Benito Thompson
Bonito Thompson is a Jamaican digital artist, creative director, and cultural storyteller whose practice sits at the intersection of art, technology, and Caribbean identity. Self-taught and deeply rooted in the rhythms of everyday Jamaican life - zinc fences, sound systems, jerk chicken, domino tables, dancehall queens, and the raw beauty of the island's terrain. Bonito has built a body of work that refuses to separate culture from innovation.
A pioneer of augmented reality art in Jamaica, Bonito staged Paper Planes in 2021, the country's first-ever AR art show; a landmark 10-piece collection that gave dancehall culture a vivid visual language and invited audiences to experience art beyond the canvas. That same restless curiosity has taken his work to some of the world's most significant creative stages: Art Basel in Miami, shows in New York and Los Angeles, and tours across the Caribbean diaspora, bringing Jamaican stories to global audiences. His AR works have been embraced by Grammy award-winning artists and major regional and global brands alike, including a celebrated year-long partnership with Pepsi Jamaica as a brand ambassador, where his murals and AR activations gave the Blast Your JamaICAN Flava campaign its cultural heartbeat. Other collaborators include Damian 'Jr Gong' Marley, Common, Kabaka Pyramid, Red Stripe, AUDI, Mastercard, KFC, and the German Embassy in Jamaica.
“The Diplomat” By Benito Thompson
Digital Art - Print
JMD $93,000
The Diplomat is a portrait of power, contradiction, and cultural currency. Fusing the recognisable figures of Prime Minister Andrew Holness, Skillibeng, and Vybz Kartel, the work places politics and dancehall in direct conversation, forcing a reckoning with how each has shaped society, used, and at times exploited the other.
The piece is rooted in a specific moment - around 2020 Covid and Elections - when two deeply conflicting narratives were unfolding simultaneously in Jamaica. On one side, dancehall culture was being framed as a driver of violence and social breakdown. On the other, its biggest voices were being sought out to carry political messages into the very communities that music had already reached. Campaign anthems. Voice drops. Endorsements. The culture was being blamed and borrowed at the same time.
“Timeless” By Benito Thompson
Digital Art - Print
JMD $135,000
Timeless is a meditation on the two most powerful forces shaping Jamaican culture across generations: music and politics. The work draws its tension from the parallel worlds of the Gully/Gaza divide, the cultural earthquake ignited by the rivalry between Vybz Kartel and Mavado, and the equally charged fault line between the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP). Both have split communities, shaped allegiances, and defined identities across Jamaica and its diaspora. Both are, in their own way, a kind of religion.
What Timeless observes without judgment, is that these forces have always moved the culture in the same way. Our grandparents dressed up, packed the party, and went wild for politics. It gave them something to rally behind, something to feel, something to belong to. Today, the younger generation responds the same way, except now it is dancehall that holds that gravity. Different era. Same fire. The culture has always needed something to call its own.
The visual language of the piece makes this kinship impossible to ignore. The street signs for PNP and JLP appear with their colours deliberately inverted, green becomes orange, orange becomes green because at their root, they are one and the same. The Gaza and Gully colours echo this, borrowing from the same political palette, confirming what the streets have always known: dancehall and politics share a bloodline. They move people the same way. They demand loyalty the same way.
Money is scattered across the canvas on the ground, almost underfoot. The culture is valuable, immensely so, but the money sits low because for too long we have not fully recognised what we carry. That is changing. The world is waking up to the powerhouse that is Jamaican culture, and slowly, so are we.
The rest of the canvas is raw and intimate: domino tables, speaker boxes, zinc fences, yard dogs. The unfiltered imagery of downtown Jamaica. From our grandparents' days to ours.
