Jamaica is such a young country—we are actually creating our culture right now,” declares Andrea Dempster Chung, executive director and one of the co-founders of the cultural movement turned registered charity, Kingston Creative. “The new cool slang, the new fashion trend, the new hot beat that is going to make the next artist famous … that’s being created right now in Downtown Kingston.” This is not only an acute observation, but for Andrea and her Kingston Creative team, the cultural and creative Industries are the key to unlocking a path for sustainable development for individual Jamaican artists, and Jamaica as a whole.
Perhaps you’ve done the free Art Walk Festival in Downtown Kingston on Last Sundays and admired the 108 vibrant murals that have made their home on Water Lane and the twenty surrounding communities? Or maybe you’ve tried the Hop on, Hop Off Bus or spent an afternoon in the recently opened Climate Change Art Park in Parade Gardens on South Camp Road? These experiences have answered a question
that many Jamaicans living here and abroad have uttered numerous times: If the rest of the world can do it, why not Jamaica?
It’s a question that Andrea asked herself time again, as she strolled through Soho in London, Wynwood in Miami, or the Mission District in San Francisco … or any other art district she’d inevitably find herself in when she travelled around the world for work: “Why not Jamaica?”
Andrea’s paternal grandparents were part of the Windrush generation who migrated to the UK after WWII to build a better life. When her Trinidadian mother was studying in Glasgow, Scotland, she met Andrea’s Jamaican father, and the pair married. At three years old, Andrea got her first taste of Jamaican life when her family relocated to Kingston and she enrolled at Immaculate Conception Preparatory School.
