National Gallery regrets the passing of Seya Parboosingh
THE National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) has added its name to the list of persons and entities paying tribute to artist Seya Parboosingh who died on Friday, August 13.
The gallery notes that Seya was an enthusiastic and outspoken participant in the local artistic community and will always be remembered by the NGJ staff as a vocal presence at NGJ panel discussions and forums. Her artistic work had a significant following among collectors of Jamaican art and is well represented in local collections, including those of the Bank of Jamaica and the National Gallery of Jamaica. She received the Institute of Jamaica’s Bronze Musgrave Medal for art in 1988.
The painter and poet Seya Parboosingh, née Samila Joseph, was born in 1925, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was of Lebanese descent. She attended the University of Iowa, where she concentrated on creative writing. Seya met and married Jamaican artist Karl Parboosingh in New York in 1957 and began to paint under his direction. The couple settled in Jamaica in 1958 and that year they had their first joint exhibition at the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Library. Seya spent most of her active life in Jamaica and was a wellrecognised member of the Jamaican artistic community.
Seya’s work was visibly influenced by Karl Parboosingh’s style but she quickly found her own artistic voice, producing quiet, sensitively painted, autobiographic paintings that resonated with her poetic work and contrasted with her husband’s bold, declamatory expressionism.
The close artistic partnership between Seya and Karl Parboosingh continued until the time of his death in 1975 and arguably endured beyond that time. Some of her most poignant works were visual expressions of her grief at his passing, such as the haunting In Prayer (1975) in which the marital bed became a coffin-like presence in the composition.
A celebration of Parboosingh’s life will be held at the UWI Chapel on Friday, August 20 at 3:00 pm.
