Inside Looking Out Looking Inside - Andrae Green

What does it mean to be Jamaican? For me, this means that I am a hybrid. Partly old and fully new. I could never have existed as I am without being in the New World. My identity is a hybridization of both European and West African cultures. With the act of painting, I can merge these diverging worlds on the canvas and give order to chaos. My creations carry the same disjointed collaged patchwork that forms my identity, my hybridization. The figures and narratives involved speak of the slippages that occur when the self and the space that it occupies are fractured and then put back together.

BIO: Andrae Green (b. 1978) is a painter whose work explores the nuances of the collective consciousness that has been shaped by time, mythology and memory. Green was born in Kingston, Jamaica where he attended the Edna Manley School for the Visual and Performing Arts. Soon after in 2006, Green was awarded a full scholarship grant sponsored by the Jamaican government and the Chase Fund to obtain his MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art. In 2011, he was awarded a residency at the CAC Troy, New York. Andrae Green’s paintings have been shown internationally in the US, Jamaica, Canada, China, and France. In 2012 he was one of the first two artists chosen to represent Jamaica in the Beijing Biennale. In 2013, Green was selected as a part of the American delegation that represented the US at the Salon de Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France. In 2019 he was an artist in residence at Experience Jamaique in Geneva Switzerland. Green’s paintings are included in many private collections around the world. In 2017 his piece “Acquiescence I” was acquired by the National Museum of China. He currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.

Listen to full episode :