Jade Montserrat: Towards The Rainbow Tribe

Emerging Scarborough-based artist, Jade Montserrat  works at the intersection of art and activism through performance, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. The artist interrogates these mediums with the aim to expose gaps in our visual and linguistic habits. Her text works take inspiration from an extensive rolling bibliography including writers Hannah Arendt, Ntozake Shange, Caryl Philips, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bell hooks and Zora Neale Hurston.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Josephine Baker’s pivotal 20th-century experiment ‘The Rainbow Tribe’ in which a group of 12 ethnically-diverse children were adopted by Baker. Montserrat explores Baker’s fairytale-like ideas of a modern mixed-race family within the climate of global 21st-century issues surrounding cultural diversity and political freedom. Montserrat’s ‘Rainbow Tribe’ defines itself as a “cultural mix of peoples” who are “advocates of free movement”. The performance and corresponding works on paper draw on the artist’s research into the history of slavery, migration and the responses to them in the context of Black Atlantic cultural studies. Watercolours that address the viewer directly with text are juxtaposed with close-ups of the human body. Fixating on lips and eyes, they mirror the lens of the selfie generation in which anyone has the potential to achieve celebrity status. In these works, Montserrat questions our collective agency and responsibility as global participants on a worldwide stage.