Bermuda’s two major visual arts venues, the Bermuda National Gallery and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, opened major exhibitions in September. In both, artists look beyond the island’s beauty to the lives and histories it can conceal. Conceived and curated separately, the exhibits highlight several artists who appear at both locations, have overlapping themes, and show younger, emerging artists alongside long-established ones.

More significantly, both exhibitions, each in its own way, promote a new understanding of Bermudian life, diving below the surface to reveal a more complete or updated story by establishing identity, recognising oppression or acknowledging the island’s challenges balanced with its charms.

The 2026 Bermuda Biennial opened on September 23, and as with previous Biennials, guest jurors were tasked with selecting from a field of submissions and proposals. In the past, this has fallen to artists or art dealers, but this year, the BNG welcomed Akili Tommasino and Julie Crooks, curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, respectively.

The thematic cohesion running through the gallery stems from the research Tommasino and Crooks conducted in the lead-up to selection. Tommasino has family ties to Bermuda, but Crooks does not. Tommasino chose to partner with Crooks knowing her foundational work on the African diaspora at the AGO. Together, the scholars researched the island’s history, even drawing on the museum’s permanent collection, according to Eve Godet Thomas, Director of Exhibitions at the BNG.

Their framework for the exhibition, titled Siren Songs, invokes the sirens of myth, whose enticing voices lured sailors to their death on the rocky shore. This “warning and seduction”, as the curators describe it, recurs as a thread linking the work on display.

The exhibit opens with pieces from the permanent collection, illustrating the historical and mythological basis for the exhibition’s focus. The Bermudian painter Charles Lloyd Tucker’s Storm in a Teacup from 1959, promised to the permanent collection, demonstrates the island’s tradition of artistic activism. The abstract painting references the Theatre Boycott of 1959, which helped dismantle segregation on the island. Other selections from the permanent collection reference European and African roots, early Bermudian photography, and the legacy of Bermuda in the work of modernist figures such as Norman Lewis.

The remaining galleries are given to the Biennial selections, contemporary works looking beyond Bermuda’s stunning beauty to tell a fuller story. About half of the artists are first-time Biennial artists, while others (Charles Zuill, Otto Trott, Christina Hutchings) have appeared in many Biennials over the years.

The interspersing of generations and viewpoints strengthens the theme of the lure of beauty concealing a world of danger or dread.

In the upper gallery, Shanna Hollis and Yesha Townsend’s collaboration, inadherent, expounds on the precarity of the island’s roads, eulogising lost lives through poetry and sculptural shrine. Two motorbikes, emblazoned with adhesive stickers, sequentially unwind a poem that evokes the lure of speed and the dangers of Bermudian roads. Hanging near by are Eli Cedrone’s Island Time at Full Speed, which renders a traffic accident more explicitly, and Corrina Rego’s Second Chance, which shifts to the dangers of the sea, tracing the search pattern that led to a kayaker’s rescue in 2025.

The written word, used visually or semantically, appears prominently throughout the exhibit, actively inscribing concepts in literal terms. Kevin Morris’s Ordeal by Tempest, or Omar Dill’s Report to the Crown and Loosing Sight of the Roots integrate words with images to investigate historical experience through the authority of language. Jasmine Lee’s The national language is English, and you can drink the water is more nuanced in its implied aural cadence, where, according to Lee, “roots of words, the turn of phrase, carry histories, power, and memory”.

Other works eschew the literalness of text but retain the weight of a literary tone. Most dramatically, Jahbarri A. Wilson’s multi-panelled painting Over the hull & Beyond the netting looks down over the main gallery with a seductive power. Wilson based his mermaid figure on the mythology of African ancestors who chose a life under the Atlantic Ocean over enslavement. His mermaid has adapted to her ecosystem, sprouting marine life from her back, which reads at once as camouflage and impediment. The figure is powerful, but a bit ambiguous. A close look reveals her gender, with muscular thighs suggesting the power that propels her.

“She’s always swimming against current,” Wilson told Thomas.

Jordan Carey’s Laying Hands: Roads, Homes & Hideaways uses text obliquely to reframe the narrative of the Bermudian worker. The image depicts a worker quarrying stone, with an actual stone saw forming part of the work’s structure. Carey is accomplished at making and printing paper, using organic media and dyes. In this case, however, the paper is reconstituted from editions of The Royal Gazette as a critical reading of the paper’s neglect of the Black Bermudian narrative. His work, then, effectively reframes and reinscribes the story of Bermuda’s architectural forms with the labour that produced them.

Stone is an apt metaphor for the island’s dual experiences and factors into many of the works on display. Bermudian limestone creates the iconic rooflines, a visual symbol of the island’s enduring beauty and part of its lure. In Carey’s work, the saw makes the labour tangible, revealing the struggle behind that architectural form.

This more nuanced display of Bermudian signs allows for many readings to coexist, revealing layers of meaning, even within similar imagery. The stone quarry Carey pictures finds counterparts in the abstract renderings of Charles Zuill’s Wells, or Alex Allardyce’s Block (Dissected Sphere). In Zuill’s silverpoint drawings and Allardyce’s cardboard sculpture, the formalism of Bermuda’s structures dominates. Other works address the singularity of the island’s architecture from a place of exclusion (Nike Bada’s Round d Back), or the vicissitudes of history and nature (Antoine A.R. Hunt’s Door Chair Table and Lilly Ralston’s Abandoned Roofs).

The melding of home, struggle, and joy is particularly affecting in Alyson Thompson and Jayde Gibbons’s multimedia installation This Too Shall Pass. Here, film footage, family photographs, and elements of home life record the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which ravaged Jamaica in 2025. Damaged family photographs, digitally reconstructed, and films of the reconstruction process are hung alongside other traces of Thompson’s family history to powerfully record the storm’s devastation. Superimposed images of Bermuda remind the viewer of connections between Atlantic islands and the shared experience of loss and familial fortitude, especially in nature’s destructive paths.

From the outset, Tommasino and Crooks help us look below the glassy-smooth surface of the Bermudian scene, illustrating the sirenic lure of Bermuda’s natural and architectural beauty along with the sharpness and pain that can lie within. This curatorial structure allows artists with many viewpoints, using varied materials and processes — reconstituted paper, family photographs, motorbikes, or silverpoint — to offer persuasive and accurate accounts of island life.

• Bermuda Museums’ Look Below the Surface: Part II will run next week and will review An(other) World on view now at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art