15 Hrs Ago
Visual artists Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris in front of 360 full-size ceramic tiles of the front and back covers of 180 Mighty Sparrow albums and 12-inch singles on display at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. –
RAY FUNK
PERHAPS the most unlikely art exhibit to have traveled around the United States and England over the last several years is Sparrow Come Back Home, a celebration of the great calypsonian Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco), featuring ceramic tiles of the front and back covers of Sparrow records.
The last version of the exhibit opened at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 21 and closes January 11. Sparrow celebrated his 90th birthday on July 9.
The exhibit features 360 full-size ceramic tiles of the front and back covers of 180 Sparrow albums and 12-inch singles on display with a timeline of Sparrow’s career and two exhibit cases of memorabilia.
The exhibit started when collaborating visual artists Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris were asked in 2010 to participate in a group exhibit in Florida at Sculpture Key West.
Harris’s mother is Trinidadian, and he grew up listening to calypso. Given the exhibit location, they thought they could do something that featured that Caribbean heritage with tiles reproducing Sparrow album covers.
“We decided to have decals made and have them placed on these handmade tiles and that would be a visual clue for people coming to the botanical gardens to see something that would pique their curiosity.” They ended up hand-making 20 tiles, fired them with decals of Sparrow’s record covers and installed them on the ground in a botanical garden,” with music recorded in TT playing as you walked through the gardens.
From this small beginning, the exhibit has since evolved into something much more substantial. They used decals of the cover images printed in Germany, fired onto commercial tiles from the US, and started seeking access to more and more Sparrow record albums.
In 2014, the exhibit was presented at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts for a few months. From Delaware, the exhibit returned to Cincinnati for a revised display in 2016 at the Clay Street Press Gallery.
Each time the exhibit travels to a new location, the artists seek to add new tiles as they seek to represent every album and 12-inch single that they can find.
Their search has been greatly helped by the British collector/discographers Graham Johnstone and Dmitri Subotsky. The exhibit features Sparrow covers made in different countries, including Nigeria, as Buckley noted, “to give a sense of the extent to which the music had spread, and the extent to which Caribbean peoples have moved around the globe.”
From Cincinnati, the exhibit was next presented at the end of 2016 and into early 2017 at the reading room of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. During the exhibit’s run, the documentary film Calypso Dreams was shown twice to packed audiences, and artist Peter Doig served as DJ at the opening of the exhibit.
From there, the exhibit came to its latest presentation in Cincinnati, and as Sparrow celebrates his 90th year, one wonders where next?
Buckley and Harris are not sure. They’d like it to come to Brooklyn for the New York Carnival and to the Caribbean, especially TT. They are open to finding a permanent home for the exhibit. Sadly, the weight and fragility of the tiles make it difficult to ship, but they are open to possibilities.