Petrine Archer-Straw was born in Birmingham in 1956 to Jamaican parents, and became known as an artist, art historian and curator specialising in Caribbean art. In the early 1970s, her family moved back to Jamaica, where she finished school and attended the University of West Indies; after gaining her Diploma in Painting from the Jamaican School of Art in 1982, she returned to England to study at the Courtauld Institute, receiving her PhD in 1995. Much of her subsequent art historical work focused on the African Diaspora, centred around the specific cultural milieu of Britain and the Caribbean in the 20th century.
Art historian, curator and artist, Petrine Archer-Straw was born on 28 December 1956 in Birmingham, England, to Jamaican parents. Her father had immigrated in 1955 to work as a linotype press operator and was later joined by his family. Archer-Straw attended primary and grammar school in Birmingham before her family decided to return to Jamaica in the early 1970s, where she completed her Sixth Form studies at Kingston's Ardenne High School before studying for a BA at the University of the West Indies (UWI), from 1975 to 1978, majoring in Theology, History and Sociology. Determined to pursue a career as an artist, she enrolled at the Jamaican School of Art in 1979 and received her Diploma with honours in Painting in 1982. She started exhibiting professionally soon after receiving her Diploma and worked as an Education/Research Officer at the National Gallery of Jamaica. However, in 1983, she decided to return to UWI to undertake an MPhil in Cultural History.
In 1987, Archer-Straw came back to the England to study art history at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, receiving an MA in 1989. She received her PhD from the Courtauld in 1994. Her thesis, entitled Negrophilia, focused on how the white avant-garde in Paris responded to black culture during the 1920s; it was later published by Thames and Hudson in 2000. In the following years, she had a prolific career both as an academic and as an artist. She initially taught at Brixton College, London and later at Cheltenham Art College where, over a period of five years (1988–1993) she taught Critical Studies. Archer-Straw subsequently lectured at the Courtauld Institute before becoming the first Head of Art History at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica (previously Jamaica School of Art) from 2002 to 2005. She subsequently became a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2005–06) and Visiting Lecturer (2006–2012) at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, prior to completing a two-year residency as a faculty guest in the Telluride House at Cornell.
In addition to her academic work, Archer-Straw worked as an independent consultant and curator for a number of agencies, galleries and museums. Her first significant assignment was for the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1995, where she was the co-ordinating editor for the ground-breaking exhibition and publication Africa the Art of a Continent. She later was a consultant for the development of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and also curated numerous exhibitions related to Caribbean and Jamaican art, including Home and Away: 7 Jamaican Artists at the October Gallery, London (1994–95), Africa: The Art of a Continent at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1994–95), New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art at the Hayward Gallery, London (1995–96), Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean for the British Council (1997–98), One Man's Vision: The Vincent D'Aguilar Collection at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2000), Past, Present, Personal: The Dawn Davies Collection at the National Gallery of the Bahamas (2002), Fifty Years-Fifty Artists at College Art Gallery (2003–04) and The Vivian Virtue Collection at the College Art Gallery (2005). Most of her art historical work centred around the specific cultural milieu of Britain and the Caribbean in the 20th century. She considered her work as mediating between two estranged but entangled communities. Archer-Straw had an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on personal narratives, folklore, visual studies, cultural studies, and other humanistic and social science disciplines to support her research.
As an artist, she produced mixed-media paintings characterised by ‘highly textured, patterned and 'feminized' surfaces’ (artist’s website). She regularly exhibited in Jamaica during the 1980s, where she held a number of important group and solo exhibitions. Her work Page Six (1988, Victoria & Albert Museum), whose form resembled that of a woven carpet, with bands of decorative pattern and a central area filled with hieroglyphic forms, was influenced by Archer-Straw's feminist readings; while it was not overtly feminist, the artist declared that the central theme was ‘about female patterns and life cycles’ (V&A). Petrine Archer-Straw died in Mona, Jamaica on 5 December 2012. Her artwork is represented in UK public collections including the V&A, London.