Carnival, from which, in Grenada the ShortKnee emerged, resulted from chaotic events south of the Sahara and on the streets of Europe played out in the Caribbean. My exploration of Grenada’s carnival icon, the ShortKnee, a masked carnival character wrapped in six and...
Masking was an integral part of Yorùbá religious culture which withstood the horrors of the Middle Passage. Grenada was a Yorùbá cultural area in the New World and the dominant African influence in the years immediately following Emancipation, arriving in their...
ShortKnee: Jinn of Maran is influenced by El genio del ingenio, a small oil on canvas (14.5 by 12 inches) in the collection of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan created in 1910 by Puerto Rican artist, Julio Tomás Martínez, considered the pioneer of Surrealism...
The ShortKnee masquerade was created post-Emancipation by Grenada’s creolised population to reconnect with an ancestral past. The earliest record of the word ‘ShortKnee’ in Grenada dates back to the 1920s, and references the knee-breeches. Disguised as a traditional...
I have been fascinated by the Rapanui Moai (Easter Island statues) since I came across them almost 40 years ago in, of all things, a comic book. I finally got to see (and touch) one up close, at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History about 10 years ago, and another...
Art in the Caribbean, An Introduction by Anne Walmsley and Stanley Greaves covers art in the region from 1940s to 2000s. With a scant sprinkling of mentions about Grenada state in the Leeward and Windwards Islands section pages 146 -148, there is not one image of...
