Bad Art Gallery will open its visual art exhibition ‘The Mountain: For Those in Need’ on Saturday, December 13, 2025, at its West King’s House Road home in St Andrew.

The event serves a dual role: an art installation that celebrates the resilience of Jamaicans and a relief drive to support victims of the cyclone. The display will run until December 23.

According to Bad Art Gallery, the “art installation…depends on your participation. We believe in making art that makes REAL impact. Bring a donation, big or small, to add to the ‘mountain’, All items will be distributed amongst persons affected by Hurricane Melissa.”

Among the artistic work that will be on display is Nyron Surjule’s. The artiste began his endeavours following the catastrophe of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 by drawing on corrugated zinc.

“Perhaps it is not strange, then, that Surjule would draw on zinc in the wake of the hurricane carnage. In fact, despite its title, this essay is not so much a praisesong for zinc as it is for art in a time of catastrophe or a praisesong for what art might do for us now in this interregnum between Hurricane Melissa and a future that is uncertain, but a future we must hope for nonetheless,” Bad Art Gallery wrote in its review of the work.

Like Surjule, Stafford Schliefer, a self-taught Jamaican artist, also capture the tragedy of Hurricane Gilbert, highlighting the melancholy of the moment in his 1989 oil on cotton painting, The Seekers: Gilbert Aftermath. The piece depicts an endless line of Black people marching solemnly through a barren land, their silhouetted faces laden with despair. The sun bears down on them unforgivingly as they wander, searching for a life that is beyond the frame of the image.

Schliefer’s scene reminisces about the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites forced to journey through the wilderness for forty years.

Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work will also be on display.

“Today, at BAD Art Gallery, we register a complaint against Hurricane Melissa. As we struggle to make sense of the unspeakable devastation that now attends the island, we invoke the capacity of art to do something in the world. We stand in a longer tradition of artists, within and beyond Jamaica, who mobilise art in a time of catastrophe to galvanise the spirit, minds, and bodies of the people,” the curators shared. “We ground ourselves both in a Jamaican practice of making art that does something in the world and a broader tradition of participatory art that radicalises the relationship between viewer and artist, politics and aesthetics, history and memory. We hope that you will join us in registering this complaint against Melissa at this time when ‘dutty tough’,” they added.