John Beadle (1964-2024) was born in Nassau to a Jamaican father and Bahamian mother and received a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and later an MFA in Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Beadle was influenced by many artistic traditions. His work – made with a mixture of materials including metal, paint, wood, clay, black iron, limestone, cardboard, plywood, paper, and found items – explores natural forms, histories of slavery and colonialism, migration, poverty, violence, and racial and national identity. His practice echoed how descendants of enslaved people would repurpose materials in Junkanoo, a festival that originated under slavery in British American colonies, which Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott once described as ‘the fragments of epic memory.’
‘John Beadle was a maker of art at the highest levels, a builder of ideas, and a builder of spaces; spaces he was not afraid to be the first to venture into, or the last to leave,’ said his friend and colleague John Cox. ‘His practice far transcended any one arena or designation yet always found itself in dialogue with the spaces we occupy because of his provoking us to participate, to dance, to cry, to fight, to realize, but most of all, to be still with the work.’