John Beadle, a pioneer multidisciplinary artist in the post-Independence Bahamas, has died aged 60, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas has announced in a statement. ‘His passing in his sixtieth year has left a cavernous space in the visual and creative arts in The Bahamas.’
Born in Nassau to a Jamaican father and Bahamian mother, Beadle received a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and later an MFA in Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Beadle was influenced by many artistic traditions. His work – made with a mixture of materials including metal, paint, wood, clay, black iron, limestone, cardboard, plywood, paper and found items – explores natural forms, histories of slavery and colonialism, migration, poverty, violence and racial and national identity. His practice echoed how descendants of enslaved people would repurpose materials in Junkanoo, a festival that originated under slavery in British American colonies, which Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott once described as ‘the fragments of epic memory.’
‘John Beadle was a maker of art at the highest levels, a builder of ideas, and a builder of spaces; spaces he was not afraid to be the first to venture into, or the last to leave,’ said his friend and colleague John Cox. ‘His practice far transcended any one arena or designation yet always found itself in dialogue with the spaces we occupy because of his provoking us to participate, to dance, to cry, to fight, to realise, but most of all, to be still with the work.’
