Today I am thrilled to be blogging chiefly about Edouard Duval Carrie, a Miami artist I have known for years and always admired. Even though I was always picky about my stories when they were finally published in The Miami Herald, and tended to mope about things that were cut or that I had left out, this profile is one that even I could not find a lot to complain about. (Find it after current news items in this blog post.)
It's great that everyone in Miami has a chance to see more of what Edouard is doing lately with his exhibit "The Three Dimensional Gods and Goddesses Meet Their Cousins The Trees." (What an incredible title! Who would not like to read a novel or see a movie with a title like that??!!) As the press release says, the show depicts "his unique universe" peopled by "anthropomorphic flamboyant characters." This show runs April 14 to May 31, 2012 at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, 3550 North Miami Avenue, Miami Fl 33127. Opening is Saturday, April 4, 2012 from 2 to 9 pm. Valet parking available. In addition to that, be sure not to miss new work by Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Nova, in his exhibit at the gallery, "Novo Aniversario." More info: see www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com
First thing first: More visual arts news in Miami
This news item is actually more appropriate for South Florida. Recently heard via email from Irvin Lippman, Executive Director of Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University about this impressive development. So very fab to see how this museum is maturing under his dynamic leadership. Try not to miss this: upcoming Pearl and Stanley Goodman Lecture on Latin American Art, "Between Two Dimensions: The Paintings and Sculpture of Isabel De Obaldia" by Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. Lecture is 6-7 pm Thursday, April 19, at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale of Nova Southeastern University, One East Las Olas, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301. Lecture is free and open to the public, but reservations are required. To RSVP for lecture, contact Holly Giuliano at 954-262-0241 or education1@moafl.org Dress code: Business attire. Following the lecture is a toast to Pearl and Stanley Goodman. Lecture is funded in part by Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Contemporary Studio Glass Movement.
And there's more exciting artcentric news: On April 2, 2012, this museum announced that the Pearl and Stanley Goodman Latin American Collection is a promised gift. As the press release states, "This impressive collection of over 75 works includes masters such as Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Wifredo Lam. The Goodmans, long-time residents of Fort Lauderdale, began to collect in the 1980s, attracted to Latin American art because it tells 'a story usually with a clear political and social message.' They are keen that their collection be of benefit to the people of South Florida and serve as a focus for educational programs at the museum and NSU." For more info, check the "Events" section of the museum website at www.moafl.org
WALL OF VODOU by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald, November 2000
With his quick wit and deep, infectious laugh, Edouard Duval Carrie would be a perfect fit as a social director on a Caribbean cruise.
You can imagine him introducing guests to one another, cajoling people to share a drink or tell a story and chatting up an audience in English or French--or even in the Spanish he learned as a teenager living in Puerto Rico.
He became an artist instead although he aims to make plenty of introductions these days. He indicated as much to a standing-room-only crowd at the opening of his latest exhibition, "New Work: Edouard Duval Carrie, Migrations," an exploration of Haitian culture, Vodou spirits, and the current desperation on the island, now on view at the Miami Art Museum. But these introductions concern desperate travelers in rickety flotillas and vivid migratory Haitian Vodou spirits of love and death, not tanned passengers sipping rum on multi-million dollar ships.
"Here is this whole culture that you might not be aware of," said Duval Carrie, a wordly and jocular figure dressed in a natty black suit. "But it may be heading your way, so let's get accustomed to each other."
Presented as a tour de force combination of painting and sculpture, "Migrations" is a spirited encounter made for South Florida, a community of immigrants suffused with much of the Caribbean. (Another collection of Duval Carrie's work, "Edouard Duval Carrie: Landscapes, Real & Imagined," is also showing at Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Wynwood.)
And fittingly, the MAM show is scheduled for its own significant encounter. In the spring of 2002, "Migrations" will meet up with three of the artist's previous installations that probe complex African, American, and European strands interlacing Haitian culture and its history, born from Middle Passage horrors. The quartet is uniting for a show organized by the Davenport Museum, a venue known for its large collection of Haitian art, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, which owns the artist's caustic portrait of deposed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his family, a seminal riff on European court painters.
MILESTONE EXHIBITION
Duval Carrie's first traveling museum exhibit will mark a milestone in a prolific career, and both "Migrations" and the traveling show should solidify Duval Carrie's reputation as a major voice sifting the New World-Old World melange of the Caribbean with the inventive materials and international outlook of contemporary art.
The just-published Oxford History of Western Art, in fact, is already linking Duval Carrie's art to the blend of European Modernism and Afro-Cuban rites forged by Cuban master Wifredo Lam.
"It's very second millenium," MAM senior curator Peter Boswell says of the artist's work. "He's a great synthesizer. He's bringing in those influences from other countries. "This is really a dominant trend in art right now, with artists who are global but also regional at the same time."
And the polyglot, Caribbean-colored lanscape of Miami, Boswell adds, "is very good at fostering that type of sensibility."
"It's so refreshing to have a voice like Edouard's, that openly talks about Vodou and treats it with the respect it deserves," says Leonie Hermantin, executive director of the Haitian American Foundation, which today is co-sponsoring a round-table discussion on issues raised by Duval Carrie's exhibition. "His art shows us that when we move to another land we used our memories of religion to help us adapt."
As Duval Carrie spoke at MAM, subdued laughter rippled through the crowd. The artist may be a clever charmer, but the urgent reasons behind his get-accustomed offer are close to the surface.
"In time, God knows, the island will get its act straight," but for now, he continued, "the crisis in Haiti seems unending."
The artist puts it more emphatically in an interview in his Design District studio, a work space lined with art books, antique maps of Port-au-Prince and an orange I-Mac computer.
"The Vodou spirits are splitting! I am having the whole pantheon pick up and leave," he says of the premise driving "Migrations," in which the Vodou spirits flee the island. "It's funny, but at the same time it's very tragic. I decided to address the problem of Haiti losing itself, of dying. Peope are in total dire straits."
BITTERSWEET STORIES
During Duval Carrie's visit to Port-au-Prince five months ago, a gunman fatally shot his cousin, a prominent radio newscaster critical of the Duvalier regime. That violent scene--and many others--are rendered in the MAM show in painted panels that include a faux marble wall relief reminiscent of a Roman Catholic altarpiece.
In one panel, a lush tropical forest smolders while in others a tatooed goddess dances in a South Beach strip joint and a warrior spirit in gold epaulets mans a tank in the Gulf war.
They deliver bittersweet stories of a besieged country, represented by rural spirits migrating into new urban contexts. The spirits are testament to the fluid energies of Vodou that Duval Carrie has always admired. He calls Vodou--with its syncretic assortment of Yoruba, Kongo and Roman Catholic deities--"a guerilla religion."
"It refuses to have strict cannons," he says. "You have new gods coming in, other gods forgotten. It recovers anything that might be of use to survival of the people."
Loosely reminiscent of a Vodou temple, "Migrations" is perfumed with lilies strewn on the floor like offerings and fraught with the rococo curves of crumbling colonial French architecture, replicated in ornate urns laden with more offerings of glazed fruit.
Throughout is the festive sparkle of Vodou altars to "Mistress" Ezili Freda, the vampish light-skinned Goddess of love and luxury. A devotee of pink cake, lace hankies, and Anais-Anais perfume, she is a poor country's fantasy of ravishing wealth--and emblematic of colonial Haiti's vanished natural resources.
At MAM, she's the dominant voyager in a peculiar flotilla of boats suspended from the ceiling, their hulls glistening in melting pink shades of mock marble and inscribed with lacy ritual drawings that invoke Vodou spirits. And like the glowering, scar-faced Bawon Samedi, a Vodou spirit at home in cemeteries but tucked here in a listing skiff, Ezili is heading for the exit and away from Haiti.
Their uprootedness is familiar to Duval Carrie, 45. He is, writes Latin American art historian Edward J. Sullivan, "acutely familiar of the disorientations caused by migration [which is] the defining issue in the history of the islands."
STUDIED ABROAD
After spending his boyhood in Haiti and his adolescence in Puerto Rico, the artist shipped out to college in Montreal to study urban planning though he was more engaged in painting than in planning. In the 1980s, he returned to Haiti to help manage his father's construction business, where he witnessed the downfall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the chaos that followed.
Two years later the French government invited him to a formative residency at the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in Paris. In 1992, he traveled to Benin, home to Haiti's African ancestors, for an international reunion of Vodou cultures, and a year after that he settled in Miami with his second wife Nina, an English film producer, and their sons, now 8 and 10.
Along the way, he has exhibited at the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, biennials in Sao Paulo and Havana, and the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta.
Raised Roman Catholic in an upper-middle-class family that typically finds his interest in Vodou "off the wall," Duval Carrie recalls constant drumming coming from the mountains surrounding Port-au-Prince.
"You got to know it, if you liked it or not. There's no way you can be shielded," he says. "When I was a kid the maids took me to somethiing that was supposedly church-related, but it was really a pilgrimage to Ezili . . . . It was just like a party, and they would serve you a Coke.
"You could even visit the tmples and go into the back rooms where the sacred objects are. There would be tables full of cakes for Ezili, and you'd have rows of perfume bottles, some appropriated from my mother. Visually, it's very stunning."
SCARRED BY BRUTALITY
Affected by the flashy panoply of altars and fantastic colors of traditional Haitian painting, the artist was also scarred by brutalities of the Duvaliers, who jailed his brother Robert for more than a year. And while his is not unique among Haitian artists of his generation in reinventing his country's intensely visual heritage, Duval Carrie is a leader in this trend, says Veerle Poupeye in the 1998 book Caribbean Art.
"His work evokes," she writes, "the magic and mystery of the Vodou universe and comments on Haiti's history and sociopolitical realities with sharp, surreal wit."
In his first show in 1980 at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, his evocations went too far. Centre director Francine Muerat advised him against adding his portrait of Baby Doc in lacy drag with a pistol pointed to his head, a nod to rumors that the iron-fisted dictator was gay and to Ezili's patronage of homosexuals.
"Do you want to have us all disappeared?" Duval Carrie remembers Muerat asking. "That would be signing our death warrant."
Six years later, the portraits finally surfaced publicly as a poster celebrating Duvalier's flight from power. Vodou scholar Donald J. Cosentino says it shrewdly indicated how Duvalier's lavish kleptocracy kept itself afloat by playing into Ezili-inspired fantasies of Haiti's poor.
Given his view of Haiti's current fortunes, Duval Carrie says migration is a more pressing issue that ever. But by devising a scenario in which even the country's spiritual essence is departing, the artist has delayed his own dream of painting murals in a Vodou temple in Haiti. The stay is only temporary, he promises. As icons of Haitian culture, the spirits are, he insists, international and can return to the island just as easily as they left.
"They can travel back and forth," he says. "That's the state of things these days. Nobody's stuck in one place."
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