Major Exhibitions

1959 Kapo, Juster Galleries, New York

1962 Kapo, Hills Galleries, Kingston

1968 Artists of the Western hemisphere, center for Inter-American Relations, N.Y.

1969 Kapo, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston

1975 Kapo, Just Above Mid-town Gallery, New York

1978 Four Jamaican Primitives, Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington D.C.

1979 The Intuitive Eye, National Gallery of Jamaica

1975 - 1985 Annual National Exhibition, National Gallery of Jamaica

1981-2 Some Mother and Child Images in Jamaican Art, NGJ, Kingston

1983 Jamaican Art 1922 €“ 1982, SITES, Washington and touring

1983 Male and Female Created He Them, National Gallery of Jamaica

1989 Fifteen Intuitives, National Gallery of Jamaica

1990 Arawak Vibrations, National Gallery of Jamaica

1994 Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Jamaica

1997 Black as Colour, National Gallery of Jamaica

1997 Redemption Song, Diggs Gallery, Salem N.C. USA

2005 Back to Black, Whitechapel Gallery, London

Major Awards

1960 Gold Award presented by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I

1969 Silver Musgrave Medal

1977 Order of Distinction, National Honours

1985 Gold Musgrave Medal of the Institute of Jamaica

1985 Norman Manley Award for Excellence in the Field of Arts

Publications

ARCHER-STRAW, P. & ROBINSON, K., JAMAICAN ART: AN OVERVIEW (1990)

BOXER, D. & POUPEYE, V., MODERN JAMAICAN ART, Ian Randle, Kingston (1998)

GRADUSSOV, Alex Kapo €“ Cult Leader, Sculptor, Painter, JAMAICA JOURNAL3:2, 1969

Kapo: The Larry Wirth Collection, (exh.cat), NATIONAL GALLERY OF JAMAICA, Kingston, (with an introduction by David Boxer), 1982

MORRIS, Randall, Redemption Songs, Diggs Gallery, Salem N.C. USA, 1997

NATIONAL GALLERY OF JAMAICA €˜The Intuitive Eye, NATIONAL GALLERY OF JAMAICA, Kingston, 1979

POUPAYE, VEERLE, CARIBBEAN ART (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998)

Website Links

Artist Review €“ Kapo €“ Mallica Reynolds

Kapo (Mallica Reynolds) was born in Bynloss St Catherine, a rural community about thirty miles from Kingston. As early as age sixteen he began receiving visions and started traveling the countryside preaching and healing. In 1931 he came to Cockburn Pen on the outskirts of Kingston, but eventually settled in Trench Town where he established his Zion Revival church. Here, he began creating his sculptures and paintings that reflected the people in his community their ritual practices. His work came to prominence through the efforts of Edward Seaga, then a young anthropologist interested in African retentions in Jamaican society who would help to exhibit his work locally and internationally and to promote it to collectors then interested in €˜so called €˜ primitivc€™ art.

As a revival priest, much of Kapo€™s subject matter is devoted to his spiritual beliefs as well as the depiction of rituals in his church such as spirit possession, casting out of demons, baptisms and resurrections. In another vein, he is a €˜folk€™ painter, painting the beauty of Jamaica, its orange groves, hillsides and houses. Like other self-taught artists, his paintings share the same flat surfaces, coloured patterning and grid like presentation.

His sculpture, however, is more distinct. They are robust characters hewn from dense wood, heavily stained to a deep rich brown/black, that create anxiety for white and black viewers alike; indeed the artist remembers being beaten and arrested by the authorities because of the perceived demonic and seditious blackness they communicated.

Edward Seaga would later become Prime Minister of Jamaica and instrumental in donating The Larry Wirth Collection, one the largest collections of Kapo€™s work, to the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1982.

Kapo€™s works can also be found in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam as well as the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America and many other collections locally and internationally. Kapo died at seventy-eight having won numerous awards and honours.