By Dominique Hunter

Guyana has quite a strong and extensive history of prolific women artists. Although poor and sporadic documentation have threatened to relegate these women to obscurity, their creative legacies have been kept alive through the continued efforts of institutions like the National Gallery of Art and groups like the Guyana Women Artists’ Association (GWAA). With every exhibition mounted or text written in their honour we are reminded of the many glass ceilings they would have shattered so that future generations of female practitioners could one day enjoy navigating less suppressive routes to success and increased representation.

It would be remiss of me to speak of Guyanese women artists without highlighting the exceptional work of GWAA, a non-profit group that has, for the last thirty years, been committed to providing the kind of environment that nurtures women’s talents and encourages creative growth. The group’s start was a modest one, materializing after a meeting in the home of fellow artist Stanley Greaves. But despite its humble beginning GWAA would eventually expand to include dozens of members, exhibiting their works locally and further afield in Brazil, Barbados, Canada and the United Kingdom, to list a few.

GWAA’s history as well as the beginnings of some of the earliest arts initiatives in Guyana is almost always traced back to Golde White, a Barbadian artist who, in 1930, mounted the first ever group exhibition of art and craft in British Guiana. Other pre and post-colonial developments in art that have been attributed to White include the formation of the Art and Craft Society of British Guiana in 1931 and GWAA much later on in 1987. White recruited the help of women like Dorothy King to set her ideas into motion and from these alliances they were able to build their own platform in an environment that once trivialized the works of women artists.

Since the launch of the association’s book “60 Years of Women Artists in Guyana 1928-1988, A Historical Perspective” in 1988, there has not been any other publication as thoroughly researched or comprehensive in its compilation of works produced by women artists in Guyana. Nesha Haniff, in her introductory remarks of the publication wrote that the impetus to acknowledge those women artists and document their works was born from “[…] the general feeling (among both men and women) that Guyana does not have many women artists outside of Marjorie Broodhagen, Leila Locke and Stephanie Correia.”

The intention of GWAA’s publication was, among other things, to highlight that contrary to popular belief there were quite a number of practicing women artists at the time. In fact, the book lists one hundred and twenty one women artists who would have been producing work between the years 1928 and 1988. The three names identified were simply a few from dozens of other women who accepted leadership roles and committed their lives to the development of art and the education of their fellow countrymen and women. The publication was an attempt to correct the public’s oversight. Instead of waiting to be pulled from the shadows by someone else they took the bold initiative of presenting their own thorough (but not definitive) catalogue of women artists.

In the same publication Broodhagen describes the moment one of the major shifts in the local art climate occurred saying, “In the early years, women worked at the simple level of the needle, with small bits of water colour and drawing, just enough to relax them from their housewifely duties. In the colonial period the wives of many expatriates, seeing the talent of Guyanese, decided to do something about it. They therefore set about holding art classes, teaching in institutions, promoting the artists (chiefly men at the time), holding exhibitions, forming art groups and the like. Foremost among these women were Mrs. Rowland, Mrs. Golde White, Mrs. Mary Heron-Bruce, Miss Romilly Seymour and Mrs. Francis Smith.”

Today we celebrate those women and the tremendous sacrifices they would have made in an effort to assert their presence in a male dominated field. Fore runners like White, King, Broodhagen, Locke and Correia; artists and educators like Agnes Jones, Mavis, Magda and Cynthia Pollard, Irene Gonsalves, Edna Cadogan, Waveney Daly, Syble Douglas, Maylene Duncan, Hazel Shury, Hilary Ng, Winnie DaSilva, Lucille Cadogan, Professor Doris Rogers, Daphne Rogers, Sheila King, O’Donna Allsopp, Bernadette Persaud, Betsy Karim, Elfrieda Bissember, Kathleen Thompson Henriquo, Josefa Tamayo, Volda Ramsammy and countless others who have, in some way, worked towards improving our individual and collective visibility. It is imperative that we never stop saying their names; they should flow as naturally from our memories and our mouths as the words of our national anthem.

The local art climate is ever changing and no one can say with certainty when those changes will unfold or how they will affect us. But while we anticipate those transformations it would benefit us greatly to keep the legacies of these women alive even as we look to the current generation of women artists to continue the work that began decades before. One interesting

shift that has since occurred involves the current male to female ratio of practicing artists in Guyana, more specifically in Guyana’s premier art institution. Just last year, for the first time in the history of the E.R. Burrowes School of Art the institution saw a batch of all female students graduate from its diploma program. That spoke volumes about what the future of women’s creative practices could look like in Guyana and makes one hopeful that the divide between representation of the sexes could finally be coming to a close.