Cayman Art Week Bus Tour (Part 1)

By Christopher Tobutt

Cayman Art Week’s bus tours – which take you around many different galleries, private homes and art spaces – have become pretty famous. I was lucky enough to go on one on Saturday 30 May, beginning in the early morning and finishing at mid-afternoon. It was a real soul-feast for an art-lover like me. There were nine stops in total – but because we wanted to do justice to each of them, The Caymanian Times has agreed to separate this into 3 separate articles, each one focusing on about three stops. It is still not enough to really explore the enormous amount of artistic talent – not only on this tour, but spread across the Cayman Islands which is making Cayman a regional centre for art and artists.

The day began at the National Gallery, though only briefly. Cayman Art Week is about getting out -- into studios, courtyards, and unexpected creative spaces. The Gallery served mainly as a launch point. Still, three exhibitions set the tone: Conversations in the 7th Dimension, honouring Randy Chollette; Next Wave, featuring artists aged 16 to 20; and Evolutions, tracing Cayman’s artistic story. Then the bus pulled away, and the island opened up.

The first stop, Scott Swing’s studio in George Town, felt like stepping into a different atmosphere entirely. The space carried a charged stillness, as though the air itself had weight. The first thing that met the eye were the life-size concrete figures. Their surfaces were embedded with shards of crushed glass, flashes of emerald and cobalt catching the light against the dull grey cement.

On the walls, large resin paintings loomed; layered, fractured surfaces that felt almost geological. Semi-abstract forms, stylised human skulls and vertebrae emerged and receded, giving the sense of ancient artifacts pulled from a lost world.

Around the edges of the studio, four guest artists offered a lighter counterpoint. Kara Julian’s shimmering, sea-touched paintings and hand-painted glassware; Sarah McDougall’s textile pieces carried the delicacy of memory stitched into fabric; Tanae Charlery’s expressive paintings felt like small emotional signatures; and Justine Jervis added quiet, contemplative works that seemed to breathe in the shadows.

From there, the bus rolled on to South Sound and Pure Art Gallery — a Caymanian cottage that has been a creative landmark for decades. Stepping inside felt like entering a home rather than a gallery. Paintings, ceramics, jewellery, and handmade gifts filled the rooms, each piece carrying the imprint of the island’s artistic heritage. Pure Art has long been a champion of Caymanian makers, and the warmth of the space reflected that history. Visitors drifted through the rooms, pausing at bright seascapes and the kind of small handmade treasures that speak to Cayman’s craft traditions.

The bus continued eastward to Harbour Walk, where two exhibitions awaited. In the courtyard, sunlight spilled across a lively display of contemporary work. Donovan Sewell’s vivid landscapes glowed with Cayman’s natural beauty, while Phillip Haynes, the painter who rediscovered his artistic talent after a revelatory trip to Cuba, brought bold abstract works.

One of the most striking presences in the courtyard was Rajj. His portraits, drawn in graphite on deep black backgrounds, emerged with photographic precision. The faces seemed to materialise from darkness, the highlights rendered in pencil so finely that they glowed.

Nearby stood several large plywood sculptures of sea creatures, carved from stacked, laminated sheets of plywood, sanded smooth and sealed to reveal the warm grain. A giant seahorse, its form both playful and monumental, was positioned beside other sealife – their shapes and their scale giving them a presence that was impossible to ignore.

Inside Unit 2, the atmosphere shifted again. Here, Kendra Ador-Agramonte, an architect by profession, presented Rocket Fuel for the Soul — a series of AI-generated video works exploring how technology might shape more human-centred spaces. Her approach to AI felt less like a technical experiment and more like a form of architectural dreaming: shifting colours, fluid structures, and digital landscapes that suggested new ways of imagining space.

And then the bus moved on.

This was only the first part of the journey. Ahead lay the Visual Arts Society at Pedro Castle, with its pottery wheels and clay-splattered aprons; Ren Seffer’s studio in Breakers, where the sea breeze moves through the work; Gram Bella’s in North Side; and several more stops before the bus would finally return to the National Gallery in the middle of the afternoon.

But those are stories for the next article. The tour is just getting started!