed and enjoined in the colonies and Europe. The forms: teapots, cups, saucers, cream pitchers, and sugar pots use the collaged images in overglaze print transfers on fine china, outlined by hand in gold and silver. Combining historic botanical imagery with depictions of enslaved West Africans and Indigenous people, The Keeper of All The Secrets focuses on the moment when the enslaved woman met the Indigenous woman to exchange information and knowledge of botanicals. Fauna portrays women with their children surrounded by the floral botanicals that were used to protect them.
-Jacqueline Bishop
Jacqueline Bishop
The Narratives of Migration (set of 10)
2024
digital print on porcelain, gold lustre
11 x 11 x .5″ (each)
The series of plates derives its title from a poem I wrote which traces various migrations within my family. As a child growing up on the island of Jamaica, I never knew my mother’s father, but I knew that he lived in England where he had another family. My mother and her brother– his children– were left back on the island of Jamaica.
Jamaica’s relationship with England began in 1655 when, having failed to wrest Cuba from Spain, the English settled on Jamaica as a secondary prize. While I grew up in an independent country (achieved from England in 1962) England still loomed large in my consciousness as a child born in the 1970s. Even today, the British Monarch remains Head of State of Jamaica, which is part of the Commonwealth.
In this work, it is both my family’s history and a larger English/Jamaican history that I have sought to trace. These plates consist of family photographs of my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s brother in Jamaica, and my grandfather, his wife, and my aunts in England. They reference the recent Windrush scandal whereby British citizens from the Caribbean living in the UK for decades were being deported back to the Caribbean, and they tell a longer story of enslavement. Replete are images of the flora and fauna of the Caribbean which would be taken from the island to fill English gardens and give rise to the field of Natural history. Also included are the icons of nationalism developed for Jamaica by the British.
What these plates show is that in both personal and political terms, the relationship between Jamaica and the UK is one that is enduring.
-Jacqueline Bishop
Jacqueline Bishop
The Market Woman’s Story
2022
digital print on commercial porcelain
8.75 x 12.25 x 1″ (each)
set of 15 plates
1/3 edition
Recently acquired by the Williams College Museum of Art, Fall 2023.
On one hand, the market woman/huckster is the most ubiquitous figure to emerge from plantation Jamaica. Yet, as pervasive as the figure of the market woman is in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, she remains critically overlooked.
In this set of fifteen dishes, I am both paying homage to the market woman – centering her importance to Caribbean society from the period of slavery onwards – placing her within a critical context. In particular, I place the market woman within a long tradition of female labor depicted in diverse imagery that I have sourced online, including early Jamaican postcards, paintings of enslaved women from Brazil, the colonial paintings of the Italian Agostino Brunias, and present-day photographs, which I collage alongside floral and abolitionist imagery.
I work in ceramics because all the women around me as I grew up – my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother – cherished ceramic dinner plates. These were centerpieces kept in one of their most important acquisitions, a specially made mahogany cabinet. To fabricate the plates, it is important that I am working with Emma Price, a British ceramicist based in Stoke-on-Trent in the former Spode factories. In the realization of the series, that connection imbues them with a meaning that shows the long and enduring relationship between England and Jamaica.
My hope in doing this work is to give much respect to the market women of the Jamaican and larger Atlantic world who have fed, and continue to feed, nations. The market woman is the defining symbol of Jamaica and Caribbean societies.
-Jacqueline Bishop
Jacqueline Bishop
History at the Dinner Table
2021
digital print on commercial porcelain
11″ diameter (each)
1 / 3 edition
As a little girl growing up on the island of Jamaica, Jaqueline Bishop’s grandmother had a large mahogany cabinet where she kept some of her most prized possessions: her bone china crockery. These delicate pieces were painted with bright, cheerful images of palaces and carriages and were only used on special occasions.
As beautiful as these china dishes were, they often hid a violent history of slavery and colonialism by European countries. In ‘History at the Dinner Table’, Jaqueline changes the story by showing the legacy of slavery on the dishes instead. Despite their violent history, Bishop is also seduced and charmed by the delicacy and beauty of bone chinaware and she has sought to produce dishes equally as beautiful as the ones made by major European centers of bone china production. The work is exhibited in mahogany cabinets as mahogany was once a major luxury import from Jamaica to England.
–British Ceramics Biennial, in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
“Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance”
Featuring Jacqueline Bishop’s, “History at the Dinner Table”
On view through January 7, 2024Location
Fitzwilliam Museum
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1RB
ABOUT
b. 1971, Kingston, Jamaica
lives and works in New York, NY
Jacqueline Bishop is an accomplished writer, academic, and visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, Italy, Cape Verde, Niger, USA, and Jamaica. In addition to her role as Clinical Full Professor at New York University, Jacqueline Bishop was a 2020 Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France; 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow in Morocco; and 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris. Bishop has received several awards, including the OCM Bocas Award for her book “The Gymnast & Other Position”, The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short story writing, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities from New York University, A James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as several awards from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission. Jacqueline’s recent ceramic work consists of brightly colored bone China plates used symbolically in Caribbean homes and explores how they hid the violent legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.
ON HER WORK
My work focuses on making visible the invisible, in making tangible the ephemeral, in speaking aloud the unspoken, and in voicing voicelessness. In so doing, I engage with such themes as pleasure, desire, sexuality, memory and exile (and their concomitant absence, loss, erasure and silence). My practice is interdisciplinary and increasingly trans-disciplinary. As someone who has lived longer outside of my birthplace of Jamaica, than I have lived on the island, I am acutely aware of what it means to be simultaneously an insider and an outsider. This ability to see the world from multiple psychological and territorial spaces has led to the development of a particular lens that allows me to view a given environment from a distance. Because I am also a fiction writer and poet as well as a visual artist, the text and narrative are significant parts of my artistic practice.
WRITING
About the Poem
“Research informs my creative process and vice versa. Presently, I am researching the needlework practices of my birth country of Jamaica. This research is informed by a great-grandmother and grandmother who were excellent patchwork makers, and my mother who made crochet so magnificent that she sold them. My mother would eventually migrate from Jamaica to the United States, where we children would join her later. In this poem, my mother’s doilies become a connective thread between Jamaica and the United States; therein, I layer many of the reasons as to why we had to leave Jamaica.”
—Jacqueline Bishop
Doilies
by Jacqueline Bishop
In the house off Constant Spring Road, the one
with the short spreading Julie mango tree
in the front yard, the lime tree
with their dark green leaves and delicate
white flowers; the palm-sized
burnt orange hibiscuses,
poisonous butter yellow allamandas,
I remember, I remember,
how my mother’s hands kept moving
as she produced one white crochet doily after another.
The slender silver hook and the fragile symmetry.
A Ford Escort was parked in the garage of that house.
Oil-slicked men tried stealing that powder blue
Ford Escort one night as we slept uneasily in the house—
Discussions began immediately about leaving
one i/land for another. The fat
balls of thread in my mother’s lap, at her feet,
those threads already unspooling, connecting one
memory, one life, one distant country to another.
Copyright © 2024 by Jacqueline Bishop. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
DOILIES RECENTLY FEATURED ON KFAI 90.3FM TWIN CITIES
Original air date: Wednesday June 19, 6:55am
As part of the “Poetry Picnic” segment on AM Drive: Poetry, Science and Wrestling
Poetry Picnic begins at 53:40 minutes on the recording
EXHIBITIONS
JACQUELINE BISHOP: The Keeper of All The Secrets
2024 | Exhibition organized by Culture& X V&A Wedgewood Collection | Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, UK
August 23, 2024 – November 3, 2024
JACQUELINE BISHOP in: if you should forget me for a while
2024 | Group Exhibition at Sienna Patti Contemporary| Lenox, MA
June 27, 2024 – August 25, 2024
ICAF 2024
2024 | Group Exhibition at the Gardiner Museum | Toronto, Ontario
May 23, 2024 – June 2, 2024
The International Ceramic Art Fair (ICAF) is a 10-day celebration of some of the most compelling recent ceramic art, featuring works by emerging and established artists from a wide range of backgrounds, as well as online and in-person programming by artists and curators.
OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?
2024 | Group Exhibition in the Wickham House at the Valentine Museum | Richmond, VA
February 20, 2024 – April 21, 2024
Our America/Whose America? Is a “call and response” exhibition between contemporary artists and historic ceramic objects.
View the exhibition page HERE & View the historic collection HERE
BLACK ATLANTIC: POWER, PEOPLE, RESISTANCE
2023 | Group Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum | Cambridge, UK
September 8th, 2023 – January 7th, 2024
Which stories get remembered, and why?
This exhibition explores some new stories from history – stories that help us to separate fact from fiction and history from myth.
OUR AMERICA/WHOSE AMERICA?
2022 | Group Exhibition at Ferrin Contemporary | North Adams, MA
August 6th, 2022 – October 30th, 2022
Our America/Whose America? Is a “call and response” exhibition between contemporary artists and historic ceramic objects.
View the exhibition page HERE & View the historic collection HERE
CATALOGS
JACQUELINE BISHOP: The Market Woman’s Story Catalog with Video
August 23, 2022 | Published by British Art Studies
Jacqueline Bishop explains her process and approach to her series of 15 plates depicting collages of Jamaican market women throughout history.
View The Market Women’s Story on British Art Studies.
NEWS
Politics on a plate: how ceramics became a tool for satire and protest | Financial Times, 2024
A new exhibition celebrates the ‘Trojan horse’ of the decorative arts
The plate might seem a benign part of daily life, but its ubiquity can be a secret weapon for artists. Over the centuries, they have used its humble form and decorative glaze work to satirise wars, condemn slavery and call for social change. Plates are the “Trojan horses” of the decorative arts, says British ceramic artist Stephen Dixon. “Everyone is familiar and comfortable with ceramics, so you can seduce people with a pretty plate, then let your subversive message flow out.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Jacqueline Bishop’s The Market Woman’s Story | Jamaican Observer, 2022
In talking to someone recently about the new set of plates I had completed, The Market Woman’s Story, in which I traced the figure of the huckster, higgler, vendor from the period of slavery until today while enveloping her in fruits and flowers, he pointed out that my first collection of poems, Fauna from Peepal Tree Press, had a section that did a similar thing, for in it I was using local Caribbean flowers to tell Jamaican women’s stories. I suddenly realised that I had a long history of using floral imagery to represent female concerns.
For many years I was a closet visual artist, though the work I did produce beginning in primary and high school was always about plants and flowers. I remember once, for example, as a wee thing at John Mills All-Age School, that I got transported while drawing repeatedly the roots of fat sugar cane stalks. It was the most wonderful feeling. Over the years I kept drawing and painting in secret: gigantic blue flowers. But I kept putting visual art to the side all the way through high school and my undergraduate years, though, unfailingly, I would take visual art classes here and there, but never quite centring art in my life. After all, what was one to do with it?
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Interview with Jacqueline Bishop | Studio Potter, 2023
“From the women in my life, I learned the importance of perseverance and hard work. Having work or being a laborer did not exclude one from being a creative individual. My mother, and my grandmother, were all women who worked outside the home, yet they made the most fabulous art pieces, whether it was patchwork or crotchet. They made a place for me in their homes to draw and paint.”
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE
Free Thinking: Black Atlantic | BBC Sounds, 2023
In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam donated money, literature and art to the University of Cambridge, and the museum which bears his name began. A research project led by New Generation Thinker Jake Subryan Richards has been exploring Cambridge’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and he has curated an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. Artist and writer Jacqueline Bishop who features in this show, joins Jake and April-Louise Pennant, who has been researching the history of Penrhyn Castle in Wales. Plus, Sherry Davis discusses the rediscovery of Black professionals in East African archaeology.
Producer: Ruth Watts
Black Atlantic: Power, people, resistance runs at the Fitzwilliam until Jan 7th 2024.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE
VIDEO
ICAF 2024: Artist Talk with Jacqueline Bishop in Conversation with Ronald Cummings
This program was recorded on May 29 as part of Gardiner Museum’s International Ceramic Art Fair programming. This program featured Jacqueline Bishop, represented by Ferrin Contemporary in Massachusetts.at the International Ceramic Art Fair (ICAF), and Ronald Cummings, associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities’ Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
INQUIRE
Additional works may be available to acquire, but not listed here.
If interested in lists of all works and series: Send us a message
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