 This installation from the heart and hands of Duval-Carrié bespeaks his ineradicable connection to the island of his birth. Knowledgeable about Vodou since childhood, the artist incorporates the religion’s theatrical sacred personages as players in his visual dramas of upheaval and transcendence. Migration out of Haiti, with consequences for the country left behind, is a persistent theme.
The twentieth-century renaissance in Haitian art has a proud exponent in Duval-Carrié, who portrays Vodou figures and rituals as Hector Hyppolite did in the 1940s and AndréPierre does today. Yet he goes beyond their superficial depictions. Unlike fantasy landscape artists and jungle painters, fond of idealizing the mountainous island as a verdant paradise with unicorns, Duval-Carrié sees farther. He has an unblinking view of Haiti grappling with a legacy of slavery, and its history as a French colony. The artist pictures Haiti’s brutality along with its beauty.
Duval-Carrié has an unerring sense of color and texture in which he implants a treasure trove of things to discover. Duval-Carrié is a visual storyteller. Despite the very specific imagery to a place and time in the Caribbean, he is an artist whose works have profound global resonance.
The artists in residence program is made possible with the generous support of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and the Friends of the Artist in Residence. Additional funds for a book on The Indigo Room were provided by Northern Trust of Fort Lauderdale and the Haitian Cultural Alliance. The book is available for purchase from the Museum Store.
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