Off Spring
This early painting by Al Ebanks depicts the shadowy outline of a lion, its facial features emerging clearly from the work’s highly texture surface. The work’s ambiguous title further obscures the work’s meaning, which suggests generational lineage and regal associations. Within a Caribbean context, the image of the lion may also connote the Lion of Judah and Rastafarianism’s adulation of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie.
About the Artist
Al Ebanks
b. 1963
Born in George Town, sculptor and painter Al Ebanks was awarded a scholarship from the Cayman National Cultural Foundation in 1995 to study sculpture with renowned Barbadian artist Karl Broodhagen and later learned bronze casting in Tuscany through the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands’ Artists Away grant programme (2004). Ebanks co-founded the Native Sons artists collective in 1996 and was awarded CNCF’s Artistic Achievement Award in 2001. He has exhibited locally and abroad, including a solo show at the Jackie Gleason Theatre, Miami. His paintings were used on-screen for the feature film Haven (written and directed by Frank E. Flowers; 2004). Ebanks’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Cayman Islands National Museum, NGCI and the Griffin Gallery, Chicago. NGCI exhibitions include the solo exhibition Dancing to Art (2004), and Native Sons’ Fahive (2005), All Access (2015), Native Sons – Twenty Years On (2016), Upon the Seas (2017), Mediating Self (2017), Cross Currents – 1st Cayman Islands Biennial (2019), Island of Women: Life at Home During our Maritime Years (2020), Reimagined Futures: 2nd Cayman Islands Biennial (2021), and The People’s Collection: A 25-Year Cultural Legacy (2022).
