Errol Ross Brewster
A COMMEMORATION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CARIFESTA '72
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Errol Ross Brewster is a Caribbean artist from Guyana who has lived in Barbados and is currently based in the United States. He was educated at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, and served as Director of Studies at the E. R. Burrowes School of Art in Guyana. With more than four decades of a Caribbean-wide, multimedia imaging practice, he has participated in multiple Carifestas.
Brewster's work on the Carifesta experience includes film, photography, painting, and interactive archiving that takes the form of information modules. He is also a public voice commenting on the nature and orientation of contemporary Carifesta practice, a perspective he will bring to “The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism” through his paper “CARIFESTA IS A BIG TING.”
For Brewster Carifesta ’72 was a formative experience. He recalls:
The descent on Georgetown of four thousand of the region's finest creatives who all lived in one designated village - Festival City, was enough to make a mere teenage bank clerk's head spin and i resolved to save every penny to study painting, film, photography and the graphic arts.
By 1977 he was teaching at Guyana’s first national art school, the E. R. Burrowes School of Art, founded in 1975 and located on Carifesta Avenue, and by 1999 he was its Director of Studies. It was then that he decided to research Carifesta ’72, an endeavor resulting in two info modules—the series A COMMEMORATION OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF CARIFESTA '72 and HOO SEH DUH, both ongoing since 1999. The former is on view here.
Brewster's work has been presented at several international exhibitions, among them: The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas's The Evolution of The Arc in 2021; The Museums Association of the Caribbean's Collecting Our Voices in the Diaspora, a virtual visual arts exhibition in 2021; The Inter-American Development Bank’s Sidewalks of the Americas installation in 2018; The Museum of Modern Art of The Dominican Republic's First International Triennial of Caribbean Art in 2010; and The EU’s Centro Cultural Cariforo's traveling exhibition Between the Lines in 2000.