The UWI Museum offers a semi-permanent exhibition relating to the UWI’s history and development; generally alongside a smaller featured cameo exhibition, up for a time, focused on an area, person or theme that is directly or indirectly related to the UWI in some way.
The semi-permanent exhibition focuses on the Origins of the university: conceptually, administratively, in terms of how it represented itself, and in terms of the actual experience of the early students. The semi-permanent exhibition will grow and adjust as research, acquisition, interpretation and space allow.
In 2018, upon the 70th anniversary year marking the arrival of the first cohort of 492 West Indian (and some children) at Tilbury Docks in Essex in 1948, what should have been a major moment of national celebration, and commemoration, descended into deep contestations within community relations and British politics.
One prized possession of the UWI Museum is a digital copy of a 1953 film on the University College of the West Indies. While it’s images are important for recording the original landscape of the founding campus in its early years, it also follows the early students and lecturers as they interact with that landscape and those facilities.
The University Singers was founded in the academic year 1957/1958 at the then University College of the West Indies (UCWI) which became the UWI in 1962. In June 2018, the University Singers celebrated 60 harmoniously sonic years. With programmes, pictures, costumes, audio records and several other artifacts this exhibition took visitors on a trail through the Singers past.
The plantation history of the Caribbean region marks the physical campuses of the University of the West Indies and this history which featured enslavement and subsequent indentureship casts a shadow that includes a current focus on reparatory justice. The UWI Museum developed a cameo exhibition on the plantation history of the sites, especially the founding Mona site where material remnants, archaeological remains as well as estate maps and other evidence remain visible.
Art has always been important to the UWI and is frequently in focus at the UWI Museum. At the founding campus, Mona, the Main Library maintains a significant collection including the ‘AD Scott’ collection of paintings by a range of well–known Jamaican artists (Barrington Watson, Edna Manley, Eugene Hyde, Carl Abrahams, Karl Parboosingh among others); works by Ras Dizzy: and works by Gloria Escoffery and other artists. UWI campuses at St.
The UWI Museum in collaboration with the Jamaica Military Museum focused on the two World Wars of the 20th century for International Museum Day 2017.
There were three internment camps run by the military in Jamaica, during World War 2, holding military prisoners and civilian internees detained in Jamaica and other parts of the then British West Indies, as well as in British West African colonies.
A cameo exhibition on the history of the UWI Carnival was mounted at the UWI Museum, as a work in progress. Carnival came to Jamaica in the mid-1950s via Southern Caribbean students coming north to attend the founding Mona campus of the then University College of the West Indies (UCWI). They brought masquerade (Mas) and steel pan music, both of which ultimately infused the campus carnival by the end of the decade.
Click here to view the exhibition flyer
The UWI Museum remembered the life and work of AD Scott, engineer, builder, art patron and artist through an exhibition of pieces from the UWI’s AD Scott Collection as well as personal artifacts. Scott, who died on June 16, 2004, was named Resident Engineer at the University College of the West Indies in 1949, soon after his return from Canada where he had studied civil engineering and worked for some years. He famously masterminded the move of an old rum store from Gale in Trelawny to Mona where it was reconstructed as the ecumenical University Chapel.
In the Caribbean we talk about Integration ... we celebrate milestones ... But do we really know that we are a region? Do we experience a sense of caribbean-ness? This exhibition highlighted some cultural practices, events and institution that define the 'Caribbean Region'.
Click here to view the exhibition flyer
