COMMUNITY ARTS IMPACT BREAKFAST

Friday, January 17, 2026 

From 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM

315 Columbia Street,  Brooklyn, New York

Presented by Blue Mango Arts & Jalopy Theatre and School of Music 

Step into a dynamic convergence of Caribbean and African Diaspora ritual arts. Witness the African Cosmogram come alive in Brooklyn. 

On Friday, January 17th, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Blue Mango Arts and Jalopy Theatre and School of Music present Se7en Paintings + Libation at 315 Columbia Street, Brooklyn. This event launches a special Fundraising Series and represents a meaningful co-curated production between two organizations committed to cultural continuity, diversity, and inclusion.

The gathering is our way of centering ritual practice, ancestral knowledge, and the cultural memory people carry. It’s a convergence of practices that are both symbolic and transformative—habits that reconnect us to what guides, shapes, heals, and holds us together.

Se7en Paintings + begins within Bernard Hoyes’ spiritually charged ritual tables installation, and a libation ceremony. The libation objective is to invoke the African Cosmogram—the unifying thread linking Caribbean and African Diaspora ritual practices to illuminate a shared African root. This serves as the evening’s grounding force, illuminating the memory, continuity, and spiritual intelligence that generations have carried forward.

Each of Hoyes’ paintings comes alive as a living tableau through ritual dance, drumming, and storytelling. His bold, soulful imagery lifts from the canvas into a sweeping performance of history, resilience, and ancestral presence—honoring the African pantheon of spirits that continue to shape the Diaspora’s cultural cosmos.

The evening will also feature a live conversation with Bernard Hoyes the featured  artist, who will share the spiritual motivations behind his practice and the narratives woven through his work.

Se7en Paintings + Libation opens Blue Mango Arts’ Fundraising Series—a ceremonial invitation into ancestral homage, cultural retention, and the living traditions that define a shared heritage. In its entirety this production dissolves the lines between spatial compositions and embodied performance arts.  There is still much to be reclaimed in the African Diaspora inheritance and this series of events operates at the intersection, merging expression for an immersive encounter. 

Let’s gather side by side to honor the threads that bind us across generations and across the Diaspora - reserve your spot today. Tickets Support The Work.

Bernard Stanley Hoyes, was born in 1951 in Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies. He is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist whose work regales Afro-Caribbean ritual as both subject and structure. 

Over the years, a distinguishable visual language has emerged from his works—an implicitly confident translation of the survival and revival of Afro-Caribbean and African Diasporic rituals molded into contemporary expressions of worship, praise, and communal ceremony imagery giving new life and breath of scale to sacred traditions.  https://youtu.be/gXI9IgXxZ_Q?si=NoRzhXjorv-u-ylt

For four + decades, Hoyes has steadily developed his aesthetic that converts African Diasporic customs into the Western context with dignity, clarity, emotional charge, and pride. Through various media, his contribution sheds light on Caribbean immigrants' presence in America.

His reframing of enduring habits through the lens of rebirth- ceremonial gestures lifted into powerful, peak movements - is a restatement of the power of Africanized resilience. This distinguishable visual voice is colorfully bold and resonating. It undeniably translates the survival and revival of ancestral ritual narratives as pertinent to everyday life. 

A master colorist, Hoyes anchors his gaze with the soaring feminine energy. In most of his compositions, radiant figures burst forth in garments saturated in a kaleidoscope of vivid hues, their swirling motion seemingly alive with a delirium as each glides across the canvas in ecstatic grace. Legs are stretched, arms lifted in praise, bodies carrying the rhythm of music and dance, bringing spiritual authority into the frame. 

This devotion sits unapologetically in traditions familiar to him. Reimagined as ritual life made visible it draws viewers into an orbit of his warm definition of communal ritual and shared transcendence. Each piece is an utterance of sounds and movements; it embraces acts of survival, revival, and an evolving representation of memory and continuity. 

Inspired by both folk and contemporary art, Hoyes' lived experiences leap unleashed onto canvas, prints, into sculptures, and murals as visual narratives. The dominant influences of his formative years grounded him and chartered the creation of a niche rooted in sacred practices that built his signature. These images function as an archive rather than as a distant ethnographic reference and are a celebration of cultural continuity.

The arc began in the city of Kingston, where early promise was apparent in exhibitions at the Institute of Jamaica Junior Art Center. Motivated by his mother’s encouragement and an opportunity to meet Ms. Edna Manley, the foremother of Jamaican Fine Arts, the trajectory continued. Through his years residing in New York and California, Hoyes, creativity matured in depicting striking diasporic praise and worship which he spun with fluency. Across painting, printmaking, sculpture, and experimental processes his technique operates as an extension of ritual practice.

In 2012, ‘Se7en Paintings: A Story in Performance’, premiered at the Ford Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. Set to an upbeat tempo it introduced a new way to experience his signature work. Seven canvas compositions served as score and script for choreographed movements, a drumming orchestra with tambourines, and ritual symbolism. 

This production lifted the images off the canvas and injected them into the moving bodies on a stage. It positioned his art as a catalyst, eliciting more than the spectators' objects. The staging demonstrated that figurative art can function simultaneously as a visual narrative and embodied performance.

Hoyes Arts is found in museums and has gallery presentations throughout the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. Placement in corporate, private, and public collections has cemented Hoyes’ works as poignant expressions within the ecosystem of African Diasporic art. Exhibitions such as Places of Validation, Art & Progression at the California African American Museum further secure his place within the lineage of African American and Caribbean modernism.

Today, Hoyes’ imagery and methodology are driving conversations about performance-based studies, visual ethnography, and Black sacredness. His aesthetics is becoming an inspiration for the way artworks stage ancestral presence in contemporary form. 

• His oeuvre traces how diasporic traditions travel, debut, adapt, and become rooted in new geographies. 
• It sustains deep connections to African-derived cosmologies. 
• It marks the advent of a modern visual canon— one where the drumbeat, procession, and praise songs are rendered in color
• It signals unity in motion, from walls to the stage

Hoyes currently resides in Palm Springs, Los Angeles with his wife LaVerna of  43 years. His artworks make up an impressive catalog that pays homage to his ancestors. By mirroring what is held with deep meaning to African Diaspora communities, across generations, his art satisfies a collective longing for ritual. 

Proceeds support the presentation of Se7en Paintings and Blue Mango Arts programming. 30% of funds raised in this series will support Hampton School in Jamaica for Hurricane Melissa Relief. 

Make a donation to  the New York staging of Se7en Paintings +. Your contribution sustains cultural arts, artist-led practices, and community-centered engagements.