Laura Facey Cooper, Spririt Dancer, 1997-1999, straw, feathers, fabric, terra cotta, gouache on plywood, 101 x 59 x 6 inches; courtesy the artist  

Jamaica is the third-largest island in the Caribbean and the largest of the English-speaking islands. It has enjoyed a lively art scene since the late 1920s, when black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey encouraged the development of art as an instrument of racial uplift. A former British plantation colony, Jamaica has been independent only since 1962, and its development as a nation in the modern world has often been turbulent and painful. This is vividly reflected in Jamaican art and culture today, which revolves largely around explorations of ethnicity and cultural identity.

Soon Come: The Art of Contemporary Jamaica brings together 32 works by 16 different contemporary artists working in painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, and textiles. The title is taken from the Jamaican vernacular expression soon come, which translates as "Great things happen when the time is right." While the exhibition features work by many internationally acclaimed artists, it also features many self-taught artists—or "intuitive" artists, to use a term coined by artist-scholar David Boxer—who have achieved recognition in Jamaica. In fact, a major theme of the exhibition is an exploration of the stylistic and conceptual differences between those artists who studied in the United States and Europe, and those who rely solely on the learned artistic traditions of Jamaican art.

Included in this survey are some of the premier artists working in Jamaica today. Cecil Cooper is a leading abstract painter whose work is represented in major collections in Jamaica, the U.S., and Canada. Since 1981, Cooper has headed the painting department of the Edna Manley School for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, the largest and most influential art school in the English-speaking Caribbean. He is also one of a group of visionary artists who is helping develop a new Jamaican art aesthetic, one that celebrates the island's extraordinarily diverse ethnic, cultural, and political heritage. Among other artists included in this survey is Milton George, a self-taught colorist who has been a fixture on the Jamaican art scene since the 1960s; Dawn Scott, a textile artist who creates some of the most original batiks ever seen; and Nicholas Morris, a young, Dartmouth-educated artist known for incorporating text into his large-scale paintings, who represents the new generation of Jamaican art.