2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing

The Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, inaugurated in 2014, is an annual award for an original piece of critical writing on contemporary Caribbean art by a Caribbean writer aged 35 or under.

Established by Alice Yard, the prize aims to encourage new writing on Caribbean art and artists, and to identify emerging voices in contemporary Caribbean art criticism.

The winner of the prize will receive a cash award of US$1,000 and publication in The Caribbean Review of Books. The inaugural prize will open for entries in May 2014, with a deadline of 14 July. The winner will be announced in late 2014.

Download full eligibility and entry guidelines and the prize entry form here.

To be eligible to enter for the 2014 prize, a writer must be a citizen of the Caribbean, whether resident in the region or abroad, and be under the age of 35 on the entry deadline, 14 July, 2014.

Each participant may submit only one entry. Participants need not have a formal background in art history or criticism.

An entry should:

• Be an original piece of writing of no more than 3,000 words, which has not previously been published in print or online;

• Be written in English (or, if originally written in another language, translated into English by the author);

• Examine a work or a series of works by a contemporary Caribbean artist, resident in the region or abroad;

• Be aimed at an intelligent general audience as much as an academic or professional one.

A piece of writing entered for the prize does not have to be a conventional critical essay or review. The prize administrators are interested in writing that investigates different forms and genres, as long as it is driven by genuine critical engagement.

The prize will be decided by a panel of three judges, who will select a winner and two honorable mentions. The 2014 judges are:

Krista Thompson (Bahamas/US), chair
Art historian and curator
Associate professor of art history, Northwestern University

Charles Campbell (Jamaica/Canada)
Artist and curator
Chief curator, National Gallery of Jamaica

Courtney J. Martin (US)
Art historian and curator
Assistant professor of the history of art and architecture, Brown University

The Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing is conceived and established by the co-directors of Alice Yard, Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, and Nicholas Laughlin, who will administer the prize and support the panel of judges in their deliberations.

For any queries about eligibility requirements or the submission process, please contact the prize administrators at:

helloaliceyard@gmail.com

Al Braithwaite: The Limes Installation

Tuesday 13 May to Saturday 7 June, 2014, at Alice Yard
Opening conversation: Tuesday 13 May, 6.30 pm

Al Braithwaite is a British conceptual artist who has been resident in Trinidad since April 2013, having relocated from London. In recent months he has been working out of Alice Yard’s Granderson Lab space in Belmont.

Braithwaite’s new project The Limes Installation opens at Alice Yard on Tuesday 13 May, with an informal conversation in which the artist will discuss his recent work. The Limes Installation can be viewed until the night of Saturday 7 June, when the project will close with an informal get-together.

The Limes Installation is a crop of limes that has been pulled out of the fire. The installation comprises 286 charred fruit. The artist writes:

“As a symbolic device placed in its historic context, the installation continues the tradition of fruit being used in art to symbolise mortal flesh, recalling the Dutch 17th-century Vanitas painting tradition. It revisits this tradition together with an earlier (mid-16th century) tradition of burning heretics during the English Reformation, during the reign of Mary I. The names of the 286 men and women who died for their faith in this way for resisting papal authority are applied to labels on the exterior of the fruits.

“The capacity for the installation to horrify is written into the limes’ seared surface, creating a memorial to aspects of resistance, state-sanctioned brutality, and sectarian tensions among believers. The troubling and potentially heroic idea of self-sacrifice runs through The Limes Installation, and finds traction in the metaphor of the way that a fruit might give its flesh for the dispersal of a seed.

“The black skin of each object is curious in its lifeless, post-catastrophe state, and attests to the depredations and violence visited on its surface. Such a feeling of aftermath reinforces the question of the whereabouts/cultural memory of the absent souls that have been expunged from their physical bodies. The work hinges on a paradox of the action of fire: that it can preserve as it consumes, turning soft ephemeral forms into archival tokens. In this way, fluid and seasonal material can be transformed into a series of turgid vessels, akin, for instance, to the transformation of clay when passed through a kiln. The fragile breakability of the resulting vessels can heighten the sense of care required to maintain each object’s integrity, through periods of political crisis and periods of natural disaster.”

All are invited.

•

About Al Braithwaite:

Al Braithwaite (b. 1979) is a contemporary artist from London, who works across a variety of disciplines, including sculpture, assemblage, found material, and installation. His work fits into a tradition of conceptual art, recalling Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and aspects of Orphism. He links his work to an interest in struggle, addressing concurrent themes in geopolitics, ethics, metaphysics, mysticism, and existentialism. He has been resident in Trinidad since April 2013.