REAL WORLD

Through its galleries and annual festival, the resort Baha Mar is elevating art that showcases the everyday complexities of life in the Bahamas

- JESSE ASHLOCK

THE HISTORY OF ART in the Bahamas was long defined by what tourists wantedand did not want-to see. "Here it never rains, and the sky is always blue," says John Cox, the executive director of arts and culture at the Nassau resort Baha Mar, with a rueful smile. We're sitting in ECCHO, the resort's second gallery space, launched a little over two years ago to showcase Bahamian artists interested in pursuing more complex ideas about life on the islands, like Kachelle Knowles, whose playful mixed-media portraits explore Black masculinity. In a section designed as a home away from home for the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB), where Cox was formerly chief curator, an installation is underway devoted to the painter Kendal Hanna, who died last summer. Often described as the Bahamas' first abstract expressionist, he painted vigorous canvases that would not look out of place beside a Rothko or a de K