Exhibition
This mid-career survey exhibition delves into the rich and varied practice of Nasaria Suckoo Chollette, a leading Caymanian artist and member of the Native Sons artists’ collective and the winner of the inaugural Cayman Islands Biennial’s Bendel Hydes Award in 2019.
Chollette’s work offers a deep and multi-layered consideration of Caymanian history, including those aspects of our shared experience that have often been overlooked, or even buried. Meditating on the role of women in Caymanian society and the traditions that were handed down from one generation to the next, Chollette unpacks both her personal and collective story through a complex network of connections that bind family and community.
Central to the exhibition’s narrative is our islands’ traumatic history of enslavement and its continued resonance of that historical trauma in our contemporary society. Chollette’s story is one of forced and voluntary migration, of settlement and nation-building, ancestral ties and the persistence of spiritual and folkloric traditions, presented side by side with the intimate, the feminine and the domestic – whereby women’s work is raised from the mundane to the spiritual.
Through a variety of artistic disciplines—from installation and sculptural assemblage to video, collage and mixed media painting – this exhibition presents a body of both new and past work spanning across two decades. Although often strikingly contemporary in appearance, it provides a powerful commentary on the past, touching on the darker chapters of Cayman’s history while honouring the remarkable resilience of the Caymanian people.
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About the Artist
Nasaria Suckoo Chollette
b. 1968
Born in George Town, Grand Cayman, Suckoo Chollette received a BA in Theatre and an MA in Educational Theatre from New York University. She is a member of the artists collective Native Sons and has exhibited widely both with the group and as a solo artist. An accomplished poet and actor, her work explores themes of female strength and empowerment, race and the repercussions of enslavement, as well as the erosion of Caymanian cultural traditions. In 2006 Suckoo Chollette won first place in the McCoy Prize competition for her painting Maiden Plum, and in 2019 she was the Bendel Hydes award winner in the inaugural biennial exhibition for her work Becoming Again (2019). In 2021 she was also the recipient of a Gold Star for Creativity at the National Arts and Culture Awards Ceremony. Her work is included in the permanent collections of NGCI and the Cayman Islands National Museum, and is featured in Art of the Cayman Islands, the islands’ first formal art history (Scala Fine Art Publishers Ltd., Fall 2016). NGCI exhibitions include: Native Sons’ Fahive (2005), The Persistence of Memory (2011), Metamorphoses (2014), All Access (2015), tIDal Shift: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Caymanian Art (2015), Native Sons – Twenty Years On (2016), Speak to Me (2016), Mediating Self (2017), Revive: Contemporary Caymanian Craft (2017), Cross Currents – 1st Cayman Islands Biennial (2019), Island of Women: Life at Home During our Maritime Years (2020), Interior and Interiority (2020), Reimagined Futures – 2nd Cayman Islands Biennial (2021) and The People’s Collection – A 25-Year Cultural Legacy (2022).
