Frank Walter's (Antiguan) Climate - Garden Museum
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Frank Walter’s (Antiguan) Climate

Frank Walter’s (Antiguan) Climate, is a richly illustrated talk by guest curator Professor Barbara Paca & Rose Sinclair, lecturer in (textiles) Design Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are joined by a very special guest Jules Walter, actor and cousin of Frank Walter. Barbara, Rose, and Jules examine the constellation of Walter’s artistic mission through an exploration of his sun-drenched art-filled world, where nature reigns among painting, sculpture, and written masterpieces.

Noted as one of the most significant Caribbean visual artists of the twentieth century, Frank Walter (1926-2009) saw art as a sanctuary, and finally found solace during the final decades of his life gardening and living close to nature in isolation on a rural hillside in Antigua.

Frank Walter: Artist, Gardener, Radical presents this enigmatic artist in an immersive experience curated by Barbara Paca, PhD, OBE and designed by Jeremy Herbert, with film by Thomas Barzilay Freund, and soundscape by composer Simon Fisher-Turner. The visitor is invited to inhabit the natural universe of the great man through over 300 original works of art, expressing the broad range of this polymath, including memory paintings of his time in the UK and Europe.

  • Barbara Paca

    Bio »

    Barbara Paca

    Barbara Paca, O.B.E. is a full research professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Paca curated the Frank Walter solo exhibition for the Pavilion of Antigua and Barbuda at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 and the group exhibition Find Yourself: Carnival and Resistance, exploring Carnival in the culture of Antigua and Barbuda, with Nina Khrushcheva, as part of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. She is the guest curator for Frank Walter: Artist, Gardener, Radical at the Garden Museum. The Frank Walter Catalogue Raisonné project is currently being undertaken by the Walter family and Barbara Paca.

  • Rose Sinclair

    Bio »

    Rose Sinclair

    Rose Sinclair is a Lecturer (Textiles) in Design Education, in the Design Dept, Goldsmiths, University of London
    Her PhD doctoral research focusses on Black British women their crafting practices, and textiles networks such as Dorcas Clubs and Societies. Her work on Dorcas Clubs has featured on national TV in ‘Craftivism: Making a Difference’ BBC4 Feb 2021.
    Rose works across a range of participatory practice in . pop-up shops, installations in museums e.g, V&A London, House for an Art Lover, Timespan in Helmsdale, Scotland. Her latest work “Dorcas Stories from the Front Room, Textile Narratives, Now and then’ a co-curated exhibition with Craftspace in focusing on crafts of the Windrush Generation, Sept-Oct 2023.
    She co-curated the first retrospective of the work of Caribbean textile designer Althea McNish, (2nd April 2022-11th Sept 2022) at the William Morris Gallery ‘Althea McNish: Colour is Mine’ supported by the Society of Antiquaries through its Janet Arnold Textile Award and The Whitworth in Manchester 22nd October 2022-23rd April 2023.
    Rose ‘s latest work, the first monograph about Althea McNish, for Yale Publishers is due in Autumn 2024.
    Rose has authored several textile books, her most recent works being ‘Tracing back to trace forwards, What it means/takes to be a Black Designer’ in (2021), in Igoe (Ed) Textile Design Theory in the Making; Does Design do Race (Dec 2022) in Hardy (Ed) Debates in Design & Technology Education’. She is on the International Advisory board for Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Textile Research and Practice. Rose is a founding member and now Alumni of the Equity Advisory Council at the Crafts Council, A trustee of the Crafts Council, A Heritage Crafts Ambassador for Heritage Crafts UK, an Associate member of the APPG Group for Craft, A Trustee of the Textile Society UK.