PRAYER by Edna Manley

Prayer is a mahogany sculpture carved by Edna Manley in 1936 and is the second work of art I found particularly captivating. Considered the “Mother of Jamaican Art,” Edna Manley created Prayer similar in form and idea to her better-known sculpture Negro Aroused. It is a rendering in brown wood of a black man kneeling, with his hands clenched and raised to the heavens. The nude body of the man is rounded in contour and slightly disproportionate in relation to his limbs.  In the emotions that it portrays, Prayer is meant to be representative of the civil outrage directed at the colonial system present in 1930’s Jamaica.

The powerful emotions inherent in Prayer are the aspect of the artwork that I found to be the most fascinating. During the 1930’s, Jamaicans active in their country’s civil rights movement were often forced to confront their own helplessness head-on, as they strove for autonomy and suffrage. Perhaps these men turned to G-d in their search for control, and it is this relationship that Prayer seeks to depict. The vulnerability and desperation implied in both the nudity of the wooden man and in his positioning are emotions that anyone who has turned to prayer in a moment of need can identify with.