‘No Gyal Can Test’ curated by Akeem Smith

A multimedia exhibition celebrating the Black women of Jamaica’s dancehall is now on display at Red Bull Arts Detroit.

Titled, ‘No Gyal Can Test’, the exhibition, which recreates the experience of the 1990s dancehall scene, is curated by Akeem Smith, who lives in Brooklyn but was raised between New York City and Jamaica. Smith, who is primarily known as a stylist and fashion designer curated his exhibition exploring the fashion, music, and surroundings of 1980s/1990s street dances in the island’s capital, Kingston.

This is done through archival photos and VHS videos of dancehall reggae events along with custom, impressionistic mannequins and architectural sculptures built from demolished materials gathered in the city. ‘No Gyal Can Test’ showcases Black women owning the street dances through their sexuality and what Smith calls the “ghetto fabulous” look.

Fancy hairdos and loud, tight, revealing clothes

The look features fancy hairdos and loud, tight, revealing clothes, often designed or modified by the dancers or even members of his own family, who Smith told Hour Detroit Magazine founded the Ouch Crew fashion collective, whose designs were worn by dancehall reggae stars Lady Saw and Beenie Man.

“With the visual aesthetics there are a lot of style parallels with women in Detroit,” Smith told the magazine, adding that, “Detroit and Jamaica have a lot of Eurocentric beauty ideals but they’re very site-specifically Black”.

In the exhibition, Smith dressed a throwback Kingston street scene from the time when he was born in 1991.

Smith told said that, “despite dancehall reggae being dominated by male artists, ‘No Gyal Can Test’ displays how the female dancers and creatives in the scene were the nucleus of the whole thing. This is what really gives the energy to the music”.

The exhibition’s title was a brag written on the back of a photograph from a female admirer that Smith found among his father’s belongings. 

While the Detroit area doesn’t have a large Caribbean community like New York City, where ‘No Gyal Can Test’ made its debut last year, Smith told Hour Detroit that, “the show isn’t just for Caribbean people to come and see themselves…The show is more about the visual aesthetics of people of the Caribbean. The show has a theme of memory and joy. The women act as my reliquaries.”