SXM Daily

All news

Culture

Deborah Jack: artist and poet of water, salt and memory

Deborah Jack, raised on Sint Maarten, is a multidisciplinary artist and poet whose work on memory, history and climate was the subject of a 20-year retrospective at Pen + Brush in New York in 2021–22.

By SXM Daily ·

Deborah Jack is a multidisciplinary artist and poet raised on Sint Maarten/Saint Martin. Working in video and sound installation, photography, painting and text, she deals with cultural memory, history, ecology and climate change. She is Professor of Art at New Jersey City University, and her work was the subject of the retrospective "Deborah Jack: 20 Years" at Pen + Brush in New York from 23 September 2021 to 19 February 2022. She was born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, in 1970, according to House of Nehesi Publishers and Pen + Brush.

Illustrative: the Great Salt Pond, Philipsburg

Illustrative photo: Richie Diesterheft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Art

Water, salt and the shoreline recur in her work, her site and Pen + Brush note; on St. Martin those themes echo the island's history of salt and the Great Salt Pond. According to her site, her work was included in "Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today" at MCA Chicago and ICA Boston in 2023 and in "The Other Side of Now" at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2019–20, and it is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. The University of Miami's Caribbean visual culture archive calls her "a Caribbean artist from St. Martin".

Poetry

House of Nehesi Publishers in Philipsburg published her poetry collections The Rainy Season (1997) and skin (2006), according to the publisher's catalogue and the University of Miami archive.

Education and teaching

Jack earned an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2002, her site and the University of Miami archive say. She teaches at New Jersey City University as Professor of Art.

On the island

According to the University of Miami archive, she represented the Netherlands Antilles at CARIFESTA VI in Trinidad and Tobago in 1995 and St. Martin in the literary arts at CARIFESTA VII in 2000. In 1997 she co-created the AXUM art café as a gathering place for the island's artists.

Sources

  • https://www.penandbrush.org/exhibition/deborah-jack-20-years/
  • https://www.penandbrush.org/exhibition/pb-x-scope-2023-deborah-jack/
  • https://houseofnehesipublish.com/sxm/about-the-authors/
  • https://www.deborahjack.com/bio
  • http://houseofnehesipublish.com/sxm/literature-fiction/
  • https://scholar.library.miami.edu/caribbeanvisual/book/export/html/182/

Source: https://www.penandbrush.org/exhibition/deborah-jack-20-years/

More in Culture