Veerle Poupeye
Veerle Poupeye is a Belgian-Jamaican art historian, curator and critic specialized in Caribbean art and visual culture. She lives in Kingston, Jamaica, and currently works as an independent curator, researcher, writer and cultural consultant.
Poupeye was educated at the Universiteit Gent in Belgium, where she obtained a BA and MA in Art History, and at Emory University in Atlanta, where she obtained a PhD in Art History and Cultural Studies. Her publications include Caribbean Art (1998), in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series, and Modern Jamaican Art (1998), which she co-authored with David Boxer, as well as various book chapters and exhibition catalogue essays on Jamaican and Caribbean art and culture. She has also contributed on these subjects to journals such as Small Axe, Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Quarterly, Raw Vision, the Miami Rail, and the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art, the West Indian Review, and the Jamaican newspapers the Gleaner, the Observer and the Record.
Veerle Poupeye has served as the Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica and had previously worked there as a Curator. She has been the sole or lead curator of more than 45 exhibitions, on Jamaican and Caribbean art, most of them for the National Gallery of Jamaica but also for other organizations in the Caribbean, North America and Europe, and she has collaborated on many other exhibitions. This has included such groundbreaking exhibitions as the 2014 and 2017 Jamaica Biennial, which she had conceptualized.
She has served as Coordinator of the Visual Arts program of the MultiCare Foundation, an inner-city development foundation, and as Research Fellow and Curator of the CAG[e] gallery at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. Her teaching experience also extends to the University of the West Indies-Mona, Emory University and New York University.
She presently lectures on Material Culture, Curatorial Studies, Art Criticism, and Aesthetics at the Edna Manley College.
