Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop (born Feb, 28 1971 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist, writer, poet, scholar, and educator whose practice spans ceramics, collage, textiles, painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and creative writing. Her work is particularly concerned with recovering Black women’s histories that have been marginalized, silenced, or omitted from official archives. Drawing on Jamaican family memory, Caribbean visual culture, West African and Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial archives, botanical imagery, folk traditions, and women’s domestic craft, Bishop uses everyday objects and decorative surfaces to reconsider histories of enslavement, migration, labor, gender, sexuality, and cultural survival. She is currently a Clinical Full Professor at New York University.  Bishop’s recent ceramic work has brought particular attention to the Caribbean market woman and the histories embedded in British and European porcelain. Growing up in Jamaica, she remembers her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother treasuring decorated china in mahogany cabinets, even though the imagery on those plates rarely represented Black Caribbean lives.  In works such as History at the Dinner Table, The Market Woman’s Story, The Keeper of All The Secrets, The Narratives of Migration, Song of the Banana Man, and A Way Outa No Way – Charleston Ladies, Bishop reverses that visual order. She places enslaved women, market traders, agricultural workers, botanicals, abolitionist imagery, migration histories, and family archives onto porcelain surfaces associated historically with European wealth, empire, refinement, and colonial trade.  Bishop’s broader interdisciplinary practice also investigates migration, exile, home, sexuality, desire, family, landscape, and the instability of Caribbean identity. Earlier paintings, photography, textiles, and video addressed Jamaican political history, Rastafarian ideas of Babylon and Zion, female sexual desire, and the experience of being simultaneously an insider and outsider to one’s birthplace.  Her scholarly practice is similarly intertwined with her artwork: she is conducting doctoral research at the University of Leeds on Jamaican women’s decorative and ornamental textile traditions, examining connections among Indigenous, African, and Caribbean knowledge systems and positioning vernacular needlework within Caribbean art history.  Bishop’s work has been exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Queen’s House/Royal Museums Greenwich, British Ceramics Biennial, Gardiner Museum, National Gallery of Jamaica, National Museum Jamaica, Center for Craft, Museum of the African Diaspora, and other venues internationally.  Her work is held by institutions including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, The Harris, Royal Museums Greenwich, National Museum Jamaica, Gardiner Museum, and New York University. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Morocco, UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow in Paris, and Dora Maar/Brown Foundation Fellow in France, and she received the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for The Gymnast & Other Positions.