Commissioner: Melville Richardson, Education Officer, Visual Arts, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Antigua and Barbuda. Curator: Barbara Paca. Exhibitor: Frank Walter.

Antiguan artist and writer Frank Walter (1926–2009) was an eccentric character now considered to be vastly under-recognized. Intellectually brilliant, Walter entertained delusions of aristocratic grandeur, namely the belief that the white slave-owners in his family linked him to the noble houses of Europe. The self-styled “7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook” produced paintings that dealt with race, class and social identity, as well as abstract explorations of nuclear energy, portraits both real and imagined—including Hitler playing cricket, and Prince Charles and Princess Diana as Adam and Eve—and miniature landscapes of Scotland, the country that he fell in love with during a visit in 1960. Walter typically painted in oil on rudimentary materials, with a marked immediacy and naivety. The first man of color to manage an Antiguan sugar plantation, Walter spent the last decades of his life in an isolated rustic home in Antigua, surrounded by his writings, paintings, and carvings. Coinciding with Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2017, The Last Universal Man is the first comprehensive monograph of this important Caribbean artist. Defying categorization as an outsider or self-taught artist, Walter worked as a writer, composer, sculptor, and painter.

Barbara Paca is the Curator for Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural National Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, and serves as Cultural Envoy to Antigua and Barbuda. She is an art historian and landscape architect, who holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and was awarded postdoctoral fellowships as a Fulbright Scholar and at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965): Revelations of African American Life in Maryland and the World and Frank Walter, the catalogue for the 2013 Art Basel in Miami Beach.