Cornerstone Archive

The exhibition Cornerstone at the Hyde Park Art Center is rooted in personal and collective memory—especially my own connection to my home Jamaica. The exhibition explores how land, architecture, the body, and memory intersect, and how they’re shaped by history, displacement, and cultural hybridity. It draws from Jamaica’s ecology, its building traditions, and the layered stories held in land—who owns it, who tends it, and who has been displaced from it. It’s also about longing and nostalgia—what it means to carry a sense of home with you, even as it shifts.

As part of Cornerstone, this archive gathers some of the materials that have shaped the process and thinking behind the work. It includes a reading list, images, and a soundtrack—all of which reflect the ideas and feelings that run through the show: land, memory, material, and identity.

The archive includes:

  • Resource List: Books, essays, fiction, and poetry that informed the exhibition’s themes—ranging from postcolonial theory to vernacular architecture and landscape memory.

  • Image Gallery: A visual collection of references—from Jamaican terrain to material and architectural details—that served as source material and inspiration.

  • Soundtrack: A playlist shaped by personal memory of a particular time in Jamaica—capturing both nostalgia and cultural memory

Resource List

Text
Pedro Azara
Cornerstone: The Birth of the City in Mesopotamia

Rachel Goffe
"Capture Land as Abolition Geography: The Mutuality of Placemaking and Flight" (Environment and Planning D: Society and Space)

Stuart Hall
Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

Brian Meeks
After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope

Rex Nettleford
Mirror, Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica

Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Caribbean

Caribbean Cultural Identity: An Essay in Cultural Dynamics

Orlando Patterson
The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament

Kirsta Thompson
An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque

Land and Environmental Issues in Jamaica
JABBEM: Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movemen
t

Beach Access

Mining and Conservation in Jamaica

Documentary filmmaker and environmentalist Esther Figueroa’s work

How a Sovereign Group in Jamaica Is Fighting a US Mining Company

Jamaica For Sale

Poetry

Lorna Goodison/Miss Lou
Selected Poems

Ishion Hutchinson
House of Lords and Commons (2013)

Claude McKay
Songs of Jamaica (1912): McKay’s first published book, written in Patois, celebrating rural Jamaican life and folk culture.

Harlem Shadows (1922)

My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979)

Selected Poems (1969)

Banana Bottom (1933): A Jamaican-set novel critiquing colonial missionary efforts and exploring cultural hybridity and self-realization.

Olive Senior
Summer Lightening and Other Stories: A collection of short stories that tackle class, race, and power.

Gardening in the Tropics: Poems that interweave nature, colonial legacies, and Caribbean identity.

Over the Roofs of the World: An exploration of migration, displacement, and memory.

Cornerstone Soundtrack