Rex Nettleford Arts Conference 2023

About

The 7th Rex Nettleford Arts Conference will be held at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, from October 11-13, 2023. This conference comes at a time when we are emerging from the global impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and thus marks its first face-to-face iteration after the lockdown. This is an opportunity to confront the revelations of the Covid years about the value of the work of artists and to interrogate how that work needs to be applied. This also signals the need to examine the apparent rise in negative cultural manifestations, thus releasing the potential of the arts for social transformation and sustainability.

The year of the conference coincides with a number of events which are important to meaning-making for Caribbean peoples. They include, but are not limited to, the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Chaguaramas which formally brought the Caribbean Community, CARICOM, into being; the 90th anniversary of the birth of Professor Rex Nettleford; the transitioning from the 60th to the 61st anniversary of independence in the Anglophone Caribbean; and the heralding of the 220th declaration of independence by the people of Haiti/Ayiti. The centrality of arts and culture to these transformations beckons us to reflect on our self-perception as an intentional pre-requisite for designing how we wish to be recognized and understood.

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For the Biennial Rex Nettleford Arts Conference 2023.  Come and witness local, regional and global voices of artists, performers, art educators, policymakers, researchers and Arts practitioners.

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