The 2nd Annual Banbôch Kreyol Festival, presented by The Haitian Times at Coney Island Amphitheater this past Sunday, May 27 was a time! I’m excited to be in collaboration with ArtxAyiti, Studio Baboun, and The Melanin Project. We presented 20+ visual artists from Haiti and the Diaspora on the amphitheater’s big screens during the music, food, art, and culture fest. I’m already thinking about next year and the magic we’ll create together.
What an honor to be featured on VOA Kreyòl for NAN SAN! Special thanks to Obed Lamy for conducting our interviews, capturing the footage, and translating me and my sister’s responses from English to Kreyòl.
NAN SAN is On view until March 31, 2024. Catch the show at:
The Haitian American Museum of Chicago
4410 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60640
Hours:
Monday CLOSED
Tuesday CLOSED
Wednesday - Saturday, 12PM - 6PM
Sunday, 12PM - 4PM
I’m back in New York and proud to share I’m in another show this month. Last Thursday, BYENVINI (Welcome) opened at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI).
This exhibition is the fruit of a seed planted by curator Yvena Despagne four years ago. Since then, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of myself and other Haitian contemporary artists to show our work, amplify our stories, and honor Ayiti with the respect it deserves. Thanks to Yvena, four years ago I got to show for the first time in an all-Haitian show with six artists I have deep respect for. Today I have the pleasure to present alongside my Haitian fanmi (family) once again, now eleven, and with works that have never been shown together in one space. Thanks to the CCCADI firehouse, a North Star institution, we’ve reconstructed “home” within its walls.
I hope you can visit and see the show at some point during the year-long programming CCCADI has dedicated to Haiti, centering the theme Lakay se Lakay: Home is Home.
BYENVENI welcomes you to explore the captivating journey of contemporary Haitian art and celebrate Haiti's enduring legacy, a beacon of strength and deep culture.
CCCADI
120 E 125th Street
New York, NY 10035
Hours:
Tuesdays 3pm - 7pm
Wednesdays 11am - 2pm
Thursdays 3pm -7pm
Every 3rd Saturday 12pm - 4pm
Guided student tours are available by appointment on Thursdays 10am - 2pm
Visit CCCADI.ORG/BYENVENI
Happy New Year. The end of 2023 was a whirlwind and 2024 is off to a crazy start for me. So far, the year has ushered in a few firsts…
• i’m in a show with family
• in the city of my birth
• at a Haitian American Museum
Thanks to the generosity of The Haitian American Museum of Chicago (HAMOC), a pillar institution in Chicago’s Haitian community, this has been a special homecoming for me.
I’ve learned so much about myself in the process of putting this show together. Working with family ain’t no crystal stair. Yet, Nan San will probably be among the most meaningful exhibitions I’ll ever do. I love my father and my sister more than any words I can share here. They are forever, nan san mwen (in my blood).
Special thanks to HAMOC’s amazing staff and to Jon Duong for graciously helping out in the 11th hour.
On view until March 31, go see our show if you’re in the Chicagoland area.
“Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighborhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive clichéd gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can’t hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of practical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together. “
+Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Last month I presented new objects in my first exhibition / group show in 2 years. I’ve been on a sabbatical of sorts these last 24 months…”getting well.” In June of 2022, I underwent a life-altering / life-improving surgery. After years of fighting with and for my body, I can say August-October marked the first time in a decade that I feel like “myself” again. The irony and synchronicity of the first show I would participate in, titled BODIES, speaks to something beyond the darkness (more on this later).
On view was a new (un)sunken place, (un)sunken place #4 , photographs from somewhere in the unfinished. With previously viewed images taken in the Bay Area and new shots I’ve taken since returning to Brooklyn, I also previewed a new series of bottles I’ve been adorning in the last 2 years: Memory Packets.
Here is my thought process about them thus far via my ig promo for the show….
my experience of getting well has been one long ceremony. the longest ritual of my life. i gave up things and started new habits and the supplement bottles accumulated. new practices led to new bottles and then i started thinking about excess, preservation, and reducing waste. most of all, i contemplated what they held once emptied. what could be stuffed or placed or dropped into them? how could they continue to serve a purpose or be useful or fulfill nothing at all except, perhaps, to be gazed upon? beautified? how does the desire for them to contain something, that projection, hold all the value they need…an alchemy of mind?
someone with a more established art career than mine told me i shouldn’t tell anyone that some of them may be empty. so while i’m not saying that now, i’m saying some are filled with space that cannot be occupied. or named.
(a note: i don’t like to follow all “the rules” y’all. i’m learning through failure. isn’t that why we’re here?)
some of them are filled with remnants, evidence of the lengths i went through to remain connected here. what would you put into them? memories (the past)? dreams (the future)? what occupies your now and what dose do you take daily?
these objects tell a history. the materials are a map. their unknown contents are confirmation of initiation into a body i’ve long inhabited, but haven’t long possessed. the afterlife of spiritual displacement.
BODIES featured the works of six female artists; Bianca Abdi-Borangi, Tasha Dougé, Isadora Frost, Tania Balan-Gaubert, Tere Garcia, and Anjelic Owens. The artists draw influence from racial, gender, and cultural identities. Promoting conversations and art-making referencing politicized bodies, sex, education, land/borders, advocacy, and mental health.
Curated by Amanda M. Johnson, BODIES was on view at BronxArtSpace from September 8, 2023 - October 7, 2023.
soon come
in september, i entered my thirty-fifth year. i made a playlist for the last birthday party i’ll throw myself for a while because…birthday anxiety. as 2021 comes to an end, i’ve been listening to it often. thought i’d share. play on shuffle and enjoy the tunes y’all.
forgive my absence here, i needed to go collect my stuff….
It’s a wrap for 2019! My last show of the year Sa Se Lakay, curated by Yvena Despagne, was my first time showing alongside all Haitian artists. I’m so grateful and excited for what’s to come, I couldn’t have wished for a better way to enter 2020!
Per usual, I didn’t take any photos at the opening reception and had to scour the internets, i.e. Instagram for images. Imma do better in 2020 (fingers crossed).
Check out + follow all the artists in the show!: Madjeen Isaac, Steven Baboun, Daveed Baptise