Art-lovers are furious that land around the popular Sacred Space site at Clifton has been cleared by bulldozers, leaving only a "bleak and ugly" area of levelled bush.
A chainlink fence has also been erected near the site, prompting critics to lash out at official insensitivity.
"The Sacred Women themselves are untouched," said art enthusiast Elizabeth Adamson. "However, the entire surrounding acreage down to and along the road has been bulldozed. 'There is not a tree or a piece of bush standing. It is bleak and ugly."
Sacred Space – where several casuarina stumps have been carved into haunting shapes of African women – has become a popular site for art-lovers since it was created last year.
Well-known Bahamian artist Antonius Roberts made the forms to reflect the area's significance as the place where African slaves were herded ashore in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the trees are bells by Tyrone Ferguson, another key figure in Bahamian art.
"The women appear to be looking wistfully back toward Africa, the original homeland of black Bahamians, while the hells toll in the breeze.
Near the Sacred Space site stood the old Whylly plantation where hundreds of slaves worked 200 years-ago. Old slave cottages remain a dominant feature of the area. On the seafront nearby is a small arch through which slaves were driven after being landed by ship.
Artists were hoping that Sacred Space and the surrounding bushland could be used as an art heritage site where other creative talents could find expression on the same theme.
Ms Adamson, attacking the clearance decision, said: "Whether it was merely an ill thought out gesture of proactivism or whether it was a statement of control, or disrespect for the artists' work, only they know.
"The fact is that as a conservation programme and as a heritage site there appears to be nothing positive happening, only this negative razing. Certainly no recent dialogue has been initiated to either preserve the current Sacred Space or any future artistic development for that specific area."
She added: "People, local and foreign, continue to visit – but to my mind it is a rather lonely, disconnected space, albeit the figures still have their own intrinsic grace."
She said the clearance was "thoroughly insulting to two of the Bahamas' own major- artists."
Calls to members of the Clifton Heritage Authority were not returned up to press time.
Source: The Tribune
