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The vernissage at the 2026 Grand Bahama Art Festival-ArtLucaya exhibition “Dream Big” in Freeport, Bahamas
By BYRON ARMSTRONG May 26th, 2026
In the world of contemporary art, locations like New York, London, Berlin, and Miami are the expected names to show up on an art traveler’s itinerary. But every so often, a new name is added to that list, reminding the world that creative energy has no borders. For the last four years, that signal has been getting louder from the city of Freeport, the quieter cousin of The Bahamas’ capital city, Nassau. The Bahamas Pavilion at The Venice Biennale was on the lips of several art media outlets this year with good reason, and what The Grand Bahama Art Festival, Art Lucaya, offers is a glimpse at the cultural renaissance bubbling under the surface of an island nation suddenly attracting global attention. The term, “The Art Basel of The Bahamas,” was used liberally by its organizers at interviews that I was fortunate to sit in on as one half of this year’s curatorial team. They aren’t just being cute. It’s an idea that reflects future ambitions in its fourth year. The event has transformed the island’s creative landscape, giving a permanent home to over sixty local artists (students, emerging, and established) and a platform for a community that, until recently, had to fly to Nassau just to really engage with the nationally recognized artists and their art.
The installation of Ben Ferguson Jr work “What Dreams May Come” 55 x 120 x 19 wood, fabric, canvas, acrylic, spray paint.
Art Lucaya, taking place over a weekend, welcomes visitors from around the world, with this year’s theme of “Dream Big” manifesting in large-scale installations and artworks from a community that refuses to be overlooked, including bold student work. Although this year’s edition, housing perhaps the largest collection of Grand Bahamian artists ever assembled, officially closes May 23rd, the launch weekend is when all the action happens. The evening of the vernissage was celebratory, with live performances by local musical collective Forces of Nature, an open bar with locally catered food, and the aforementioned parade (aka “rush out”) sprinkling more Bahamian culture into the mix. Saturday offered a more contemplative program: an Artist Tour led by Armova Curatorial, a deep-dive conversation with internationally exhibiting artist Veronica Dorsett (returning home from Toronto, Canada), and meditative art workshop with local phenom artist Claudette Dean. The day closed with a free film screening of “Reframing Paradise”, a documentary tracing Bahamian art from a small pop-up studio to the regional force of Fuse Caribbean Art Fair. Sunday, reserved for the student work, represents a deliberate and necessary act of care and investment in the future of ArtLucaya and its rising artists.
Clockwise (l to r): Patricia Curtis, “All I Want for Christmas is a Fish Sandwich” 36″ x 36″ x 2″ | “Ben Fish’n” and “I Dropped a Fish” 36″ x 36″ x 1.5″ Oil, acrylic on canvas | Sheldon Saint “Sugar Apple Guinep” 45″ x 30″ Watercolour | Leo Brown, “Path to Tomorrow” 48″ x 36″ Oil, acrylic, plaster. | Vernissage night.
While Grand Bahama is famous for its sand and sea, the infrastructure for the same kind of visual arts movement coming out of Nassau was largely absent. For decades, artists on the island faced a familiar dilemma; how to present their talent to the world stage without a stage. The festival is supported by the Grand Bahama Port Authority, which has covered core costs for all four years. Carnival (the cruise line) has also sponsored the performing arts and student exhibitions for the second year. Ticket sales help to ensure the festival is sustainable for future growth. To date, Art Lucaya has given back $10,000 each year to both public and private schools for the purchase of art supplies. Some schools didn’t have art classes at all before receiving this funding. By channeling admission fees directly into classrooms, the festival has created a closed-loop economy of cultural reinvestment.
“100% of those funds go into funding the art programs,” explains Fatima Zahra Kaboob, the Chair of Art Lucaya. “We want the younger generation to feel that art is a career path. Not just something you do for fun when you’re depressed or on a rainy day.”
Top to bottom: Paula Boyd Farrington “Dream Pathways 2” and “Dream Pathways 1″ | 38″ x 31″ x 1.5” digital collage print on canvas.
Given the scale of what’s unfolding at Mosaic, a local art and cultural hub and the festival’s new permanent home, it’s less of an aspiration and more a statement of fact. Launched with much fanfare (including a Junkanoo marching band and ribbon cutting), this year’s “Dream Big” is reflected in the sheer scale of the exhibition, with the main exhibition taking place at MOSAIC, and a student show next door, in the unlikeliest of places, a church hall. This alternative yet organic way of making ArtLucaya work, from the perspective of a community arts festival with global aspirations, is emblematic of Grand Bahama’s art scene; resourceful, passionate, and driven by volunteers like Paula Farrington, an abstract painter who both exhibited work and designed the catalogue for ArtLucaya, and board members like Lisa Codella, a Bahamian ceramicist and writer who helped with logistics and communication.
Chantal Bethel, a founding member and participating artist in Art Lucaya, knows this reality intimately. Before Art Lucaya, Bethel and fellow artist, Claudette Dean, would travel to Nassau to exhibit, renting tents and hoping for sales. There were no galleries in Freeport. No annual festivals. No reason for an international collector to land at Grand Bahama International Airport.
“Art Lucaya allows us to uplift the art and the artists, and bring it to a higher level,” says Bethel, whose two works at the festival, “Presence of Absence: Peace Chimes” and “Peace Tower” invite stillness amidst the noise of a chaotic world, focusing on world peace as a dream worth pursuing. Inspired by her study of Buddhism and her Haitian heritage (a country “at war all the time”), Bethel created an interactive installation featuring a bell and lotus. “Sometimes when things are very chaotic, rather than getting mad and shouting, you need to go back to your peaceful time,” she says. “You can’t always change the outside world but you can change your way of seeing things.”
Clockwise (l to r): Chantal Bethel “Presence of Absence: Peace Tower” 72″ x 26″ x 10″ and “Presence of Absence: Peace Chimes” 44″ x 24″ x 10″ acrylic, crackle, gold leaf, metal chimes, driftwood on wood | artist-educator Claudette Dean leading art workshop “Freeing the Dreamer Within” at Mosaic
That “way of seeing things” extends to the internal politics of organizing a growing festival. After a devastating hurricane with impacts that are still being felt. ArtsLucaya and the growing arts movement on the island have acted as a way to move past tragedy and look to the future. Dreaming big is a necessity in the face of challenges, and the arts have sparked a sense of hope and community among the residents. As Bethel’s artwork suggests, the solution to tragedy is to not succumb to it but to find peace within it and build toward the future. It’s a lesson as applicable to the art world as to the world at large.
“We are putting the island in the limelight, not just on a national stage, but on an international level,” says Sheldon Saint, another founding member of Art Lucaya and a renowned watercolor artist practicing for 34 years. His large watercolor titled “Sugar Apple Guinness” is a portrait of his nephew eating the native fruit in front of a blue door. Saint’s piece, like much of the festival’s work, is deeply rooted in everyday Bahamian life; a child in summer, a conch shell, and, like Bethel, the space between silence and noise.
(l to r): Veronica Dorsett, 6lX-Love 01 and 6IX-Love 02, Decorative paper collage, framed 28″ x 12″
This year’s iteration of ArtLucaya closes May 23rd. However, thanks to the support of volunteers, local media, businesses, and the growing interest of cultural travelers, you can mark your calendars for ArtLucaya 2027. While there, you may catch a glimpse of what visitors to The Bahamian Pavilion at Venice already know: The artistic talent in the Bahamas is one to watch, and the best way to do that is up close and personal.
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