Join us for the opening of

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September 2016 to September 2017

Alice Yard and Granderson Lab

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X = symbol to mark a specific location
X = sign for multiplication
X = an unknown variable
X = 10

In September 2016, Alice Yard marks its tenth anniversary as a space for conversation and experiment. Beginning in a modest Woodbrook backyard, our activities have gradually expanded through creating a small gallery space, residency quarters for visiting artists and curators, a bandroom used by dozens of musicians for rehearsal, and the adjunct space Granderson Lab in Belmont, home to a number of artists and creative collaboratives.

We began ten years ago with questions and possibilities. Our evolution has been organic and open-ended. As we consider our actions and ideas of the past decade, our instinct is less to celebrate and more to affirm our spirit of investigation and exchange, our ethos of generosity and independence.

As we prepare to begin our second decade, on Sunday 11 September, 2016, Alice Yard will host an installation by artist in residence Blue Curry, alongside September 2006, a modest exhibition drawn from our archives and documenting the moment of Alice Yard’s beginning ten years ago. We will also share details of a curatorial collaboration between Blue Curry and Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier, which will unfold over the coming month: a series of site-specific, public-domain projects by various artists, exploring questions of authorship, decision-making, and the artwork as event or action rather than object exclusively.

These activities will also open YEAR X, a twelve-month programme of projects and events that reflect on the archive of our past and the prospects of our future. We invite our collaborators, interlocutors, and friends to join us in imagining what might be possible in “a backyard on a small island.”


All are invited.

Souvenir, by Blue Curry (hair combs, perspex plinths, billboard posters) for VITRINE, 2014

“Artists, this space is available”

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Photograph by Nadia Huggins

“We wanted to see what was the range of creative disciplines that could be accommodated simultaneously, which is pretty much the way negotiations were forged in a traditional yard context in urban Trinidad.”

Alice Yard co-director Sean Leonard, on the influence of family generosity and Carnival productivity on his practice, and our decade-long experiment in this small backyard in Woodbrook — interviewed by Stephen Stuemplfe and published in the September/October 2016 Caribbean Beat.

Richard Williams: New Objects and Wall Collages

Thursday 11 August, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Installing Bloody Republic

The artist will present a sequence of actions/experiments for one night only. Trinidad-born artist Richard Williams is influenced by contemporary wall graphics, graffiti, and the public performances of the Fluxus Movement. His creative explorations can be traced to their genesis in the yard of his family home in east Trinidad, and can now be seen on the streets of Germany.

“I moved to Germany about ten years ago… I began my formal art practice when I finished at the John S Donaldson Technical Institute design programme. Although I may be far from home, switching off my feelings of concern is not an option for me. I always pay attention to how we treat our environment and communities… My latest works combine the worlds of past and present. I am revisiting my past and bringing it into my present experiments. Showing the reality of T&T’s 2016 social collapse is important to me — dealing with these problems is the start for finding a way to solve it.”

Invasive Species (detail)

Rattan vs Plastic 

Asha Ganpat: New Works

Thursday 4 August, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard

During her week at Alice Yard, artist in residence Asha Ganpat has made two series of new works: Save Me Hanuman!, using found printed materials (an illustrated children’s book of Hindu stories and a book on local insects), and Hard Alchemy, using coins and gold leaf. On Thursday 4 August, she will present these along with an informal short talk on her recent and current projects. The works will remain installed until Saturday 6 August.

All are invited.

Introducing Asha Ganpat

Artist in residence, July and August 2016

Asha Ganpat is a multimedia visual artist who was born in Trinidad and now lives and works in New Jersey, where she is an adjunct professor of sculpture at Montclair State University, is an independent curator, and co-founded Red Saw Gallery in Newark.

In late July and early August 2016, Ganpat is artist in residence at Alice Yard, where she plans to use locally sourced media for her work. In one piece, she will combine images from a Hindu story book and a published survey of insect life in Trinidad to play out a vengeance fantasy spurred by the many bites and stings and near-misses over the years. In another work, Ganpat will look at the imbalance of currency exchange and will seek valuation and revaluation through a playful consideration of alchemy.

Ganpat received a BFA from Mason Gross, Rutgers University, and an MFA from Montclair State University. She has shown her work at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Insitituto di Cultura, Exit Art, the Noyes Museum, the Queens Museum, the Jersey City Museum, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Her work was cited as one of NYC’s top ten art installations of 2012 by Complex magazine. She is an alumnus of Aljira’s Emerge, Gaia’s Wonderwomen Program, the Annual New Jersey Book Art Symposium, and Chashama North residencies.

Captured in the Grip of Listening?

Photographs of People with Radios in (Post-) Colonial Bamako
A talk and research exhibition by Antawan I. Byrd
Wednesday 27 July, 2016, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Studio Photo Diallo, Untitled, 1962, Silver Gelatin Print, 5 x 7 in., Private Collection

Antawan I. Byrd is a PhD Candidate in Art History at Northwestern University, studying modern and contemporary art of Africa and the African Diaspora. During the months of July and August, 2016, he is researcher in residence at Alice Yard.

His dissertation, tentatively titled “Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art”, examines how artists in Bamako, Port of Spain, and New York use sound technologies to engage profound moments of political change, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century.

On Wednesday 27 July, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard, discussing his research on sound and photography in Bamako, and introducing his research interests and aims for Port of Spain. A selection of photographs collected during this research will be on display, continuing until Sunday 31 July.

All are invited.

Photo: Steeve Bauras

About Antawan I. Byrd:

Most recently, Byrd was an Associate Curator for Telling Time, the 10th Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography, 2015, and was a member of the editorial team for the 2012 Biennale Bénin Inventer Le Monde: L’artiste Citoyen. He was a curatorial assistant for J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in 2011. From 2009-2011, Byrd worked at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos as a curatorial assistant. His research has been supported by an Andrew Mellon CLIR fellowship, a Block Museum curatorial fellowship, a grant from Northwestern University’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies, and a Fulbright fellowship.

Alexandra Majerus: Down the Islands

Thursday 9 June, 2016, from 7 pm, at Alice Yard



During her time at Alice Yard, current artist in residence Alexandra Majerus has created a video work in response to conversations and text messages, which she will present on Thursday 9 June, along with an informal talk on her recent and current projects.

All are invited.

Alexandra Majerus is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video performance, and installation. With a half-Caribbean background, Majerus has repeatedly migrated between Barbados and Canada. She investigates the culture and history of Caribbean countries and their diasporas within their frameworks of colonialism and forms of neo-colonialism.

Introducing Alexandra Majerus

Artist in residence, May and June 2016

Alexandra Majerus is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video performance, and installation. With a half-Caribbean background, Majerus has repeatedly migrated between Barbados and Canada. She investigates the culture and history of Caribbean countries and their diasporas within their frameworks of colonialism and forms of neo-colonialism.

Majerus is currently an MFA candidate at OCAD University, and is looking at the dynamics of subjectivity and identity that lie between the constructed perception of Paradise and lived experience. During her residency at Alice Yard in late May and early June 2016, she plans to investigate the different and/or similar perceptions that Trinidadians may have of themselves and their landscape and culture in an economy that is not driven by tourism.