Jamaican reggae, dub clubs, police violence and Black culture are at the center of a new exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA) by British artist Denzil Forrester, a show curated by Gean Moreno.
ICA unveiled the “Denzil Forrester: We Culture” exhibition with an opening reception last Thursday which featured a celebration of dub music and a special appearance by Jamaican producer Hopeton “Scientist” Brown.
Forrester, who was born in Grenada and later moved to London, returns to the American art scene with a collection of more than two dozen drawings and paintings from early in his career. A majority of the vivid and vibrant paintings capture the party scene inside London nightclubs during the 1970s, when Rastafarian culture grew increasingly popular in England.
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“Little Shaka” by Denzil Forrester is on display at the “Denzil Forrester: We Culture” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
“The clubs I used to go to were about 50 to 60% Rastafarians, some of them might have dressed like Rastafarians, with the dreadlocks and big headgear, even if they weren’t,” said Forrester. “I loved what they looked like and I loved how they danced, and that helped me to make those paintings.”
Another set of paintings, inspired by Forrester’s childhood memories in Grenada, pays homage to Carnival in the Caribbean.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m calling extended Caribbean [experiences] of immigrant kids who ended up living outside of the islands, like many kids in Miami,” said Moreno, explaining his intention behind his curation of the exhibition. “How they create their own cultures. I’ve been thinking about that and working with different artists to show that. Denzil was perfect for this. So I reached out to him and started talking about what would make sense.”
Eager to learn everything he could about art, a young Forrester set out for London’s Central School of Art and Design in the mid-1970s. In 1981, he attended Royal College of Art before heading to Rome for a two-year fellowship. In the late ’80s, he was selected for the Harkness Fellowship in New York.
Forrester discovered his muse – nightclubs – during those early college years.
“You have to have something that means something to you,” he explained. “If you look at all the famous artists, van Gogh, Picasso, they always painted things that meant something to them, like landscapes and water lilies, but when I painted landscape, I didn’t get excited by it that much.”
Inspired by London’s nightlife, Forrester began carrying compressed charcoal, pastels and paper with him to a nearby club. Soon, he found himself at the dimly lit, two-story venue every Friday night to draw what he saw there.
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“Wolf Singer” by Denzil Forrester is a part of a collection of paintings highlighting Caribbean Carnival.
From 10 p.m. to midnight, as DJs blasted disco and R&B, Forrester would complete several drawings, creating each over the length of time needed to play one song. At midnight, he’d head downstairs for dub sound system operator Jah Shaka’s arrival. There he would complete another series of “gesture” drawings against the backdrop of Jamaican reggae and dub, leaving the club with about 50 drawings total per night.
“Gesture drawing is when you’re using emotion to draw what you feel,” Forrester explained. “You don’t want to use intellect or know what you’re drawing. I wouldn’t see what these drawings looked like because it was dark. But the next day, I would look at the drawings and then use about three or four of them to create a painting the next week in art school. That was the beginning of me creating a language for myself.”
Drawing from life once more, Forrester made police brutality the focus of his college thesis after a friend and former neighbor, Winston Rose, died while in police custody in 1981.
“Deado 2,” “Death Walk,” “Three Wicked Men” and “Funeral of Winston Rose” each depict moments leading up to Rose’s death and burial. They are all on display at ICA.
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“Blue Tent” by Denzil Forrester was painted during a fellowship in Rome.
“This is relevant today because it relates to what’s going on, with what happened to George Floyd,” Forrester said. “When you think of all the sad things that have happened, and even recently like those five police officers that killed the young bloke, you realize things haven’t changed that much.”
Forrester, whose art career hit a roadblock for about three decades, said he is elated to have his work at ICA.
“I’ve been making paintings since I was about 17 and nothing happened until I retired. I’m 67 now,” he said. “This is so exciting for me because, for 10 years, I was in art school and traveling to many places and was successful, but then nothing happened for me for 30 years ... now people are actually showing my work and can relate to it.”
Forrester joined the Stephen Friedman Gallery, a private art space based in London, in 2018, and has had his work shown internationally since. Prior to this Miami exhibition, he presented a show in Los Angeles.
(Chris Cater)
Denzil Forrester, exhibiting artist at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, attends the opening night event for his show./Courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art Miami
“The great thing about being launched commercially in my 60s is that I had about 40 years to paint without being interrupted,” he said. “Obviously, I was teaching part-time for 30 years but that didn’t stop me from doing my own thing.”
Moreno says “We Culture,” which runs through Sept. 24., was 18 months in the making. He traveled to Cornwall in England to view Forrester’s expansive art collection to select the pieces that are now on display at ICA.
“This exhibition shows us how that happens in London around the reemergence of Rasta culture,” said Moreno. “It adds to the way we’ve been trying to think of the expansion of these cultures from the Caribbean that are not just in the Caribbean anymore. And these new cultures that form may not even be identical to what happens in the Caribbean. We’re cumulatively starting to build this bank of knowledge of how immigrant groups and displaced folks start building their own culture.”
Admission to the museum is free but registration is required. Visit ICAMiami.org for details.