Surrounded by the colourful and often dramatic installations at the Bermuda National Gallery's ongoing Barcardi Biennial, an enthusiastic audience of nearly 50 local artists, collectors and residents from the Caribbean Diaspora were led on a "Journey of Jamaican Art" by Belgian-born, Jamaica-based art historian and curator, Veerle Poupeye.

The Partner Re Art Lecture Series celebrates six successful years of bringing thrilling discourse on art to the Bermuda National Gallery. They have ended the 2007/2008 series in fine fashion with an in-depth analysis of the circuitous and often controversial path of the defined Jamaican Arts scene.

BNG director Laura Gorham said: "We have used our own Bermuda Biennial 2008 as the inspiration for looking at another island's art scene with the woman who literally wrote the book on Jamaican Art."

The path of Jamaica's robust art history intertwined with its cultural institutions and societal development can at once serve as both inspiration and cautionary tale to Bermuda's rapidly evolving arts scene.

Mrs. Poupeye began the lecture by illuminating the various perspectives on how Jamaican art is defined. She co-authored the seminal Modern Jamaican Art (1988) with David Boxer, a 2002 Bermuda Biennial juror. She explained to her audience his concept of The Jamaican Art Movement. Boxer's theory asserts that Jamaican Art is essentially "art that has developed as an integral part of the nationalist, anti-colonialist consciousness underlying the cultural and intellectual life of the island since the 1920s".

While that interpretation was and continues to be widely accepted internationally, it caused a maelstrom of controversy on Jamaican shores. Primarily, the argument decries the elevation of "Edna Manley as the pioneering defining Jamaican artist" likewise the implication that any art produced prior to her development of the Jamaican School was only colonial in origin. According to Mrs. Poupeye, Boxer's detractors — with a discernible "high art bias" — also rejected his "elevation of the Intuitives (self-taught primitive artists) to the top of the Jamaican artistic hierarchies".

The lecturer then led the audience down the emerging paths of Jamaican aesthetic traditions with an in-depth pictorial tour. She presented images from the first documented Jamaican artist, Isaac Mendez Belisario (1795 -1849) who was a Sephardic Jamaican Jew. Popular art and craft traditions such as calabash carving and furniture making, are practices that continue to yield economic returns, however small, from the tourism market.

According to rg Magazine May 2008, writer Ronald Lightbourne, in researching Bermudian photographer John A. Frith's forays into the Caribbean in the Mid 1800s, identified Kingston Jamaica as "one of the most important centres for the fashionable new art of photography".

Mrs. Poupeye identified Adolphe Duperly and sons, Haitian migrants, as the pioneers who introduced Daguerreotypes (photography) to Jamaica during that period. The Afro-Jamaican pottery, which predated these documented developments by two centuries, and was primarily utilitarian and displayed an aesthetic that reflected both West African and European influences.

The Nationalist Art Movement in Jamaica, led by Edna Manley, a leading cultural patron in the 1920s and advocate of the anti-colonial movement, was as David Boxer insisted, a watershed movement for Jamaica. Edna Manley organised and scouted for talent and introduced Modernism to the Jamaican cultural aesthete.

She identified her role in developing the Anglophone Caribbean's first School for the Visual Arts and celebrated Jamaica's ongoing commitment despite economic constraints, to the perpetuation of the Arts and the aggressive acquisition of iconic Jamaican pieces.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jamaica's Black Nationalist leader, was cited as a major influence during this period. Mrs. Poupeye pointed out that class and race differences led to different forms of anti-colonial nationalism expressed as either 'Jamaican Nationalism' or Diasporal Nationalism (African).

However, they shared a belief that culture's role was critical for the development of national identity.

Within this Nationalist Art Movement, the audience was shown dignified depictions of Jamaica's cultural life by various artists such as Albert Huie and David Potinger. In contrast, we were shown cheerful, romanticised interpretations that could be seen to have pandered to the tourism market such as those produced by Rhoda Jackson.

Mrs. Poupeye then examined the period led by the Contemporary Arts Association and the high levels of professionalism and high modernism they advocated. They were strongly influenced by the Black Power Movement of the 1960s.

In the context of this shift, Jamaica experienced Independence, mass migration, the Democratic Socialist Movement engineered by Michael Manley and a highly productive period for the arts in general.

There was a major move to celebrate the Intuitives — or self-taught Jamaican artists. Their name change from 'The Primitives' was a critical move in their elevation of status. These pieces that included wooden carvings, paintings and installations with images were often idealised, as Boxer says as "pure and sincere", uncontaminated by fashion, unmediated expressions of the world around them — and the worlds within.

Some pieces show African proportions and can be viewed as showing continuity of Jamaican Art traditions and those of the African ancestors. These pieces range in subject matter from the human condition, to landscapes, to the mystical. Rastafari, religion and politics also influenced the movement.

Mrs. Popeye showed signature pieces from each period and genre, and revealed the subtle underlying commentary and history of them all. Other artists discussed included Albert Huie, John Dunkley, Karl Parboosingh, Eugene Hyde, Barrington Watson, Osmond Watson, Mallica (Kapo) Reynolds, Everald Brown, David Boxer, Hope Brooks, Milton George, Leonard Daley, William "Woody" Joseph, Petrona Morrison and Omari Ra.

The lecture, which adeptly switched between scholarly academic analysis to witty and energetic social commentary, captivated the audience who were ready with questions and animated discussion.

When asked by an audience member to pinpoint a defining coming of age of the prolific Jamaican art scene, Mrs. Poupeye hesitated, expressing a belief that the Arts were an evolving continuum but, when pressed, declared that Jamaica's "cultural confidence emerged in the 1960s", post-independence.

It is an interesting perspective within the Bermuda art world as our cultural confidence grows and is supported by various institutions and is affected by a myriad of factors.

Bermuda society is in a state of relatively dramatic evolution as relates to the raging economy, the aesthetic shift of Bermuda's architectural and geographic landscape, the diversification of the Bermuda's racial and ethnic make-up and the world-wide trend of globalisation.

The stimulation and changed pace of the Bermuda society has yielded high levels of productivity from artists of all genres. From the classical high art, to the nuanced and complicated assemblages seen in this year's Biennial to an emergence of technology in art as has been seen in Tech Week's successful exhibition at the Bermuda Society of Arts.

The argument will be made that, not unlike Jamaica, changes in social dynamics whether good or bad, will demand social commentary and our artists are often our most skilful messengers.

"Artists must have friction," said Eugene Hyde, Jamaican graphic designer and painter.

With this declaration, Hyde, through the lens of Mrs. Poupeye's historical viewfinder, encapsulates the story of Jamaica's often contentious art scene.

She outlined the vicissitudes of the local industry and the 'cultural wars' that have played out within it from the 1920s and beyond.

She shared that many of Jamaican Arts' cultural battles were played out based on class, race and nationalistic or Diasporic ideology and now are based on sincere art versus market-driven art, but celebrates the debates that have evolved publicly through the local media and in Jamaica's cultural spaces.

She expressed her excitement at the constant public discourse and credits that critical debate for the phenomenal growth of the Jamaican Art movement. With the Bermuda Society of Arts' threatened eviction, the community was roused from its lackadaisical posture and moved to action.

The outcry from a wide range of local voices was enough to motivate politicians, impassioned letters to the editor and an eventual reversal of decision.

This is the power of art discourse and hopefully, one of the lessons learned on that lush and winding Journey of Jamaican Art.