Jamaica: Arts & Media

Jamaica has a vigorous visual arts tradition supported by institutions such as the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston. Painters Albert Huie and Barrington Watson and sculptor Edna Manley are among the artists who gained international recognition for work rooted in Jamaican life and landscape. Since the late twentieth century, dancehall culture has produced its own visual language of brightly colored posters and flyers advertising sound-system events, with illustrator Wilfred Limonious among the best known contributors to this popular art form.

Jamaican literature has produced writers recognized well beyond the Caribbean. Poet Claude McKay, born in Jamaica, became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the early twentieth century. Louise Bennett-Coverley, known popularly as "Miss Lou," helped establish Jamaican Patois as a literary language through her poetry and performances, while Una Marson, a poet and broadcaster, produced the BBC radio program Caribbean Voices in the 1940s, giving early exposure to Caribbean writers.

Jamaican music has had an outsized global influence relative to the island's size. Ska emerged in the late 1950s, giving rise to reggae in the following decade, popularized internationally by artists such as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Dancehall, characterized by rhythmic deejay "toasting," became the dominant homegrown genre from the 1980s onward. The National Dance Theatre Company, founded in 1962, has built an international reputation in performing arts. Jamaica's film industry remains modest but produced the internationally acclaimed 1972 film The Harder They Come, directed by Perry Henzell.