Solo Exhibition at the Barbados Museum - Am I a bad girl, Nanny?

The Barbados Museum & Historical Society will be presenting two interrelated exhibitions that center Black women’s lives, historical memory, and the ethics of representation in Barbados.

Am I a ​bad ​girl, Nanny? Cries of Innocence and of Experience, a solo exhibition by Joscelyn Gardner

and

Harriet Thomas Weekes: The Right to Opacity

Exhibition dates: 26 February - September, 2026

Opening simultaneously across two galleries at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, these exhibitions engage the life and legacy of Harriet Thomas Weekes (1815–1897)—a Black Barbadian woman whose life spanned enslavement, apprenticeship, and legal freedom, and whose image survives in rare nineteenth-century photographic portraits held in the Museum’s collection. While the colonial archive records Harriet primarily through her labour as a nurse to multiple generations of one white family, these exhibitions ask more searching questions about care, power, judgement, and what can—and cannot—be known about women like her.

In Am I a ​bad ​girl, Nanny?​ Cries ​of Innocence and of Experience, internationally recognised Barbadian artist Joscelyn Gardner approaches the archive as a site of fragmentation and ethical tension rather than certainty. Through lithography, embroidery, and layered material processes, Gardner constructs a speculative visual landscape imagined through the perspective of Eva Douglas Richards, the white child in Harriet’s care. Gardner’s practice does not claim Harriet’s voice; instead, it dwells in the awareness of partial knowledge and the multiplicity of possible truths.

The companion exhibition, Harriet Thomas Weekes: The Right to Opacity, situates the Museum itself within this inquiry. Drawing on archival fragments, photography, and community engagement, the exhibition foregrounds a curatorial practice of listening—one that resists the impulse to render Harriet fully transparent or knowable. Guided by Édouard Glissant’s principle of the “right to opacity,” the exhibition honours Harriet as a woman who lived a full and complex life without requiring her to be reduced to the limits of the colonial record. Visitors are invited to contribute reflections, becoming part of an evolving, multivocal narrative.

The exhibitions are curated by Natalie McGuire, PhD.

The stone and plate lithographs in the exhibition titled Am I a bad girl, Nanny? Cries of Innocence and of Experience, have been produced in collaboration with Tamarind Master Printer, Jill Graham, at NSCAD University Print Shop, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.