Cayman National Museum Presents: “Conversations with Popular Art”

Our new exhibition, titled Conversations with Popular Art, features work by self-taught, popular artists - or Intuitives, as they are often called - from the Cayman Islands, along with other Caymanian artists who have utilized popular art idioms and techniques in their work.

The exhibition invites reflection on the status of popular art and artists in the context of Caymanian art and explores the ways in which the popular culture is celebrated and used to assert Caymanian identities, community and belonging. The exhibition looks at self-taught, popular art as a dialogue between the individual imagination and cultural conventions and traditions, and considers its complicated relationship to the artistic mainstream, where it is granted a foundational and pioneering role, but not always equal status. It also interrogates the conventional boundaries between art and craft and invites viewers to regard all objects and images on view as full-fledged “art”, as objects and images of often remarkable imaginative and technical ingenuity and sophistication. The exhibition also explores into tourism’s contradictory role in shaping perceptions of Caymanian culture, often to the point of stereotype, and preserving and reviving traditional artistic practices that might otherwise have become obsolete.

The self-taught artists represented in the exhibition include celebrated names such as Gladwyn K. “Miss Lassie” Bush and Harvey Ebanks, but also less-known names such as Edney McLean and anonymous artists whose names were not recorded. Their work is exhibited along with that of mainstream artists such as Charles Long and Virginia Foster, whose work interprets popular forms. The exhibition features work in a variety of media, such as paintings on conventional and unconventional surfaces, drawings, carvings, thatch and other textile and fiber work, ceramics, and mixed media objects.

Most of the works of art in the exhibition are from the Cayman Islands National Museum collection, including the Ira Thompson Collection and the Virginia Foster Collection, supplemented by loans from the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands and the Cayman National Foundation.

The opening of this exhibition, on May 23, 2025, is scheduled to coincide with Cayman Art Week 2025. The exhibition will continue until the end of August 2025. On May 23, the Museum will be open from 9 am to 9 pm, with free admission for the day, and light refreshments will be served after 5 pm.