Art players are forced to learn how to navigate import and export regulations and how to raise funds to support these often expensive endeavors. Import was especially recognized as a barrier to visual art programming and the growth of visual art learning spaces. Import regulations further challenge Jamaicans to learn from each other’s experiences and to be resourceful at finding local alternatives.

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“There's nothing negative really more than transporting the works. That's where I find the most discomfort, getting the work out and in. But otherwise, I have no problem interacting with other spaces.”

Kimani Beckford | Painter, Collector, Curator AIRS (Artist)

 

“Every artist has mastered the import, export duties and customs in Jamaica. Every artist has to deal with it. We know all the paperwork. And I guarantee you, any artist can leave the art world right now and go work down at Kingston Wharf or any one of the custom ports, because we have to deal with the paperwork so much that we know the text. If we don't fix that, it becomes difficult for us to develop as an art space.”

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There are so many avenues for artworks to be exported to other spaces. The only issue I'm having is how much of it are we going to be able to import to build our own cultural space. There is no issue with exportation in Jamaica, whether by the artists or the works themselves or ideas. But importation is the paramount issue that I think we have to cross… And so if we don't have freedom of traffic on both sides, I think that's one of the principal things we need to fix first before we can move any further.”                                   Phillip Thomas | Painter, EMCVA Lecturer, Curator (Arts Educator)

 

“There was no professional spray paint on this island when I first started painting. We started shipping it out on a case by case basis for each project. [It was] extremely difficult. The first couple small ones came through. People know how to slide things through. But then I came one year, sent a bunch of paint down, and it got flagged. We were going to get the paint to do something to the Bob Marley Museum…But I went down to the wharf [afterwards] and cleared the paint. We entered the wharf, and immediately the driver was ticketed for not having a turn signal. They told me how much money it was going to be. I had to go to two different banks to get the cash. It was like all the money I had in the world. My Jamaican friend was like, ‘Make a fake invoice that says it’s worth this.’ We got out of the van and there was a rum barrel with a piece of plywood on it, and all these Jamaicans playing dominoes on it, waiting [on] food and stuff to clear to get their name called. And they all looked at me. And the dude put his hand on the corner of the plywood and flipped the table with all the dominos. We get to the door and the guy was like, ‘There's only room for one person to go through this door, not two.’ I went up to the window, went through the maze, and the woman is like ‘$850 for duty on this.’ And I was like ‘Well, I've got this -fake invoice- that says it's only worth this.’ She is like ‘Well, I can go get my supervisor and we can review this.’ I was later told that it would take about two months. I was like, ‘Let me just pay this and be on my way.’ And she was like ‘I think that's best.’ So I ponied  up the money. 

It was probably 150 cans of spray paint and it was like double [the cost to clear it]. Now I have an import permit. But even with an import permit, the 2500 cans I shipped here last December, I was told that they wanted to burn it on the pier. I still had to push it through some channels, but it's in the store for sale now. There's now artist-grade spray paint on the island for the first time available, cheaper than other regular spray paint. So that's empowering to make an artist be able to produce the quality of art that we're doing on the current project. In the administration's food to do exactly the same. And for foreign artists to become a visitor, you just want to grab some [like] candy and straight [let them] do their thing.

So it's going to be really interesting how this develops. It harkens back to how conservative this country is, or some of the cultural deficiencies, for an island nation to not have the art supplies necessary to create professional art. Large-scale art.”                                                                               Jonathan Lamb | Spray Painter, Founder Touch Up JA (Artist, Curator, Collector, Investor)

 

“The equipment then [when my dad was first starting his animation studio] was the typical Windows CPUs with a bit above entry-level specs that could take on projects easily. And that could handle 3D projects and 2D projects if needed. It was hard to get those. It was expensive to get them in because of course you have to purchase, you have to bring them in. And there was no form of incentives at that time to help with cost. And my dad was the sole investor of the company. So it was a big investment. “

Alwayne White | Animator, Media Production (Artist)

 

[On making art duty-free:] “This government always prioritised culture. So from post-independence we've had the National Library, the Institute of Jamaica, a museums division, National Gallery of Jamaica. There's really been a strong support of culture. But it's almost like the free movement of art is seen as a kind of an elitist activity, and anything the government does, they consider the impact. So how many people is this impacting? If it's thousands of people they'll consider it. It's hard to argue for [duty free art] because you're arguing for a handful of artists. It's not a big cohort. I live in hope and there is a process where you can register work to leave and then bring it back in, but it's very bureaucratic. I hope there will be at some point, but it's almost like artists here, the work needs to be shown abroad, not where just the diaspora is, but for more visibility, for more inclusion by writers who write about global contemporary conversations or trends or areas of interest the artists are working in that align with other conversations happening in the world. So I live in hope.

[On hosting international shows:] Again, you come back to how do you get it in? You know, when we did the Kingston Biennial, I think it was 2022, which was curated by David Scott, who is Jamaican, based in New York, Small Acts, Anthropology at Columbia; a lot of diaspora work came in. The National Gallery usually focuses on the local. At times there have been other engagements with the region, but that's all fairly recent. I support that, so I think it's important to do. But for that we had a lot of diaspora work coming in, so it had to come in as a bonded shipment. So, it's all together and it has to leave together as well. So, it would have to be that kind of process and with that you do need a kind of institutional support. If you're going to do it independently, you'd need the National Gallery to come on board to be able to legitimize that process because it is a government institution. 

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And there have been engagements with the International, but more as curators. So, the National Gallery used to have a whole series of exhibitions. I think there were annual Curators' Eye, where they would bring in curators who would look at the contemporary moment and curate a show. So there would be some freshness of perspective and insight. In terms of bringing the international in, it would be great, but again it comes down to funding. When we did the Jamaica Jamaica exhibition, which was first staged at the Philharmonic in Paris, it was kind of crazy if it didn't come here. But we had to raise the funds for that. And a country like Jamaica has lots of needs, so to raise funds for an exhibition is a hard thing to do, and we don't really have public funding bodies. We don't have foundations and things like that, so it's a challenge.”

Susanne Fredericks | Director, Suzie Wong Presents (Curator, Investor, Collector)

 

“Cargo, the handling, crating and so on, moving works of art generally, is an expensive undertaking. But also the customs regulations in Jamaica are very prohibitive. The import duties are I think about 43 percent, and there are no longer exemptions. [Ten years ago,] the National Gallery had an automatic exemption, which was not necessarily making matters easier, because you still had to go through the bureaucratic process. But now those automatic exemptions no longer exist. And in the current Biennial in Jamaica, a number of works are not in it because they got stuck in Customs. So that has always been an issue. I'm very upset that that has not been resolved, because there are ways to resolve that. Part of the problem is also that even if you get an exemption, there's still significant fees that you have to pay. So there is no longer a full exemption and you cannot clear things through customs yourself. You have to clear it through a broker. And that comes with its own expenses.

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I think part of the problem is that Customs has always seen art as a money-making thing. It is not seen as non-profit. It is seen as a high-end, valuable product. And also in Jamaica a significant part of the art market is part of the informal economy. So government gets nothing on it in terms of taxation. And there are basically only two points where there is an almost guaranteed revenue. One is art materials, which have a similar taxation rate in Jamaica, which makes them very expensive. And then the second thing is the import of art into the country. And I think that is why there is reluctance to step away from that. There are all these exemptions for sports and for musical instruments. So why is there reluctance to do the same for art? And I think it has a lot to do with that perception that art is a product. That it is something that collectors buy. That when art comes into the country it is necessarily for commercial purposes. And if you want to bring art temporarily into the country, you can do so. But you have to pay a deposit equivalent to the duties until it is re-exported, which of course for a cultural institution that runs on a tiny budget is just not possible. So one thing that I had hoped could happen is that the National Gallery would get bonded warehouse status, like they do for the cars, where the duty is not paid unless it stays in the country, unless it does not leave. It was a discussion that had started, and I think technically it is possible to do that, so that at the very least, the museums would  have that status. It's a big responsibility too, of course, because a lot of things can go wrong in the process. But if it can be done for cars, I don't see why it could not be done for art. But I don't think there is that will, and I think it really goes to that same mindset about art, of seeing art exclusively as a luxury product. And as long as you have that, there is going to be this sense that if you ask for a duty exemption, you're somehow cheating the government out of legitimate revenues.

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So it's very unfortunate, because I think it has really hampered Jamaica's role in the regional and international exchanges that are really the norm right now. And in other Caribbean countries better solutions have been found. So Jamaica right now is probably the most prohibitive in terms of the customs regulations on art. And things getting stuck in customs for months and so on. It's not a productive way to deal with exhibitions.

Customs also takes the position that you need to apply for any exemptions and so on months ahead of time. If you know how exhibitions are curated, especially juried exhibitions, you will not have that information months ahead of time. So something has to give. And I thought that that bonded warehouse system might have been a way to deal with all of that. I don't think it's going to be resolved anytime soon. Any artist in Jamaica has stories to tell about sending their work for exhibitions and then having to get it back into the island without major expenses. But all the efforts have fallen on deaf ears there. There does not seem to be any political will to deal with this.”

Veerle Poupeye  | Director Cayman Islands National Museum, Past Executive Director National Gallery of Jamaica, Past Edna Manley Faculty, Author “Caribbean Art (The World of Art)” (Curator, Collector, Investor, Policy Maker, Scholar, Critic)

 

“…[We] were importing the clay from Toronto or Miami, and it was white clay. JBDC [Jamaica Business Development Corporation] loved the look of the product, but they just knew that the white clay had to go. They said, ‘Look we love the product but you have to change the color of the clay. You have to bring it more authentic, with a real cultural look.’ And that's when they introduced Kingston to me and said, ‘Look, there's actually Jamaican clay in Kingston that we think would make your products more outstanding, more meaningful.’ 

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Most kilns that you see here are imported from overseas. We don't make kilns here, but I came to Kingston and found out about this traditional style firing I never knew about. The persons that live in Rose Town, they've been doing it for years. They build a brick oven to fire their products. There's [people] that traveled out to Africa and they got another idea of firing [by] digging a hole in the ground and actually putting the pieces in there, putting the wood on top of it, and then do the firing that way. I'm just learning as I go along. No matter how modern we get, and we're growing into the future, there's always a time that you have to go back to your past. What if one day the gas runs out, or the electricity is gone, we still could go back to the earth and use the provisions that were provided for us to use.”

Garfield Williams | Founder, Trench Town Ceramics (Craft Artisan, Curator, Collector, Investor)

 

“I have someone who knows exactly how to build crates. There are people here who can package artwork, definitely. There's more than one. And they're good. But I have one that's particularly good. I just find it's expensive.”

Laura Facey | Sculptor (Artist, Informal Teacher, Investor)

 

“To me another problem is Jamaica has terrible issues in terms of export for small exporters. All my artisan friends complain about that. You have two options. One, post office, where things will probably arrive in two to three weeks and they look battered, and I've tried that. And the other one is a DHL or FedEx, which is 35 US dollars. And no one is gonna pay $35US. No one in America can pay $35 to program back that may cost $35. That's not going to happen. So we need to work that out on a small scale and for small exporters. Then you ship something and the person decides they want to return it or exchange it, which is now a standard in online shopping. That is another cost right there. So it's a little tricky. So to me working with a bulk buyer in America would probably be the best situation. But it takes logistics and you need to accept that you're not going to get full value out of the item because they're going to want discounts. There's so many steps to it. So there's a maker who lives two hours from Kingston. How do they physically get the goods to somewhere in Kingston for it to be checked, to be labelled, all those kind of things? And then you have to bulk ship it. It's really just logistics. If somebody could work that out, I think that'd be great. And figure out better rates with shipping agencies and so on. 

I once went to Guatemala, and this person I knew, her business was working with artisans there. She was supplying big companies like Anthropologie and various big US retailers. And she told a scary story. She said when you work with those big retailers, you put yourself at financial risk. A retailer put a big order in for her, she made all the things, she shipped it to them, and they changed their mind, or they went out of business, and they went bankrupt. And she got stuck, so you need to have business savvy not just for the logistics of shipping, but dealing with big distribution.”

Ashley Rousseau | Founder Beenybud, “Purveyors of Fine Craft” (Craft Artisan, Curator, Collector, Investor)