Visiting Artist Edouard Duval-Carrié to Lecture on January 25
Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié will visit Florida State University for a week in January, and will give a public lecture, “Art in the North Caribbean,” on Wednesday, January 25 at 6 pm in WJB 2005, as a guest of the Departments of Art History, Art, and Modern Languages. Duval-Carrié creates vibrant paintings, sculptures, and installations that combine mythical and historical imagery with critiques of Haitian history, culture, and politics. A native of Port-au-Prince, Duval-Carrié fled the regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier as a teenager, studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the University of Loyola Montreal in Quebec, and currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. The artist’s trip to FSU this month will also include an artist workshop, seminar visits, and preparations for a 2018 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The Art & Design Library in WJB is home to Duval-Carrié’s vibrant nine-panel mixed media piece Sugar Conventions, in which the artist addresses complex aspects of Haitian society and history such as the plantation “culture of sugar,” the transmission of Voudou practice into the Americas as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, and the struggle for successful Haitian governance. In an essay describing Sugar Conventions’ intricate iconography Art History PhD candidate Lesley Wolff writes:
At heart, Duval-Carrié is an educator: he challenges the viewer to make meaning of dense iconography derived from Haitian history, politics, and religion. Duval- Carrié also re-appropriates, inscribing historical photographs, documents, paintings, and ephemera onto his own work and thus problematizing official Haitian narratives against lived realities.
