Jamaica Art Market Review | January 2026
- artephemera.com
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 46 minutes ago
Volume 5. Issue 1.
She woulda/coulda been a millionaire. We are delighted to be quoted in the venerable NYT, courtesy of Susan Wands and Emma Palmer.The article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Yes, it’s the obituary section; but it helps to lift Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) out of obscurity as the artist who painted the Rider-Waite deck of tarot cards (over 100 million decks sold to date), yet she died penniless.
No, I’m not an illustrator, but an art market researcher, concerned with valuations and artist resale royalties.
My notion that her mythological story-telling skills, learned in Jamaica from a nanny who exposed her to the symbolism and magical parables that are our Anancy stories, honed her ability to tell a compelling story in one picture and subsequently, brilliantly illustrate the Tarot, is there.
My caution, however, is missing: that the Obeah Act of 1854 still obtains in Jamaica, which forbids the promotion of the ‘superstition of obeah’, nevertheless I am encouraged by PCS's manifesto “A Protest Against Fear”. And hey, it’s the New York Times and I’m loving it.
Read the full story: Overlooked No More: Pamela Colman Smith, Artist Behind a Famous Tarot Deck - The New York Times
The World Needs to See This *
Laura Facey now represented by Todd Merrill Studio, New York
Todd Merrill Studio, NY has announced their representation of Laura Facey, CD Jamaica's celebrated sculptor whose powerful, meditative practice spans more than five decades.
Their showing at Art Basel's Design Week 2025 in Miami, FL reframes Facey as a designer who operates fluidly between art, architecture, and philosophy, producing objects that seek not only to shape space but also to recalibrate human experience.
"Perhaps the most arresting works at (Design Miami/Art Basel) were presented by Todd Merrill Studio: monumental furniture-sculptures by Jamaican artist Laura Facey. The centerpiece was Cloudbench, an enormous couch crafted from raspberry-painted cedar, featuring a cocoon-like back carved from a single tree trunk.., this organic mass rested atop a rectilinear base overflowing with gold leaf, which appeared to drip down onto the seat like molten light...
"What makes Facey’s work so intense and transcendent is not only its scale but also its synthesis of raw, organic form with radiant, almost sacred color. The pieces feel rooted in place and history, yet unmistakably contemporary—objects that function as furniture while carrying the weight of memory and myth." --- Alex Ulam
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