The National Gallery of Jamaica on Orange Street in Downtown Kingston holds the best collection of Jamaican art in the world — spanning from the colonial era to the present, with particular depth in 20th-century painting and sculpture. The building is a converted waterfront warehouse, and the galleries are arranged chronologically, starting with British colonial-period landscapes and portraits before moving into the distinctly Jamaican visual vocabulary that emerged in the 1930s.
The gallery is strongest in its coverage of the Intuitives — self-taught Jamaican artists working in bold, visionary styles, many of them rooted in Rastafarianism and African spiritual traditions. Artists like John Dunkley, whose dark, hallucinatory paintings of Jamaican life are unlike anything else in the Caribbean, and Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds are given proper space. The contemporary galleries upstairs show changing exhibitions of current Jamaican artists. Admission is modest, crowds are light even on weekends, and the bookshop carries serious art history. One of the best small national galleries in the Caribbean.