Aug 13, 2026
Reimagining the Picturesque with Kimani Beckford
The Jamaican artist uses portraiture to engage personal and familial history
Kimani Beckford. Untitled, 2025. Oil on canvas, Overall: 142.2 × 104.1 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds from Stephen Brown and Brenda Woods, 2025. © Kimani Beckford. 2025/201
“Through portraiture, I affirm the presence and identity of individuals within their own cultural spaces, emphasizing the importance of self-recognition and dignity.”
Given the right context, portraits can be much more than aesthetically pleasing images of real or fictional people. By creating a deliberate portrayal of a human being in a specific setting, an artist can make a profound statement, full of depth and nuance. The painted portraiture of Jamaican artist Kimani Beckford achieves this end. On view now at the AGO, Beckford’s Untitled (2025) casts a contemporary Black boy in formal attire against a serene, rural Jamaican landscape.
Striking in both scale and vibrancy, this portrait foregrounds the side profile of a Black boy confidently gazing out of frame to the right. His silhouette nearly takes up the frame, leaving enough room for viewers to engage with the landscape behind him. A pastoral setting of the Jamaican countryside, complete with rolling green hills and a crisp blue sky with soft clouds creates a contrasting background against the sitter’s mahogany skin. His burgundy blazer and white-collared shirt add to a rich colour palette, making Untitled (2025) a work that commands attention.
This painting is the first of Beckford’s to explore landscapes as a backdrop for portraiture. Earlier works placed his sitters in monochromatic, surreal spaces. His move toward the Jamaican landscape as a setting is a personal one, directly engaging with his family’s history. “I am exploring the relationship between portraiture and the rural landscapes of my upbringing, which is deeply personal,” Beckford explains. “I draw inspiration from conversations with my grandparents who spoke of leaving large stretches of ancestral land to migrate into clustered urban environments in search of so-called ‘better living.’ These reflections ground my interest in the landscape as both a physical and symbolic space and an archive of memory, transition, and cultural transformation.”
Beckford’s depiction of the Jamaican landscape comes with an additional, poetic layer of commentary. Because of the transatlantic slave trade, his surname can be traced back to the Beckford family, one of the most prominent landowning and slaveholding families in Jamaican history. William Beckford (1744-1799) was a known patron of the arts who championed European landscape painters of the era. He supported and purchased works from artists who created idyllic depictions of Jamaican plantations, all of which intentionally omitted the violent realities of slavery. In Untitled (2025), Beckford confronts and subverts the historical whitewashing of Jamaican landscape art by placing his sitter – a Black boy majestically gazing into the distance – in front of the picturesque rolling hills of his childhood.
Kimani Beckford was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. He received a BFA in Painting at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in 2011. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions both locally and internationally.
Untitled (2025) is Beckford’s first painting to enter the AGO Collection. It is now on view as part of the focused presentation of works, Critical Views: Recent Acquisitions by the Department of Arts of Global Africa & the Diaspora, on Level 2 of the AGO in the R. Samuel McLaughlin Gallery (gallery 201). Additionally, on view for the first time, alongside this work by Beckford, are recently acquired works by Che Lovelace, Sahara Longe, Sandra Brewster, Paul Anthony Smith and Natia Lemay.
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