Art & Public Service: Frank Walter

By Jabari Jordan-Walker

Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter (1926–2009), also known simply as Frank Walter, was born in Liberta, Parish of St. Paul, Antigua. A prolific artist, gardener, and visionary, Walter was raised by matriarchal elders who prioritized oral traditions from both his European sugar plantation-owning relatives and enslaved African ancestors. 

While touring the Garden Museum in London I had the opportunity to become familiar with Frank Walter and his oeuvre after picking up a beautiful catalogue concerning Walter’s life published by the museum. As Britain’s only museum dedicated to the intersection of art and British horticulture, the Garden Museum was founded in honor of two seventeenth-century English naturalists, John Tradescant and his son of the same name. Having founded the Musaeum Tradescantianum, the Tradescants are credited with opening the first museum open to the general public in England. Essentially a house museum dubbed “The Ark,” the Tradescants collected the most eclectic objects from around the world both natural and manmade. 

While the two men are buried in the church yard now part of the Garden Museum. Art historian and curator Barbara Paca, who was responsible for a 2023 Garden Museum exhibition titled Frank Walter: Artist, Gardener, Radical describes Frank Walter as being “Tradescant-like” due not only to his classical education in Greek, Latin, and botany but his life’s dream to create a Tradescant-inspired museum that he envisioned as a sort of Antiguan Kunstkammer that would be in public service to all who visited, particularly Antiguan youth.  

“Out of sync with others seeking material gain, Walter had an urgent spiritual need to find his own solitary place in the natural world so that he could live in his head with his thoughts and philosophy” – Barbara Paca (Art Historian and Curator) 

I find Walter’s “unrealized” vision to establish a museum for Antigua’s public to be both greatly inspiring and corroborative, as I too have a strikingly similar goal in mind to establish a Kunstkammer in rural Georgia that also aims to inspire local youth to learn and apply research around the material culture and rich history that has positively shaped horticulture in the Southern U.S. 

The Garden Museum provides visitors and scholars alike with an experience that prioritizes stories that display how our contemporary lifestyles can relate positively to the slow and intentional act of gardening. For those called to find comfort in gardening as a creative act, the Garden Museum is certainly a place where artistic and ecological impulses are encouraged as demonstrated so aptly through Frank Walter’s retrospective.