Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will open Cosmic Mirrors, a new exhibition recognizing the works of 27 Haitian artists, in honor of Haitian Heritage Month. Spanning two centuries of art, the presentation pays homage to Haiti’s political history and the country’s creative abundance.
Tout Moun Se Yo Moun (Everyone is Someone), © Kathia St. Hilaire, 2022. Image: courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2023; purchased with funds provided by Curator Circle.
The exhibit runs parallel to Kathia St. Hilaire: Immaterial Being, the Museum’s first solo mounting from the South Florida-raised artist. As the child of Haitian immigrants, St. Hilaire combines found objects that act as symbols of the Black American experience with visual and material references to her Haitian culture. Together, they become joint a representation of St. Hilaire’s identity formation, growing up within a diasporic Afro-Caribbean community in Florida.
Here are three other artists to discover at the exhibit, which runs through Fall 2023.
Robert Saint-Brice
Bust of a Figure Wearing Green, Robert Saint-Brice, 1960. Image: NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; gift of Miles and Adelaide Zisson.
Cosmic Mirrors commences with the visionary paintings of Robert Saint-Brice, who was born in Pétion-Ville, Haiti two years before the turn of the 20th century. Although he could not read nor write, Saint-Brice’s art expressed a thousand words, and he found success from his work in his fifties. Saint-Brice was also a voodoo priest and stated he received his inspiration—messages from his ancestors—in dreams.
Roland Dorcely
Lumiere bleue (Blue Light), Roland Dorcely, 1958. Image:
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; gift of Mrs. Edna K. Allen.
Considered one of Haiti’s preeminent modernists, Roland Dorcely expressed his creative visions through cubistic and abstract paintings. The Port-au-Prince-born artist’s work is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and his poems were published in Jean-Paul Satre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes. In 2020, three years after his death at age 87, Dorcely’s paintings were featured in the Spotlight section of the Frieze New York art fair.
Myrlande Constant
Azaca Médeh Négre Montagne La Voûte, © Myrlande Constant, early 2000s. Image: Image courtesy of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2023, The constant is on loan from Richard Levine, AIA.
Textile artist Myrlande Constant is well-known for her Vodou-themed flags, also called drapo Vodou. She began her cultivation of the art form in the 1990s and her work grew in size over the years, as she prefers to create in large-scale tableaus. Constant’s work is also featured in a retrospective organized by the Fowler Museum UCLA, the first time a U.S.-based museum space has devoted an entire exhibition to the work of a Haitian female contemporary artist.
