See ‘Fragments of Epic Memory’ in Columbus

Shades of blue envelop the Carnival performer, her elaborate costume decorated with an array of feathers. She is the subject of Jamaican artist Paul Anthony Smith’s “Midnight Blue,” a picotage on pigment print created in 2020. Picotage is Smith’s technique of stippling the image with a sharp tool to create texture, like on the performer’s body. In “Midnight Blue,” he also used spray paint and colored pencil to enhance the blue painted figure in the background so that it appears drawn into the scene rather than naturally part of it.

Smith’s piece is part of “Fragments of Epic Memory,” a traveling exhibition that can be seen at the Columbus Museum of Art from Sept. 19 through Jan. 26. Named for a 1992 Nobel Prize-winning lecture by writer Derek Walcott, the exhibit serves as a window into the Caribbean through the presentation of historic photographs and documents alongside contemporary art across various mediums.

“It’s a region that’s inspired many of the freedom struggles that continue to play out across the globe,” says Daniel Marcus, the Columbus Museum of Art’s in-house curator for the exhibition. “Particularly, this show was conceived with the George Floyd movement unfolding simultaneously. There’s a link that the show makes between the uprising in 2020, and the pattern of movements in the Caribbean going all the way back to emancipation in the 1830s.”

The exhibition includes contemporary media such as photography, video projection and paintings by artists of Caribbean descent to tell the stories of both struggle and celebration. The heart of the exhibition is a collection of more than 100 historic photographs of the island region, which come from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs and depict the years following freedom from colonial rule.

“It asks us to think about the Caribbean, but it also asks us to reflect on the immensity of Caribbean history,” Marcus says. “That history is central to the show. It’s front and center. We want people to come away with that weight and at the same time we want people to come away with the lightness of Carnival.”

E. Broad St., Columbus 43215, 614/221-6801, columbusmuseum.org