Travis Deen—CANARSIE

Travis’s Mwen Te Gen Yon Rèv (I Had a Dream) is a community-centered textile project exploring dreams, intergenerational memory, and Haitian cultural identity through storytelling and collaborative art-making. Through a series of Dream Sessions in Canarsie, participants will translate personal and inherited dreams into embroidered and embellished textiles that come together as an immersive, suspended installation known as the Dream Veil.

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Travis Deen (Travis Pereira) is a multidisciplinary Haitian American artist and designer raised in Canarsie, Brooklyn.  Working across painting, sculpture, fashion, textiles, sound, and mixed media, Deen reimagines dreams, memories, and  personal and cultural histories into visual worlds that explore transformation, identity, and the tension between opposing  forces. 

A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Deen studied Fashion Design with a specialization in Special Occasion  and minored in Art History. His background in fashion continues to inform the way he approaches material, construction,  the body, and storytelling within his fine art practice. 

Raised by his Haitian grandmother, Deen grew up surrounded by Haitian culture, faith, food, music, family traditions, and a strong sense of care for others. As the child of immigrants, he was also encouraged to pursue a stable profession and  became a nurse. His experiences in healthcare have shaped his understanding of care, vulnerability, discipline, and  human connection while his creative practice has remained the place where he explores memory, imagination, and  possibility. 

Through an abstract and Afrofuturist lens, Deen’s work often brings together seemingly opposing ideas such as masculinity and femininity, innocence and monstrosity, beauty and discomfort, and light and darkness. Rather than reproduce a  memory or cultural reference literally, he transforms it, allowing figures, materials, color, folklore, and imagined  environments to exist somewhere between what was experienced and what could be. 

Deen has created commissioned live portrait and illustration work for Christian Dior at Macy’s Herald Square and Todd  Snyder’s Rockefeller Center flagship. His recent work continues to expand across painting, textile, embroidery, fashion,  and mixed media, with a growing interest in how his own memories and visual language can enter into conversation with  the experiences of others.