Jul 10, 2024, 6:30 PM – 8 PM

A Beautiful Mind: Frank Walter and Creative Expression

On the occasion of the exhibition Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul, join curators Claire Gilman and Barbara Paca with writer Vladimir Lucien and artist and filmmaker Billy Gerard for a conversation on the life and work of Antiguan artist Frank Walter.

A polymath with a keen intellect and thirst for knowledge, Walter created a body of work that encompasses a variety of mediums, subject matter, and styles. During his lifetime Walter produced over 5,000 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 600 sculptures, 2,000 photographs, 468 hours of recordings, and a 50,000-page archive. The exhibition To Capture a Soul provides insight into not only Walter’s artistic practice but also his relationship to issues of race and identity, the legacy of slavery, the colonial and postcolonial experience, and the history and politics of Antigua, Barbuda, and beyond.

Billy Gérard Frank

Billy Gérard Frank born in Grenada, West Indies is Multi-Media Artist and Filmmaker. Frank's research-based practices interrogate personal issues dealing with race, exile, memory, global politics, and post-colonial and queer decoloniality, challenging normative discourses around them while imagining and creating counter-histories. His works have been exhibited and screened in group and solo shows in museums and institutions like Brooklyn Museum (2020); Butler Institute Of American Art, and international film festivals like the Berlinale, and Sundance, and are also in several private collections and institutions like the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design, Farnsworth Art Museum, among others. He represented Grenada in the 59th La Biennale di Venezia (2022) and was also one of the artists in the collective who represented the island at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia (2019). He is a recipient of many grants, including the Ford Foundation Grant for his La Biennale Di Venezia project (2022) and recipient of the Creative Capital Award in 2024, “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact.”

Frank is also one the founders of the Nova Frontier Film Festival & Lab which showcases and incubates the works of filmmakers and artists from and about the Global African Diaspora, The Middle East, and Latin America, and is also a Lecturer in Directing and Design in the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and has lectured at universities like NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and York University.
Claire Gilman
Vladimir Lucien

Vladimir Lucien is a writer, actor and critic from St. Lucia. His debut collection of poetry Sounding Ground, which won the 2015 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014 and was hailed by poet Kamau Brathwaite as “a sign of the start of a new tradition in the anglophone Caribbean.” Lucien is also coeditor of Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia and the screenwriter for the 2012 documentary, The Merikins. Several of Lucien’s poems have been translated into other languages including Dutch, Mandarin, Italian and French. His criticism and essays have also been published widely in journals such as the PN Review, Asymptote and Poetry International. Hailed by CBC books in 2017 as a “young black writer to watch,” Lucien’s is an important voice in his generation of writers.
Barbara Paca
Frank Walter

Frank Walter was born Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter on Horsford Hill, Antigua. A descendant of enslaved persons and plantation owners and burdened with the distinction of being the first person of color to be a manager of a sugar plantation on the island of Antigua, Walter struggled with his identity and place in the world. He was torn between his Black Caribbean ancestry and his Northern Europe heritage, embarking on a tour of Europe and the UK between 1953 and 1961 in search of his familial roots. Unprepared for the racism he experienced, he returned to Antigua where he worked as a photographer, frame maker, and artist before designing and building a home, art studio, and garden in a remote location on Bailey’s Hill in Antigua in 1993. There he took refuge, depicting the fertile landscape and the people he encountered as well as envisioning and rendering imagined universes.

Credits

Education and Community Programs at The Drawing Center are made possible by the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. Major support is provided by the Evelyn Toll Family Foundation, the LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation, and Hauser & Wirth. Additional support is provided by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and the M&T Charitable Foundation.