The Sunday Arts section starts today

From today, the Sunday Guardian introduces the Sunday Arts Section. It is a fact that Trinidad and Tobago is culturally rich. One of our biggest national events is a sprawling multimedia production that encompasses the visual and performing arts, and engages the population as producers and consumers for two to four months of the year. Even if you take Carnival out of the picture, you’re still left with a country that produces musicians, designers, dancers, writers, painters, photographers at a phenomenal rate.

Despite this, it is an unfortunate reality of newspaper work in Trinidad and Tobago that the arts aren’t covered enough. A few specialists in arts and culture exist—our Peter Ray Blood is one veteran in the field, and the late Terry Joseph was another—but it remains true that coverage of arts and culture is never wide enough or deep enough to take in all this country has to give. A newsroom has finite resources of reporters, photographers and column centimetres, and all too frequently, it is the “hard” reporting like politics, crime and business that gets those resources before arts and culture.

The Sunday Arts Section will seek to cover the wide range of arts and culture events, practitioners and products that are not being adequately covered elsewhere in the media. We will strive to bring the fine arts, film, literature, fashion, dance, theatre, design and architecture into the paper, to tell the stories of those making work, and to review work that has been made.

The “we” is a mixture of veterans and newbies—like visual artist and clothing designer James Hackett, who has never been a reporter before, alongside writer/photographer Mark Lyndersay, who reported on the 1990 coup and has been shooting the stage since the days of Helen Camps and the Tent Theatre. Others include Janine Mendes-Franco, Shivanee Ramlochan, Sonja Dumas, Melanie Archer, Barbara Jenkins and me, not to mention Guardian staff reporter Zahra Gordon and writer Gillian Moore.