Born: 15 March, 1943, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Died: 2 August, 2008, in Montego Bay, Jamaica, aged 65. ONCE Jamaicans had got over their shock and had grieved over reggae legend Bob Marley's death in 1981, there was a unanim
ous public call for a befitting statue in the capital, Kingston, where he had lived and recorded for most of his life. Although artist and sculptor Christopher Gonzalez was teaching in Atlanta, Georgia, at the time, his reputation was such that the government of Edward Seaga turned to him in 1982 to immortalise the Jamaican who had moved the world.
When, however, the 8ft bronze statue was finally unveiled opposite the National Stadium on 11 May, 1983, the second anniversary of the singer's death, there was only one Jamaican word to describe the public's reaction: Bangarang! – outcry, disorder, even violence, as Marley fans hurled rocks, fruit and other assorted projectiles at this image of their hero.
Gonzalez, then 40 and of half-Hispanic origin, had depicted the singer symbolically – with a distorted face, his dreadlocks blending into his lower torso to become the roots of a tree, and one dreadlock curling back upwards to become a rather-phallic microphone. The statue stood for only a couple of hours.
To restore order, troops of the Jamaica Defence Force threw ropes around it and dragged it unceremoniously to the safety of the National Gallery of Jamaica, where it remained on less controversial display for almost 20 years. It now welcomes tourists to the Island Resort, a shopping and entertainment mall in Ocho Rios owned by Chris Blackwell, the London-born Jamaican record producer who "discovered" Marley and introduced him to the world via Island Records. According to British-born art historian and curator Petrine Archer-Shaw, it remains a masterpiece, "one of the most famous works in Jamaican art history".
A new, conventional and lifelike statue of the reggae king was commissioned, from sculptor Alvin Marriott, and erected in 1984 in the same spot on Kingston's Arthur Wint Drive.
Hailed early in his career as one of the first wave of post-colonial visual artists, Gonzalez never fully got over what he considered the public's misunderstanding of his intention – to express Marley's groundedness, his roots, his rising up, his spirit and his influence rather than his physical image.
Marley's widow, Rita, mother, Cedella Booker, and fellow band member Bunny Wailer were among the statue's most vocal critics, some of whom reacted as though Gonzalez had committed high treason.
Other sculptures by Gonzalez remain in the National Gallery in Kingston, in many public buildings and in private collections but he concentrated in later life on abstract painting and figurative watercolours.
Christopher Gonzalez was the son of a Puerto Rican immigrant musician and a Jamaican mother. He attended Alpha infants' and boys' schools in the city, then St Martin High School before studying sculpture at the Jamaica School of Art in 1963, a year after the Caribbean island gained its independence from Britain. It was a time when young artists were finding a new voice, looking back to their African roots and forward to a life free of colonial "chains".
Gonzalez broadened his horizons at the California College of Arts (and Crafts), where he got a Masters' in Fine Arts, and as artist-in-residence at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.
Before returning to Jamaica, he lived in Denmark, as artist-in-residence at the Herning High School in Jutland, and in Norway, where he was strongly influenced by the work of sculptor Gustav Vigeland.
Back home, his first government commission, in the mid-1960s, was for a bust of anti- slavery hero George William Gordon, son of a Scottish plantation owner and a slave, which stands in the National Heroes Park in Kingston.
In 1966, his wood sculpture Man Arisen was hailed as "a direct descendant" of the work of the island's best-known sculptor, English-born Edna Manley (1900-87), notably her iconic Negro Aroused (1935). Gonzalez denied the latter piece had directly influenced his (other than that Manley had kindly given him the wood for it), but both clearly symbolise the rising of the enslaved towards freedom and justice and both remain major attractions in the Jamaican National Gallery.
A decade and a half before the Marley sculpture, Gonzalez was already courting controversy. His figure of a windswept Christ at the prow of a boat, commissioned for Kingston's Holy Cross Catholic Church in 1968, was rejected because, in the words of one art writer, it was "too anatomically correct. His 'manly features' were very evident".
In 1975, two bronze reliefs by Gonzalez, representing the Birth and Unity of the Nation, were commissioned by the government and remain at the tomb of former prime minister Norman Manley (husband of Edna Manley) in National Heroes Park. That same year, Gonzalez was one of ten Jamaicans featured in the Ten Jamaican Sculptors exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London.
In September 1997 his work featured in the Caribbean Visions: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Centre for African-American History and Culture in Washington DC, the largest show of Caribbean art ever to travel outside the region itself. In the words of an art critic in the Washington Post: "The human figures in The Tree of Life by Jamaican Christopher Gonzalez seem not so much to have been chiselled from a massive mahogany block as to have grown from it." One of Gonzalez's works featured in the exhibition Back to Black at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in September 2005.
At his memorial service, Jamaica's opposition leader and former prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller eulogised Gonzalez's "resistance to cultural straitjacketing", saying: "His passion for truth caused him to create work that challenged the establishment. The same quality of artistic courage and desire to communicate spiritual insights to his fellow men and women found in Bob Marley were also to be found in Gonzalez."
Christopher Gonzalez is survived by his wife, Champayne, a son and five daughters.
The full article contains 1011 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
