How Baha Mar Is Elevating Bahamian Art Worldwide

18.12.2024 - 15:43 / cntraveler.com / Art Basel / John Cox

The history of art in the Bahamas was long defined by what tourists wanted—and did not want—to see. “Here it never rains, and the sky is always blue,” says John Cox, the executive director of arts and culture at the Nassau resort Baha Mar, with a rueful smile. We're sitting in ECCHO, the resort's second gallery space, launched a little over two years ago to showcase Bahamian artists interested in pursuing more complex ideas about life on the islands, like Kachelle Knowles, whose playful mixed-media portraits explore Black masculinity. In a section designed as a home away from home for the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB), where Cox was formerly chief curator, an installation is underway devoted to the painter Kendal Hanna, who died last summer. Often described as the Bahamas's first abstract expressionist, he painted vigorous canvases that would not look out of place beside a Rothko or a de Kooning.

The resort’s resident flamingos

The permanent collection of the NAGB, housed in a stately 19th-century mansion in Nassau built for the first chief justice of the Bahamas, includes the likes of Jacob Frank Coonley, an American photographer who helped establish the Bahamas as an island fantasy, alongside artists who departed from that vision, like Maxwell Taylor, a social realist painter whose depictions of single moms and street life in the 1970s ushered in a new generation of Bahamian artists. The museum's launch, in 2003, was the first major impetus for the emergence of a robust new Bahamas art scene tackling issues of race, gender, and postcolonial identity. The second, arguably, was the 2017 opening of Baha Mar, with its original gallery, The Current, and more than 2,500 works by Bahamian artists displayed throughout the premises. “We've been a catalyst for other galleries to open on the island,” says Graeme Davis, Baha Mar's president. A few of these include the young spaces CAB, Tern, and Sixty 2 Sixty.

But Baha Mar, which sees brisk sales at its two galleries, is uniquely positioned to elevate the profile of Bahamian art worldwide. It also hosts Cox's rapidly expanding Fuze Art Fair, the second part of the resort's annual Culinary & Arts Festival, for which Davis has Art Basel–like ambitions. That Baha Mar can be a home for challenging, complicated art is just one aspect of Davis's vision to build a sustainable tourism operation that benefits the broader community. It's also evidence of how much travel has changed since the Bahamas first became famous as a vacation paradise. “There's been a pivot in the artist and a pivot in the traveler as well,” says Cox. “The traveler has evolved.”

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine