Elisabeth Ann Brown
THE ARTISANS OF POMPEY SQUARE
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I wasn’t always an artist. In fact, I had no idea I had any real artistic ability. In school I enjoyed painting, but always felt my work was not that good. When I became a teenager my father bought me an old Canon AE1 Program 35mm camera in a second hand store, and when we went camping in the Rocky Mountains I thoroughly enjoyed taking pictures with it. I used a slide film, and over a couple of years I took hundreds of photos. But no one said to me that they were really any good so eventually I just put the camera away.
It wasn’t until my children had grown up and gone away to school, and the doctor I was working for became very ill, that I took up a camera again. This time my boss saw some of my work and he liked it. “Mark my words,” he said one day, “You will do well with these pictures. I am never wrong, you should run with this.” So I took the pictures to a print shop and, still feeling a bit unsure of myself, I asked the owner of the store, Duncan, to have a look at them. Duncan asked me if I had ever thought of selling them, and to prove a point he had one of them printed on a 5ft canvas and hung it up in his store.
Although that canvas print never sold, numerous copies of it did. I found out that there was a program organized by the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism that helped to give artists and artisans exposure by setting them up on trestle tables on weekends along the main Bay Street in downtown Nassau. I joined the program in 2006. I started out selling notecards and gradually as things began to go well I branched out into framed prints.
Most of the artisans I worked alongside were making straw bags, hats, table mats and Christmas ornaments. Straw work is a very traditional craft in The Bahamas. The straw is actually palm fronds cut from various types of palm tree, including sansevieria, palmetto and silver top. The palms are dried and the strips are plaited into various designs and colours, with patterns having quaint names such as pineapple and fish pot. The products have been popular with the tourists for many years, and in fact the craft goes back hundreds of years. Red Bays, Andros, is known particularly for the quality work of the straw weavers.
Other artisans utilized the abundant and beautiful sea shells from the local beaches to make ornaments, hair clips and jewellery. One of my dearest friends in our group of talented women is Astrid Pinder who, under the business name of Fine Ocean Jewellery, produces some very beautiful and high-quality conch shell, whelk shell and sea glass pendants, bracelets, earrings and rings. Her sea glass is found on the beaches of Long Island, her husband Ellison’s native island in The Bahamas. Astrid has done a tremendous amount of research about sea glass, and the pieces that she makes are often of unusual colours. She told me that the rarer colours often date back 200-300 years and have come from the many shipwrecks scattered about the islands.
Although the artisans in the Ministry of Tourism’s Authentically Bahamian program produce very high quality work, they have never been allowed to sell their products in the native straw market. The straw market was famous back in the days when the women working there were actually producing their own work, but with the advent of doing easy business with “made in China” the market rapidly became home to a lot of imported goods. If you take a Caribbean cruise you can see these items on every island in similar markets, the only difference being that they will have something on them labelling them with “Bahamas” or “Aruba” or “St. Lucia”. The true artisans of The Bahamas definitely have styles and a quality of work that is all their own, and far better than the imported goods. It is well worth looking for the local artisans to purchase something that will be a unique memory of your trip.
We worked on Bay Street for several years, catering mostly to the cruise ship visitors who flock to the islands on weekends. Unfortunately, we had a lot of resistance from the store owners, none of whom actually sold any of our work. The majority of the stores were expensive jewellery emporiums, franchised all around the Caribbean. Eventually they won their battle to get us off the sidewalks, and an alternative was found for us at the far end of Bay Street in the newly constructed Pompey Square. The location was very attractive, but it afforded us no protection from the hot sun and tropical downpours in summer, or the cold winds whipping up off the harbour that we overlooked in winter, and tourist traffic through the square was minimal compared to the main high street. Any ideas we had to promote the market were usually discouraged as well.
And if that wasn’t enough to make life difficult for us, the bottom seemed to drop out of the retail market as far as tourists were concerned. The economy could be blamed, and also the high crime rate in Nassau, although downtown was very secure. Also, while the vendors in the straw market were being charged $35 a month, we were being charged $30 a day, and were given 10 x10 foot tents. I think someone must have thought that quality work equalled high income, but this was most definitely not the case. Many of us often went home at the end of a 12-hour day in the baking sun barely having made that $30 back. I was lucky, I had art which was different, and it was popular, so for the most part I made enough to keep body and soul together.
Despite all the difficulties, and the constant changing rules and threats by the Ministry of Tourism to shut us down – due to the large number of straw vendors in the market complaining about us, as well as those big store owners – we persevered.
Then one day, Pamela Burnside – the founder of Creative Nassau, an affiliate of UNESCO – approached the Ministry and was able to secure the use of Pompey Square for a couple of extra days during the week for us. We still had to pay $30 a day, but at least now we were working more steadily. We were still under the tents and this often meant our days being cancelled due to inclement weather, but we had more opportunity to work, especially when there were several cruise ships in port. It was still tough though, and most of us were scrambling to get that $30 each day to be able to work.
The program has evolved since I left in early 2016. Now you can find Astrid and her beautiful jewellery at the Art Walk in the Marina Village at the famous Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island on weekends, along with several other artisans. Creative Nassau is still putting on a market in Pompey Square on Wednesdays and Fridays as well. They also have a shop located on Village Road, Nassau, at Pam’s Doongalik Studios. The shop is called Craft Cottage and has a marvellous array of creative crafts ranging from straw work to painted glass, paintings, clothing made from Androsia fabic – a lovely batik produced in Andros – and of course lots of different styles of jewellery, and many other products all handmade by talented local artists. Be sure to check them out when you visit; I know you will be well pleased with your handmade original souvenirs and art!
