The end of September brought two new exhibits that reconsider the depiction of Bermuda in the art historical record. One is Siren Songs, the Bermuda Biennial at the Bermuda National Gallery; the other is An(Other) World at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.

An(Other) World, which opened on September 25, fills the Butterfield Gallery with a nuanced understanding of Bermudian experience. Whereas the Bermuda Biennial showcases works from the moment, as biennials do, as Masterworks curators Jasmine Lee and Daisy Gould staged a reconsideration of the permanent collection, installing much-loved works from the past alongside voices of contemporary artists.

Lee, whose work appears in the BNG exhibit, captured the distinction: “The collection does a good job at telling us what Bermuda looked like; it doesn’t always tell us what Bermuda felt like, who lived here, the life of a particular space.”

Lee and Gould set out to show what Bermuda feels like by creating a dialogic space to engage the viewer in reframing the Bermudian experience. In the work by Charlie Godet Thomas, in his Fleurons for an Epiphyte with Georgia O’Keeffe’s Banyan Tree, the reframing is literal.

An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant, precisely how Godet Thomas’s work grows out of O’Keeffe’s. He references O’Keeffe’s drawing in the structure he created to surround hers. Here, he comments on the anthropomorphic quality she endows nature with (“like a hand in the crease of another’s arm”) while further enhancing it through contemporary ecological concerns (“which serves to stop a fall or from being felled”).

Elsewhere, the reframing occurs through placement. Gould and Lee hung paintings, sculptures, and photographs like constellations, creating new meanings through proximity.

“I like to think about the works as sentences, or phrases,” Lee explained. “Some works have a full stop, some work with a dash, and some are exclamations, but together they resolve to a phrase or a sentence.”

The installation extends the metaphor. Individual works become phrases and their groupings become paragraphs.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer faces one such conversation. The Modernist landscape by American painter Frank Carson, Late Afternoon of 1932, reads differently next to Cy Gavin’s Portrait of My Father from 2014.

Carson’s painting belongs to the 20th-century tradition of landscape artists who visited Bermuda for study. This is a painting by a non-Bermudian using the island’s landscape and light to inspire stylistic investigation, in this case through vibrant colour. His landscape is silent and uninhabited, focusing on the autonomous beauty of the shore, rather than seeing it as a social setting.

Gavin, also an American, painted the shore in the context of his Bermudian father’s loss. Linked visually by colour and materiality to the Carson, Gavin combined his acrylic paint with his father’s cremains, his own blood, diamonds, and Bermuda’s sand. The landscape now literally and physically merges with the artist and his father.

For many works, the dialogue ignites with text panel additions by OYANGO, an artistic collaboration of Liana and Ajala Nanang Omodele. Their alternative interpretations challenge the customary reading of paintings. Sometimes these alternate readings originated from OYANGO, and other times from student workshops they conducted.

In this manner, E. Ambrose Webster’s Couple of 1922 is recast as “the casual sexualisation and dehumanisation of the Black body”. Another viewer may see the clothed, female figure in this painting as powerful, condemnatory even. This divergence in reading is exactly what this exhibit encourages.

“The exhibit creates an invitation to keep looking,” Gould explains. “People think that art is just an object in a space but in reality it can lead to a way of thinking about things differently, imagining the world differently.”

And if the viewer disagrees with the reading, either OYANGO’s or the curatorial description, they are encouraged to “mail” a postcard to the exhibit in the upper gallery, thereby continuing the conversation through the run of the show.

Works that entered the Masterworks collection years ago, such as the Webster or the Carson, are now re-engaged. Whereas the museum’s original mission was to repatriate works about Bermuda, their meanings were not fixed at the time of accession. Their history continues to evolve. “It’s not that old is wrong and new is right,” Gould reminds us. “It’s that context changes.”

Another “constellation,” or visual sentence, centres around darkness in Bermuda. Drawing from Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean, edited by Marsha Pearce, night scenes from the collection — by Charles Zuill, Bruce Stuart, and Nicola Muirhead — ask: what is Bermuda without that magic light and transcendent colour? What is Bermuda like in the dark, a fitting metaphor for the exhibition’s goal of discovery and recontextualisation.

That question, “What is Bermuda?” arises repeatedly with the groups of paintings, sculptures and photographs. In the upper gallery, Graham Foster’s Portrait of Dan Dempster, from 1990, sharply contrasts with the Pan Am travel poster by Mark Von Arenburg from 1955. The poster’s gloss of a touristic vision in no way reflects Foster’s agitated, dream-like setting, all fracture and untethered motion. This is myth confronted by reality but which is reality, and to whom?

Perhaps the clearest picture of a Bermudian reality comes from Jayde Gibbons’s constellation Children of the Soil. Her photographs of diving at Admiralty House are interspersed with alternative depictions of Bermudians, hung between two works depicting Bermuda without Bermudians. Her photographs exclaim presence rather than absence, showing an ebullient community, tied to the land but not obscured by it.

Gibbons speaks effectively and joyfully to Bermudian identity, as do many of the other works in the exhibit and the collection more generally. This identity, this exhibit reminds us, is constantly evolving. Only by its investigation, both in historical and contemporary images, do new understandings emerge. Lee reminds the viewer: “To define our culture we need to properly evaluate all the ways we have arrived here.”

“That’s the crux,” she continues. “You can see a work of art, then see it again and again, but with a new lens each time.” Revisiting earlier readings and placing historical works alongside contemporary responses deepen both the understanding of identity and the discussion of art.

The examination of identity that both the BNG and Masterworks undertook this autumn is not new to contemporary museum spaces. In Bermuda, however, where stunning beauty motivates much artistic expression for Bermudians and foreigners alike, reconsiderations like these are crucial. Recent exhibitions have opened this conversation. Lee’s and Gould’s An(Other) World boldly responds.

• The An(Other) World dialogue continues through March 20, 2027, with various events encouraging discussion and response. A children’s reading room in the main gallery engages young visitors and an adult book club on exhibition themes will meet in November, January, and March. (Check thewebsite for more information.) Lee and Gould spoke in the galleries on October 13, as will artists on October 29 and November 19