Congratulations to Adrienne Rooney, Art History Ph.D. candidate, for recently receiving The Donald C. Locke Award, a research fellowship from the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University for a research project titled "Donald Locke's Mark on the Caribbean Festival of Art (Carifesta)." The award provides funding for researchers exploring the collection of correspondence, manuscript materials, photographs, and printed materials of visual artist, teacher, critic, and writer Donald C. Locke.
Adrienne is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rice University. She studies twentieth-century art and (visual) culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Circum-Caribbean. Her dissertation—for the time being titled "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981" and to be completed in Spring 2023—is the first book-length academic study of Carifesta, an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts. Her dissertation attends to the conceptualization of the monumental, multilingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. With the support of extensive archival research and contemporaneous theories by, among others, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter, it weaves a story of the festival—a meeting place for artists from Brazil to Curaçao, from Saint Lucia to Suriname, from Venezuela to Haiti—in the heady, long 1970s.
Image: Donald Locke's “Timehri Man (Indian Shooting Fish),” 1967, shown in the inaugural Carifesta in 1972. Guyana National Collection.