Gary Thomas an Artist: From Orphan to Family Figures

(Originally Published by Kaieteur News July 30, 2018)

By Clairmont Chung


“My name is Gary Thomas. I was an orphan”. Mild murmuring could be heard from the audience. “My mother died when I was four years old.” A collective groan followed. “My father took me to an orphanage. He said he would return, but never did”. Silence. “I waited five years before I gave up expecting to hear the gate and that it would be him.”

Artists and Coordinators from Roots and Culture Gallery and Pan African Workshop. Thomas is 2nd from rt
(c) roots&culture

With these words, Remilton “Gary” Thomas began his talk at the opening of an art exhibit hosted by The Court Street School Education Community Center in Freehold, New Jersey, for Black History Month, February 2018. Roots and Culture Gallery curated the show titled, “The Arc of Brown Bodies” and featured Thomas’ as well as the work of Happiness Akaniro Olude, Hazel Daniel, Emmanuel Glen, Grace Daniel, and from the Roots and Culture Collection: Dudley Charles, the late Roderick Bartrum, the late Omowale Lumumba.

Thomas’ speech was not part of the plan. The plan was to display works of art that we believed raised questions on how we look at the bodies of women and attempt to excavate some historical memory to help us understand what seems a preoccupation with women’s bodies as subjects of art, and in life too: bodies subjected to ‘commodification, deification, and objectification, but still not equal’. This was to add to the growing spotlight on women’s bodies as targets for violence and abuse and to think of ways to end the terror.

I met Gary Thomas in the 1970s and until now he had never shared this detail about his mother’s death and its effect on the trajectory of his life. Then, we frequented the same places and knew some of the same people. ‘Metropole Corner’ was a frequent stop: Metropole Cinema at Robb and Waterloo Streets. In the mid-1970s he moved to Front Road, West Ruimveldt, in South Georgetown.

I lived nearby and would visit on occasion. He was always making something. He would rebuild the soles of shoes and sneakers for extra money. It was the 70s, and the platform shoe popular. I never got a new sole, but watched him work and it was clear his true interest was the many wood and stone sculptures in various stages of completion.

Days before the Court Street School event, its Board President, Andrea D. McPherson, asked that I give a short lecture at the opening of the exhibit. I had already written the brochure and only needed to expand that with some historical context that included the period of European control of the misnamed “slave trade' through its church and the state. It was human trafficking, with African women’s bodies at the core of that enterprise. I limited my talk to women’s bodies because of the urgency that has taken the rest of us, but that could be extended to all bodies on another day.

I posed the question whether the present attention women receive comes from the same place: whether as subjects of the artistic eye or the hissing from random men on the street. Whether the threats they face, because of men, is from the same history of terror and from whose bodies more bodies were forced-out into the fields and sometimes in the fields, and whether popularity as subjects in art can be reconciled with this history. Gary and I had spent several days working together preparing pieces for the exhibit. We rehashed old times; the good times and bad about the people we knew and what had happened to them. Spread over two weeks, it was the longest time-block we had spent together; sometimes working past midnight. He never said he wanted to speak at the opening. Later, he confided he had no plan to speak.

Instead, we had talked about that day when the one o’clock Matinee, at Metropole, was interrupted with a message projected onto the screen instructing him, Gary Thomas, to leave the cinema immediately and meet the driver of the Honorable Minister of Culture, Shirley Field-Ridley, on the outside. Outside, the Minister’s driver gave him the keys to the West Ruimveldt flat. As promised, Minister Field-Ridley had found him a place to live and work. She would become a committed benefactor until her sudden death in 1982. Thomas’ art had begun to open doors.

We talked about events that led to meetings with the Comrade Minister and her knowing of his work through Compton Parris who staged a one-man show, in 1974, but included one piece from Thomas that made an impression. Thomas would win the National Award and the Newcomer Award that year.

The Minister pledged the resources of her office and delivered. It was a modest space, but badly needed, with a wife and child and one on the way. His previous homes had been much more modest. The early years were spent at St. John Bosco Boys Orphanage in Plaisance on the East Coast of Demerara. There was a stint as an ‘extreme delinquent’ at “Suddie’; a training, and reformatory juvenile detention center for delinquent boys and orphans at Onderneeming, Essequibo Coast.

Between the Plaisance orphanage, from which he aged-out, and Suddie, he stayed with a family that asked Donald Locke, a renowned artist, to look at Thomas’s work. Locke taught at Queen’s College and invited Thomas to join his art class. There he practiced the basics of form and anatomy with the constant pencil drawings of the human –mostly women- and still life, but grew impatient. It was art he loved, not school.

Most of the inmates at Suddie were there for petty offences like wandering, and, if caught a second time, were judged extreme delinquents; a complaint left over from that 500-year period of human trafficking, forced labor and indenture. ‘Suddie’ stood on an abandoned sugar plantation with farming and the industrial arts as its curriculum. Thomas’ artistic gifts spared him the hard labour of its fields and trade shops. Instead, he stayed in the Warden’s office ‘drawing all day’. From there he could see fellow inmates labouring while he enjoyed the shade with pencils and paper. The Jesuit Sisters at the orphanage had given him the first pencils and crayons that started the journey. From relative comfort in the Warden’s office, he began to think that this could be a way to live. Later, he found it the only way to live.

The Family by Gary Thomas @ Constitutional Court
South Africa (c) Northwestern Univ.

In 1981, his piece was chosen from four submissions as a wedding gift to Princess Diana and Prince Charles from the Guyana government and displayed in the throne room at St. James Palace in a representative exhibit of the thousands of gifts received. He became the go-to person for state-gifts, with recipients that included the Late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. Another piece sits at the Constitutional Court in South Africa; selected by Albie Sachs, retired Judge and Anti-Apartheid Activist, on a 1991 visit to Guyana to help with that country’s own racial separations.

Gary Thomas' work takes pride of place at St. James Palace 
Throne Room, London (Wedding gift to Charles and Diana)  

Accolades include; a stint as Artist-in-Residence at Jackson State University in Mississippi, an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)-sponsored exhibit in Washington DC, pieces exhibited in the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and Asia, a National Medal of Service as a pioneer in the arts, and a 2012 1stPlace Winner in Guyana Visual Arts Competition – sculpture category.

L to R: Gary Thomas, Dudley Charles, Camo Williams
and IDB Representative plan Wash. DC exhibit 

We talked about the formation of Roots and Culture Gallery in the mid-1980s as an art collective, with Camo Williams as curator, and its importance in offering wider opportunities and resources for Thomas and a host of other artists to learn from each other and create an internationally recognized collection. So when he rose up to address the audience at Court Street School, I did not expect that opening. He did list some achievements that stood in stark contrast to where he started; an orphan from an orphaned people to bearing gifts to British royalty and nobility who had been responsible for so much pain.

Court Street School, Freehold NJ (C) Court Street School

The Court Street School offered a place to express self, itself a monument to that orphaned history: a segregated school for the descendants of trafficked Africans, until the 1950s. Inside that schoolhouse, in a show of resilience, a reconstituted family, one would have the privilege of the high level of skill on display, and from such a highly regarded group of artists, and to share intimate details of one artist’s life. Maybe, the audience understood more about his work and by extension found the answer to the prevalence of women not just as subject, if not object, but as magic.

Maybe Gary’s decision to speak was inspired by the piece read by poet, Bro. Spencer ‘Shabaka’ Brown, another board member of the Court Street School and fittingly called, “The Ark of Brown Bodies”. It was a story about the orphaning of persons from families and families from peoples and peoples from land and the reverse; land from them all. With words like:


Ark of Brown Bodies
What manner of vessel are thee?
For this journey that you have taken me on
Is a journey of self-damnation
A journey of self-hatred
A journey into the very bowels of hell itself!

Gary made his way to the front and indicated he had something to say. What that audience did not know, is that Gary could not see them. It was difficult enough walking to the front of the room. His eyesight had been failing for the last 30 years. He had been blind in one eye since 1999 and now, almost blind in the other. He is unable to negotiate public transport on his own. And from his home in South New Jersey, USA, it is difficult getting to places where art is happening, the lifeblood of an artist.

Eruption by Gary Thomas

In 1999, former President Janet Jagan sent Thomas and his wife to see a specialist in Suriname on a grant from the Ministry of Health. He underwent an operation that improved sight in one eye, but at the expense of the other. A decade earlier, Guyanese Superstar Eddy Grant, had sponsored an evaluation in England, but that doctor decided against surgery. Now, it is beyond the point of crisis.

It is one of those lessons in life: that so much beauty can come from so much pain.

All the time we talked while preparing for the exhibit, the work was done mostly by feel. His familiarity with the form showed as, with sandpaper in hand, he followed the smooth curves and twists, a hallmark of his work and almost always a woman or family as if a substitute, but more a reflection of his honed humanity and the family he never knew well; if only to make them over again and gift them away.

We may not yet find the way to end violence against our women. But it is in our hands.