Edna Manley

Edna Swithenbank was born on 28 February 1900 in England, to a Jamaican mother and an English father, the Wesleyan minister Harvey Swithenbank. The Jamaica Information Service says she was born in Yorkshire, though her birth was registered in Bournemouth. She trained at several London art schools, including St Martin's School of Art, and studied privately with the animal sculptor Maurice Harding.

In 1921 she married her cousin, Norman Washington Manley, a Jamaican lawyer, and in 1922 she emigrated with him to Kingston. Her work was exhibited in London from the 1920s, and she held her first solo exhibition in Jamaica in 1937. In 1938 Norman entered politics and founded the People's National Party, and Edna supported him while pursuing her own career in culture and politics.

Her best-known work is Negro Aroused, carved in 1935, a figure of a man awakening to a new consciousness, the first in a series of works celebrating the working people of Jamaica. It became an icon of the independence movement, and the Jamaican people raised money to buy it. Others include The Prophet, Mountain Girl, The Digger and Pocomania, all made in the 1930s.

Manley was also one of the architects of Jamaican art education. She began evening art classes at the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica in the early 1940s, and in 1950 she helped open the Jamaica School of Art and Craft, Jamaica's first art school, working with artists such as Albert Huie. It became the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in 1995. She was also a founder of the National Gallery of Jamaica.

She received the Institute of Jamaica's Musgrave Medals, including its first gold medal, in 1943, and in 1980, at the National Gallery's retrospective Edna Manley: The Seventies, the Order of Merit. After Norman died in 1969 she carried on sculpting, saying that art had saved her. She died in 1987, aged 86, was given an official funeral and was buried in her husband's tomb at National Heroes Park in Kingston. She was the wife of Jamaica's first Premier and the mother of Prime Minister Michael Manley.