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  • Petrine Archer-StrawIn Memoriam (1956–2012)
  • Eddie Chambers (bio)

Professor Petrine Archer-Straw, who died recently and unexpectedly, was one of the most active and accomplished historians of Caribbean art. In her work as an artist, academic, art historian, writer, and curator, Archer-Straw consistently challenged the prevailing orthodoxies that treat Caribbean artists and cultural practice in geographic, racial, and artistic isolation. In essence, her position was that we cannot fully understand or appreciate the practice of Caribbean artists without due consideration of broader factors such as migration, history, identity, and above all diaspora—the scattering of many black people beyond their ancestral home-land of Africa. Archer-Straw traveled widely within the United States, the Caribbean region, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. Thus her keenly observed constructions of the role of diaspora within cultural identity and practice were built on very real experiences and engagement with diverse communities of people and artists the world over, and not just in her native Jamaica. Archer-Straw was responsible for authoring many texts on artists’ practice, including several books, and cocurating several important exhibitions for galleries in London and around the country.


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Born in Birmingham on Boxing Day 1956 to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw spent the first period of her life, until her teens, in the United Kingdom. Her family returned to Jamaica in the early 1970s, and since then, excepting periods of study and work abroad, much of her time was spent based in Kingston, Jamaica. In a catalogue essay written in 2005 (Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary), Archer-Straw recalled her upbringing in the West Midlands and discussed some of the factors [End Page 6] and influences that contributed to the development of her sense of self as a black British person of African and Caribbean heritage.

She gained a theology, history, and sociology BA from the University of the West Indies, Mona, graduating in 1978. She then studied at the Jamaica School of Art (later called the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts), securing a diploma in painting in 1982. This began a long and fruitful affiliation with this leading Caribbean art school. An MPhil in cultural history from the University of the West Indies, Mona, followed some years later in 1987. In 1994 she was awarded a doctorate from Courtauld Institute, University of London, for her critical study of Negrophilia (the somewhat skewed white embrace and love of things black and African), with particular emphasis on Paris, France, in the early part of the twentieth century. Archer-Straw was primarily known and widely respected as a historian of Jamaican and Caribbean art, a writer, a curator, a university professor, and a college lecturer. Perhaps less well known is her work as an accomplished artist in her own right. Her work made its way into a number of important collections, including that of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Her first major contribution to the study and research of Jamaican art was her collaborative work with Kim Robinson, Jamaican Art: An Overview—With a Focus on Fifty Artists. Published by Kingston Publishers in 1990, the book is still unsurpassed as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to the visual arts of Jamaica. An updated version of the book was published in the summer of 2011.

Archer-Straw also wrote art criticism and exhibition reviews, demonstrating her wider interest in the complex interplay between diaspora, migration, travel, artistic production, history, and identity. Her interest in such matters was further reflected in her very sizable body of scholarship, research, writing, and curatorial practice since the early 1990s.

Archer-Straw had an extended association with the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) beginning in 1983, when she joined the gallery’s education department. She subsequently served as an NGJ board member and did much to advance scholarship on many aspects of the gallery’s collection and many of the artists it represents. In 1994 she curated (and provided the catalogue entries for) Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists, an important exhibition held at London’s October Gallery. The exhibition brought together several artists based in Jamaica and presented their...

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