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The more celebrated pioneers of Jamaican art include Edna Manley, Cecil Baugh, Alvin Marriott, Carl Abrahams and Albert Huie. At the start of the twentieth century economic condition among the African population in Jamaica had not changed much since emancipation in 1834. Art was for the privileged in society. Norman Manley, a young Jamaican lawyer and politician of mixed parentage, had married his cousin Edna from England. Edna Manley joined her husband in Jamaica in 1922, at the age of twenty-two. She had studied sculpture at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London. Edna Manley supported her husband’s political work, which was to champion the cause of the poor. Sculptures by Edna Manley that were influenced by that period include Negro Aroused, which was done in 1935 and Pocomania (shown) in 1936.

The Institute of Jamaica eventually played its part in the development of the arts. Edna Manley taught and inspired young artists during the forties. Artists like David Pottinger, Henry Daley, Albert Huie and Ralph Campbell.

Alvin Marriott was already a known carpenter and sculptor in Jamaica and the USA. In the USA, he was featured in local newspapers and presented to the White House, a bust he made of F.D. Roosevelt. Alvin Marriott later won a British Council Scholarship to study at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London. Over the years, Alvin Marriott’s mastery in sculpting the human form has won him many public commissions, such as The Runner in 1961 and the Bob Marley Monument in 1985. Other artists that were making a name for themselves at that time were Cecil Baugh, who is the father of Jamaican ceramics and Henry Daley, who did not live to witness the success that his work now enjoys.

The forties and fifties saw an increasing number of Jamaican artists studying and developing their art abroad. Gloria Escoffery, Albert Huie, Ralph Campbell and Osmond Watson were among those who returned to practise in Jamaica. Ronald Moody and Namba Roy lived in England after the Second World War and practised their art there.

With the number of artists in Jamaica growing, so was the need for venues to display their work. Hills Galleries on Harbour Street in downtown Kingston was the first to respond to this need.

In 1950, the need for a formal centre for training was realised. The Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts was established with Government funding through the Institute of Jamaica. It operated as a part-time evening institution until 1961 and offered certificate courses in various subjects including painting, sculpture and ceramics. Members of the board of the school included Bernard Lewis – the then Director of the Institute of Jamaica, Edna Manley, Cecil Baugh and Albert Huie.