Frank Walter: Music of the Spheres

This publication has been produced to accompany an exhibition staged by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, for the 2021 Edinburgh Art Festival. The exhibition is the first devoted to Frank Walter’s ‘spools’ – the small circular paintings which, in their consistency of scale and form, provide a lens through which to witness the workings of Walter’s inner eye.

Walter’s work was unknown during his lifetime, but in the decade since his death he has emerged as one of the most distinctive and intriguing Caribbean voices of the last fifty years. Painted with a rare directness and immediacy on whatever material came most readily to hand, his works describe a visionary artist rooted in the landscape of Antigua, the island of his birth.

The publication, co-published by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and Anomie, London, features contributions by Barbara Paca, Professor Paget Henry, Kenneth M. Milton and Mary-Elisabeth Moore. Edited and produced by Ingleby, the publication has been designed by Joanna Deans / Identity and printed by Graphius, Ghent.

Frank Walter (1926–2009) was born Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter on Horsford Hill, Antigua. He spent much of the 1950s travelling in Scotland, England, and West Germany. While in Europe, Walter pursued various creative activities including drawing, painting, and creative writing. Walter returned to the Caribbean in 1961, where he began a prolific output of painting, drawing, writing, sculptural work, photography, and sound art.

Walter's work was first exhibited alongside paintings by Alfred Wallis and Forrest Bess in the exhibition ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ at Ingleby Gallery in spring 2013. A solo exhibition of his work was presented by The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, in summer 2013 and later that year, Ingleby Gallery presented a solo display of Walter's paintings at Art Basel Miami Beach. A major solo exhibition followed at Ingleby Gallery in spring 2015. In 2017, Frank Walter represented Antigua and Barbuda at the Venice Biennale in the show ‘Frank Walter: The Last Universal Man 1926–2009’. A solo presentation of Walter's work also took place at Harewood House, Leeds, UK, in the summer of 2017. A major retrospective of the artist's work was displayed at both MMK Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt in 2020 and at David Zwirner, London, in the spring of 2021.

Barbara Paca is an art historian and landscape architect. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and was awarded postdoctoral fellowships as a Fulbright Scholar and at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. She serves as Cultural Envoy to Antigua and Barbuda and in 2017 curated Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including ‘Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy’ and ‘Shouldering Antigua and Barbuda: The Life of V.C. Bird’. He is the editor of The CLR James Journal and also of The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books.

Kenneth M. Milton is sole conservator for the family of Frank Walter. He has worked for a number of leading museums and academic institutions in the United States. For the last ten years he has immersed himself in the world of Frank Walter.