Munroe, Kishan

Kishan Munroe (born 1980, Nassau, The Bahamas) is a multi-media artist who uses his work to investigate social history. Whether through large scale paintings, documentary or photographs, Munroe examines the human condition framed within a larger historical context, producing work that he hopes has the power to resolve conflicts, connect viewers, and transform consciousness.

As a young man interested in exploring his creativity, Munroe was accepted into the Annual FinCo Art Workshop where he refined his talent under the tutelage of great Bahamian painters. Following these studies, Munroe won the Central Bank Art Competition in 1996, 1997 and 1998, when he received the Central Bank Art Scholarship, encouraging him to pursue his talent professionally.

In 1998, Munroe attended the Savannah College of Art and Design with an ambitious double major in painting and visual effects, graduating in 2003 with honors. Though he explored expanding his practice beyond the realm of painting by taking up photography and video, he chose to pursue painting at a graduate level at his alma mater on a graduate fellowship, graduating in 2005. In the meantime, he won the Central Bank Art Competition in 2004 once more.

After some time working as a freelance photographer and continuing to expand his painting practice, in 2008 Munroe embarked on The Universal Human Experience, a multimedia expedition that he hoped would take him around the globe. The first phase, conducted over 16 months, saw the artist trek into parts of the Caribbean as well as Central and North America, observing the social realities of different groups of people with video, painting, and photographic documentation. His experiences, culminating in the 2010 exhibition Transition at the Central bank of The Bahamas, challenged human-made constructions of violence, difference and misunderstandings to zoom in on a common humanity shared by all in a globalized world. While researching and gathering funding for Phase II of the project over the next few years, Munroe embarked on a second multi-disciplinary project based on a major historical event in Bahamian history: the sinking of the HMBS Flamingo, part of the Royal Bahamas Defense Force fleet, by Cuban fighter jets on May 10, 1980. Mixing his own paintings, photography, and video documentation with visual, audio, literary, and dance contributions by other Bahamian and Cuban artists in Swan Song of the Flamingo at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas in 2013, Munroe offered a long-overdue tribute to an event that greatly shaped Bahamian history as well as a new reconciliation between the two Caribbean nations affected by the tragedy. Munroe’s work has been exhibited both in The Bahamas and throughout the United States and is part of numerous public and private collections including the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Central Bank of The Bahamas, The Baha Mar Resort, the Dawn Davies Collection and The D’Aguilar Art Foundation.