King Sailor

Exhibition opening: Monday 29th April at 2:00 pm at The National Museum and Art Gallery. Continues until April 2014. Gallery Hours: Tue-Sat 10am-6pm In a statement about Mas Man, Dalton Narine’s recent documentary on his life and art, mas genius Peter Minshall paid tribute, once again, to the fancy sailor character: “The mas had made something truly original, like the surreal fancy sailor, like nothing you had ever seen or imagined, so different, this extension or widening of the accepted terms of human apparel.” Now, the National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago is pleased to re-open our permanent Carnival Gallery with “King Sailor” – an exhibition of sailor costumes, drawings and photographs of the many avatars of this seminal mas character. In this show we present The Mt Hope Connection, a Carnival archive belonging to Keith Carrington and Keith Ramirez, whose Fancy Sailor band has been in existence for the past 29 years, although Carrington has been a King Sailor since the 1960s. According to Carrington, “The Mas camp is in Macoya. We move off from The Corner of. Duke and Frederick Streets on Carnival Monday and Tuesday, and continue to partner with the St Michael Boys’ school. Since 2007 we have been participating in St Lucia’s Carnival, providing the only 70-strong Sailor band accompanied by a steelband. We have many trophies at the band-house, we won Small Band of the Year three times.” This exhibition also includes a series of discussions on “Archiving our Carnival Arts”. We hope this will encourage discussions and documentation of traditional Mas. The National Museum is committed to both the preservation of the past carnival arts and the development of their future in Trinidad and Tobago. The Mt Hope Connection is a collaboration with The Carnival Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, which has documented and conserved part of the collection.