There’s something irksome about an artist who excels in two artforms – but such are the skills of John Lyons, as accomplished a poet as a painter. Possibly it’s tied to his Trinidadian roots; a small Island of cultural fusion that has a big punch across the globe.
I openly admit to some bias, as not only have I known John for many years, I have performed and published alongside John Lyons the poet. He and I were team members for what was my first gallery-based workshop at Manchester Art Gallery and he really helped me through the experience.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1933, Lyons came to the UK in 1959 to study at Goldsmiths and Newcastle, and from 1967 lived and worked in Manchester and Hebden Bridge for almost forty years.
In my role as Cultural Director of the Manchester based Black Arts Alliance (now known as National as members hail from across the UK), I co-curated his work in NBAA exhibitions. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that I have one of his earliest large charcoals hanging on my stairs landing. It consists of a Black male in profile facing a white male. It is an image of equality and confidence – they are looking directly into each other’s eyes. The work not only reflects the persona of Lyons but his belief that no one is superior to another, no matter what their heritage. This exhibition at the Whitworth also includes some early charcoals, including ‘Anatomy of an Eggbox’ (1964), a drawing of surreal forms that looks as though the paper carton were melting as he drew it.
Need I say what a joy it is to see Lyons’ work resplendently on show across three gallery spaces. It could be said that such a solo exhibition is long overdue and I partly agree, but a retrospective exhibition of this scale also needs time to ensure the broad extent of such an artist’s work in paint, sculpture and poetry can be brought and curated together (the show will tour in February 2025 to The Box Plymouth).
I first met John late 1984 when I became the Black Women Writers Development worker at Cultureword (run by the Manchester-based writing development organisation Commonword). Lyons was a member of the Identity Workshop that Lemn Sissay ran, and I co-edited the resulting publication, Black and Priceless. In that publication Lyon’s poems included his 1987 prize-winning poems for Peterloo Poets and Cultureword, ‘The Lure of Cascadura’, which won First Prize in the Peterloo Poets Afro-Caribbean, Asian Poetry Prize, ‘Skin Skin Yuh Not Know Meh’ which was Highly Commended in the Peterloo Poets Competition, ‘Englan No Muddercountry’ which won Second Prize in the Cultureword Poetry Competition, ‘The Black Poet’, and, one of my favourites , ‘Jab Jab’, that I helped him develop into a performance piece : ‘before we go away, jab, jab, yuh goin to pay, jab, jab, cause we ded trouble, jab, jab, an big an able, jab, jab.’
It was my pleasure to work with Lyons in the performance of his work. This was a joy to watch as the delight of sharing with an audience brought a beam of a smile to his face. Here in the Whitworth, a number of his poems are displayed directly on the gallery walls, placed like pages from a book, some with accompanying audio recordings of Lyons reading them. The poem in the final room, ‘Transformations’, taken from the magazine The Fenland Reed, exemplifies his interest in poems as artworks when he writes: ‘an art object in conceptual mode / with fragments of past dinners / sealed inside. I wonder / at the mind and hand that made / these fragile forms for / living flesh: the fish and the fowl.’
As with his paintings, John’s poetry has a tenacity in particular when it comes to punctuation and grammar – I believe he uses words to paint the poems on the page. You can hear the joy in his readings here in the gallery, especially with the first poem in the entry way, ‘Guru Bird’, from the 2015 book A Carib Being in Cymru, which introduces his lifelong fascination with owls.
It is worth noting that any retrospective will offer a potted history, but this couldn’t be more true than with Black arts histories of the late twentieth century in the UK. Here in the Whitworth there is a vitrine showing items from Lyon’s archive, including old photos with large groups of children dressed up in carnivalesque costumes, a publication titled The ArtPack: A History of Black Artists in Britain which includes other recognisable names alongside Lyons’ like Sonia Boyce and Claudette Johnson, and a charming letter inviting Lyons to talk to the history of art students at the University of Manchester in 1988 (‘we can pay you a fee of £20.00 plus expenses… you will need a 50p coin to get into the car park).
There is, however, a lot of the history missing. I believe Lyons and I joined Black Arts Alliance at more or less the same time and I was the producer of the multi-media show Revelations of Black at the Royal Exchange Theatre. In the beginning it was Aldith Venair (one of the NBAA founders) who curated the visual arts exhibition displayed across the Royal Exchange theatre as part of the Manchester Festival. A year later was Revelations of Black 2, again at The Royal Exchange Theatre, and the visual arts were shown in The Ginnel Gallery which was based on Lloyd Street off Albert Square. Off course Lyons had pieces in both exhibitions and performed his poetry to a full houses in both years.
When I was getting ready to transfer from secondary school, art was the subject many people took in order to achieve sufficient qualification to gain a place in further education. My art teacher however, advised my mother not to bother sending me for the exam as ‘she cannot tell the top of a painting from the bottom’ (and that is a real quote.) It was true! Visual art bored me. The reason was simple – none of the paintings from the Old Masters to the contemporary exhibitions I had seen up to that point reflected me or anyone resembling me. It wasn’t until the Cornerhouse hosted The Image Employed exhibition, selected by Keith Piper and Marlene Smith, that I connected with the visual arts. Suddenly, there I was along with so many others on huge canvases, some incorporating text that spoke to me. The presence of so many female artists including Claudette Johnson, Amanda Holiday, Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas, inspired me to start curating exhibitions that mixed genres.
In the eighties when the BLK Art Group organised the ‘First National Black Art Convention’, Lyons was situated north of the action in location and age. I don’t believe it is unfair to say that the majority of British born Black artists’ work was explicitly political in its context. There was, and some might say still is, a struggle to have the work appreciated on a par with work by white artists. In many ways, Lyons was seen as an elder. He wasn’t fresh out of Art School, and was in fact teaching in secondary and further education. His work wasn’t reflecting a Black British view of life as the majority of the BLK Art Groups were, though I doubt that bothered him. Lyons has always told a story embedded in his memories of his homeland of Trinidad – this was especially important when so many people knew little more of the ‘West Indies’ beyond the island of Jamaica.
It was around this time that Lyons, along with Alnoor Mitha and Lin Tang, founded Zamana Studios. I curated NBAA’s Storia, in which each visual piece came from a partnership with a performer. Three pieces were sited on stage almost like scenery. Working with Lyons meant being kept on one’s toes because he expects and deserves his work to be respected and presented in its best light.
It was the norm during the eighties that even when a gallery hosted an exhibition by Black artists, catalogues were rarely produced. It is purely my opinion that most likely it was considered that shows by Black artists would not attract a sufficient audience to warrant the cost of printing. This means that so much history is reliant on memory. While NBAA did produce print, it was limited in quality by the lack of sufficient funding. I will always remember one NBAA exhibition that included pieces by Lyons at the MMU Holden Gallery. The catalogue was printed horizontally on A3 paper. I collated it across several surfaces, stretching from the front door of my house down the hall into the kitchen. Thankfully we had managed to get several boxes of a new Trinidadian rum that helped eased the strain for everyone.
Manchester’s annual carnival began as a procession through the streets of Moss Side and Hulme culminating in a festival in Alexandra Park organised by locals originally from Trinidad, St Kitts and Nevis. Some say the year was 1970, others put it as 1971. In the first years it was a small event, but large in its energy for the participants eager to reconnect with a tradition from ‘Back Home’. It took many years for Manchester Council to recognize the value of carnival for everyone, finally permitting the procession to extend beyond the streets immediate to the park. Living close by raising his young family in Stretford, Lyons had never left carnival out of his life. Possibly (he has never said) frustrated by the limitations of the Manchester event that gave its concentration to carnival design and the procession without educating the crowds on its history. He painted with the vibrancy of his island to evoke the essence of a celebratory tradition embedded in his soul. It just hasn’t been possible for him to leave the theme out of his work; Carnival was (and is) pulsating through him. Pumping the blood of creativity from his heart to his fingers, he has captured a tradition that was seeded in the roots of the slave trade of captured Africans forced to survive after the Arawak (Taino) and Carib (Kalinago) were worked to death on their own lands.
Documentation of the havoc that colonisation imposed on the Caribbean is continually being updated and the details are always harrowing. The spirit to survive motivated captured Africans in their toil and, where possible, in the briefest and mainly secretive moments of recreation. If indeed ‘recreation’ is the terminology to use. Forbidden to participate in ‘cannes bruleés’ (when the sugar cane was burnt), the slaves began to mimic the plantation owners, mocking their music and dancing and bringing into the mix their own beliefs of good and evil that they remembered or had been kept alive through oral history since their capture and transportation. One poem included in the exhibition, ‘Sunseeds of Slaves’ from the book Lure of the Cascadura, shows Lyons’ feeling for the legacies of slavery right through to the present when he writes: ‘The new sunseeds of slaves / sprouting up through rubble / in England’s cityscapes’ as he laments the loss of his own ‘carib soil’ along with so many others who journeyed to the so-called motherland.
Maya Angelou talks of ‘We wear the mask’ in her poetry. Masks have always been part of African culture and remain an intricate part of Carnival. You will see the demonic masks alongside the masks of fools in many of Lyons’s artworks. The first painting you see on entry is ‘Masquerade Enigma’ (2023) which shows a woman in a crowd holding a baby – everyone except the woman, who wears a cerise dress and bright green jewellery with turquoise details, is wearing a mask of orange and peach tones. Room One, ‘Carnivalesque’, doesn’t include a single artwork without masks. In one of the wall poems in that room, ‘Behind the Carnival’, taken from a book of the same name, Lyons writes: ‘men hid their awe behind masks / shaped wood and clay into their fear / behind the carnival’. Some of these masked characters you might recognise, many possibly not. Specific archetypes and characters come up again and again, Jab Jab and Book Man, Jabmolassie and other jumbies (mythological spirit or demon) in various forms, repeatedly as an owl. Here is an opportunity for exploration beyond the modern concept of carnival, which increasingly is being influenced by the Brazilian troops of skimpily dressed women. True carnival is a craft from costumes, head dress, music and lyrics. Carnival is a history, a tradition full of warning and expectation of good times to come. Lyons is the driver of this sojourn.
You may well be surprised to see in his collection some work totally lacking colour, and within these is my favourite piece, one that I tried to buy but Lyons (understandably) refused to sell. ‘My Mother Earth is Black like Me’ (1988), a work of muted brown pastel on paper. Here is a man climbing free of the earth, or possibly he is returning to it. Trinidad, the whole of the Caribbean, is saturated in the blood of Africans, native Caribbeans and indentured workers. Their spirits await J’ouvert, to walk alongside the carnival troops.
Some artists, regardless of their chosen genre, speak of their work as their mission in life. For others it is their journey of (self) discovery. In my opinion, John Lyons’ work seems in many ways that of a visual historian and cultural activist. This is his story, his heritage, and he shares it with a vitality that is embedded in every frame. It makes me wonder if David Rudder wrote ‘Trini to de Bone’ in John’s honour.
While John is indeed Trini to the bone, he could never be accused of ‘Liming’ (hanging around with friends chatting for chatting’s sake). Now in his ninety-first year, we have the opportunity to stand back, look around and admire the depth and scope of a great artist. In doing so, it is possible to retrace the origins of an event that takes place in London, Manchester, Leeds, Huddersfield, Preston, St Pauls, Leicester. Where there are people of Caribbean heritage, there you will find carnival. Surely these are the cities where John’s exhibition needs to be seen.
In the words of Calypsonian Arrow; Long time, we doh fete like dis!
John Lyons: Carnivalesque, the Whitworth, Manchester, 10 May – 25 August 2024.
SuAndi is a Manchester based poet and writer who works internationally. She has received honorary degrees in Literature and the Arts along with an OBE for her work in supporting and promoting Black artists and their culture. She is the NBAA freelance Cultural Director.
This article is supported by The Whitworth.
Published 24.07.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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