ON VIEW | Vizyon Atistik | What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor
2026-04-25 - 2026-06-07 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Opening April 25, What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor, is an exhibition of works on paper by women artists across generations, presented by Curatorial Fellow Yvena Despagne and Executive Director Régine M. Roumain.
Through drawing, printmaking, collage, and mixed media, the exhibition considers paper as a material that carries memory, labor, and cultural continuity. Paper absorbs gesture records pressure and hesitation, time, revision and return, while holding traces of the hand and the persistence of ideas. Centering practices shaped by embodied knowledge and movement across place, the exhibition affirms paper not as a provisional surface, but as one that remembers and endures.
This exhibition draws on traditions of storytelling and record-keeping shaped through movement and change, where each work reflects acts of preservation. Paper bears the imprint of the hand that shaped it while holding memory with remarkable precision. The artists position paper as a deliberate and enduring space in which lived experience is carried forward, and where marks serve as witnesses to time. Across varied practices, the works reveal how meaning emerges through layering, removal, and touch, shifting paper from a neutral ground into an active agent in the inscription and formation of memory.
Moving between intimacy and assertion, the exhibition brings forward practices long positioned at the margins while emphasizing their conceptual and material force. Here, paper holds thought, labor, and lived experience, sustaining what might otherwise fade. It absorbs touch even as it carries personal and cultural histories, insisting on its role as both record and witness.
An opening reception, panel discussions, and community workshop will further explore the craftsmanship of working with paper and its preservation of memory and time.
On view from April 25 through June 7
Thursday – Sunday, Wednesday by appointment.
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY

Visit the HCX Gallery to view this exhibition and join the artists & curators at activations taking place as part of this exhibition.
Sat. April 25 | 6-9pm
Opening Reception
RSVP Here »
Sat. May 2 | 4-6pm
An n Pale with Exhibiting Artists
RSVP Here »

Sun. Jun 7 | 2-4pm
Collage Workshop with Mel Isidor
RSVP Here »
Sun. Jun 7 | 4-7pm
Closing Reception
RSVP Here »

—
Featured Artists
Sally Yolaine Binard | Website
Sally Binard is an Atlanta based multidisciplinary artist whose work examines history and identity through vivid color, composition, and an unmistakable sense of place.
Her practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Informed by her childhood in the Caribbean and her life in Key West, her work explores stories that shape individuals and communities. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions such as Black Creativity at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and Underneath Everything: Humility and Grandeur in Contemporary Ceramics at the Des Moines Art Center and the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Her work has also been included in publications such as Ceramics Monthly.
Her commissioned public works include Bounty of Plantation Key, created for the Plantation Key Courthouse and a project for the Frederick Douglass Community Center, honoring the legacy of the Bahamian Black community in Bahama Village, Key West.
Binard’s artwork and story have been featured in Forbes.com, the Florida Slave Trade Documentation and Education Center’s online archive, reviewed in Hyperallergic, and appeared in multiple CBS productions. She is the recipient of the Kaabo Clay Collective Award, a CERF+ grant, and the 2021 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.
Artist Statement
I am a mixed-media artist of Haitian and Belgian heritage, drawing inspiration from the vibrant traditions of Haitian art and the classical influence of Dutch painters. This cultural duality shapes my work, merging classical techniques with rich, colorful storytelling.
Working primarily with oils, clay, and wood, I create portraits and installations that distill personal and social themes into visual narratives. My paintings transform human experiences into a poignant visual language, layered with symbolism.
Rooted in literature, history, and research, I look to the past to better understand and navigate the present—both my own and that of the people I portray. In this way, my art becomes a bridge, connecting historical narratives and personal experiences with modern identities.

Ani Brutus | Website
Ani Brutus is an interdisciplinary artist of Haitian-Filipino descent who works across print, painting, textiles, and assemblage. Using found fabrics, everyday objects, and family archives, she creates layered works that explore ancestry, memory, and spirituality. Inspired by Vodou and sacred geometry, her practice transforms discarded materials into tactile pieces that reflect personal and communal histories.
Brutus treats everyday items as relics carrying traces of touch and experience, assembling them into textured, organic forms. Through techniques like cyanotype, woodcut, and painting, she layers imagery of ancestors, cultural symbols, and her surroundings to create works that exist at a “crossroads” of material and spiritual forces. Her work emphasizes connection across time, honoring ancestral presence while reimagining the meaning of the ordinary.
Ani Brutus has exhibited with Haiti Cultural Exchange, Studio 45, Blue Print Archives at Moda Curations, Black Girls Sew at the Textile Arts Center, and Push-Up Gallery.
Artist Statement:
In Vodou, spirit inhabits everything—animals, objects, infrastructure and beyond—binding us across time and geography. I am drawn to imprints of routine, like the indentations in a seat cushion or the wear of a well-loved hair-clip. My practice begins with the engagement of everyday materials and the observation of their forms. At the base of my work, I create textural surfaces through the assemblage of found domestic fabric and discarded commonplace items. I work with items like keys, toothbrushes, old curtains and clothespins. I regard each material as a relic, carrying traces of touch, memory, and connection. Together they form a portrait of my lifestyle. Each assemblage is mounted onto organically-shaped bases that are prone to weathering. I work with foamcore, paper, unstretched canvas and tattered fabrics. My work honors the material from which they came, while reimagining their role through cycles of change.

Jennica Drice | Website
Jennica Drice, born in Brooklyn and raised in Port-au-Prince, is a textile artist working with indigo and cyanotype. Her practice is rooted in cultural memory, migration, and diasporic inheritance, using blue as her primary material language. She began her creative practice with Kaymanmzel, a sustainable fashion project built around recycled textiles. Drawn to transformation, she later turned to cyanotype, using the process to move images and materials between states and rework them into new forms. Her work explores personal and communal archives, asking what culture preserves, how it travels, and what form it assumes upon arrival.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows including Between Us at Haul Gallery where she completed a residency, First Hand at Zepster Gallery, Soft Structures at Makers Ensemble, and Migration Stories at Fulton Art Fair Gallery.
Artist Statement
I work in blue. Indigo, cyanotype, denim, cotton. Blue is both language and landscape to me. It holds mourning and freedom, ceremony and survival. Across Haitian Vodou shrines, Muslim tiles, and Catholic robes, blue is often understood as a sacred color, one that summons and protects whatever realm holds your belief.
I grew up one of six girls among seven cousins. Hand-me-downs weren’t just clothes; they were culture. A tutu or Victorian dress passed from body to body carried traces of each celebration, each season of wear. That rhythm taught me care and transformation, how to find beauty in what already existed. Kaymanmzel, my sustainable fashion project, continues that lineage, reworking discarded materials into garments that hold memory and possibility.
That same understanding of objects as carriers of history took root early. My grandparents’ house in Port-au-Prince had vivid blue walls that soaked up the sun. I lived there until I was twelve. From the open balcony I watched funeral processions, listened to Rara bands, heard vendors calling out their own makeshift jingles. Blue was always there, painted on walls, woven through memory, alive in gesture, song, and ceremony.
I return to it again and again.

Mel Isidor | Website
Mel Isidor is a Haitian-American mixed-media artist, designer, and urban planner based between Seattle, WA, and Boston, MA. Her work draws inspiration from the built environment, exploring how cities reveal the relationship between people and culture. Mel holds a Master’s in City Planning from MIT and a B.A. in Urban Studies from Brown University—a foundation that brings a philosophical and analytical lens to her practice, shaping both how she sees the world and how she translates that understanding through to her compositions. Her artistic practice combines photography and collage to create layered compositions that merge realism and abstraction—physically and metaphorically connecting different moments in time and space. Using imagery from her own photography, family archives, and public records, she builds scenes grounded in memory and heritage that reimagine familiar geographies through a speculative lens.
Mel also leads Isidor Studio, her design practice dedicated to the intersections of art, design, and urbanism. Across both her art and studio work, she transforms research and observation into visual narratives that deepen our understanding of place and the everyday materiality that shapes it. Her work has been exhibited across the United States through galleries and public installations in Boston, Seattle, and New Orleans, and she has been invited to speak on her creative practice at institutions including Adobe, Yale University, and the University of Southern California.
Artist Statement
Roots is a photo collage series capturing vignettes from reconnecting with my family and the landscape in Haiti. Each is a one-of-one handmade collage made with paper and foil, assembling fragments from landscaped to lived spaces. By layering imagery from my personal photography and family archives, these works document Haiti’s landscape into new forms that exist between memory and imagination. The fragmented compositions reflect how a place holds multiple stories at once, showing how histories are embedded in the built environment and culture is visible in physical form.
Each piece operates as a threshold where temporal boundaries dissolve, drawing the viewer into a winding passage between what was, what is, and what might be. The collages resist a single timeline, with fragments from different moments placed in relation to one another so that time appears all at once, disorienting any fixed sense of where a scene belongs. A recurring motif in my work is the incorporation of mirrored elements that draw the audience into the frame, transforming each piece from a snapshot of the past toward an augmented reality that reminds viewers they are part of the work they are observing.

Nathalie Jean-Baptiste | Website
Nathalie Jean-Baptiste, is a Haitian artist, storyteller, and cultural influencer whose artwork evokes emotion in its rawest form. Her paintings, through bold colors and intimate portraits, transform loneliness into beauty and human vulnerability into strength. Her gift for portraiture and translation of emotion also led her to use her Haitian heritage and curiosity for traditional cooking as her palette, turning the act of hosting into an art form of its own. Everything she creates is a reflection of her home, her family history, her inner world and the women who live within it.
Nathalie’s curiosity fuels her creations and her desire to share knowledge through art and experience. A passionate learner and educator, Nathalie proudly completed a residency with the Guggenheim’s Learning Through Art program where experienced teaching artists are placed into New York City public schools to collaborate with classroom teachers to develop, facilitate, and integrate art projects into the school curriculum.
Artist Statement
As a Haitian painter and storyteller my work lives at the intersection of memory, survival, and transformation. I use painting as a storytelling tool that helps carry what the body and the mind remember when words fall short.
Underground is part of a series of works on paper, created in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. These pieces emerged first as unspoken emotions while I was locked in transit, in a space between devastation and safety. They are traces of a raw, fragmented memory on my paper that is only an attempt to process what felt ungraspable at the time.
In a country shaped by many legacies, documentation is not always entrusted to official archives. Instead, the everyday push and pull, lived in alternative forms: handwritten texts, religious drawings, and coded visual language.
My relationship to paper is rare, yet the material has found itself deeply rooted in my daily-life heritage, where it carried visible aging notes: folded book corners, dog-eared bibles, scarred birth certificates. These gradual ephemeral markings transform paper into a living archive activated through touch, storage and display.
Paper is testimony. Paper is our first form of memory storage. Haiti’s everyday life documentation, political struggle, and collective memory…particularly during times when histories were threatened with erasure, all gave purpose to paper. Similarly, in my practice, paper is not passive. It absorbs and remembers as it becomes a witness to both the visible and the unspeakable.
Through this layered series of emotional abstraction, I traced internal landscapes shaped by an immeasurable trauma, resilience, and survival.
Rooted in my Haitian heritage, my work is informed by spirituality, identity, and human connection. I am interested in how we carry history within our bodies, and how creation, whether through painting, food, or gathering—becomes a ritual of release and restoration. Everything I create is an extension of home, of lineage, and of the women whose strength lives within me.
In this body of work, paper holds what I survived. It becomes both archive and offering, a space where personal memory meets collective history, and where the act of marking becomes an act of survival, remembrance, and, ultimately, salvation.

Rejin Leys | Website
For more than three decades I have been working on and with paper. My mixed media drawings reflect my interest in social and global issues in improvisational and playful ways. But since incorporating papermaking into my practice, I have found myself becoming more interested in it as a material than a drawing surface. This has led to projects that exploit the sculptural possibilities of paper pulp. Using mostly recycled paper and casting from different molds, surfaces, and objects, I can address the issues that concern me in ways that are new to me and challenge me both technically and aesthetically.
Recent cast paper projects reflect my concern about climate change by focusing on New York as a city of water; explore how our history is written right into the built environment; or personalize our pandemic era awareness of the importance of caregivers by sharing my late father’s tools. Some of these projects began with public, interactive papermaking events that led me to spend time on deeper exploration of ideas, processes, and forms. They address broader concerns while focusing on place and community.
Artist Statement
Rejin Leys is a Haitian-American mixed media artist and papermaker based in New York. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, and her work is included in several public collections including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University, Rutgers University Caribbean Studies Department, and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). Leys is a recipient of a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and MFA from Brooklyn College.

Julie Rouzier Mevs
Julie Rouzier Mevs is a Haitian mixed-media artist born in Port-au-Prince in 1986. Her work explores memory, identity, and cultural transmission through the lens of Haitian folk traditions, oral histories, and spiritual practices.
She studied Visual Communication at l’École de Condé in Lyon, France, and later trained with Haitian-Italian photographer Roberto Stephenson, whose mentorship helped shape her visual language and approach to storytelling.
From 2009 to 2015, she worked as a freelance visual artist in Haiti, collaborating with cultural institutions, international organizations, and musicians, while documenting artistic and social life across the country. She was actively engaged in the cultural sphere through initiatives such as Haiti en Scène and Foto Konbit. She co-founded Yanvalou, a cultural space in Port-au-Prince dedicated to artistic exchange.
In 2021, she began developing Ranmase Sonje, a project that marked a turning point in her practice, grounding her work in a deeper exploration of Haitian cultural memory. Through this project, she translates folk and Vodou traditions into layered visual compositions that combine photography, drawing, and archival references.
Since then, she has expanded this approach through collaborations with musicians, creating visual identities and imagery for contemporary sonic worlds. This ongoing dialogue between sound and image allows her to extend her process into modern musical expression, bridging ancestral memory with present-day forms.
She is currently based in the Dominican Republic
Artist Statement
My practice begins with an act of gathering—of fragments, lyrics, gestures, and images. Inspired by the Haitian folk song “Twa Fèy” and its refrain “jete, bliye, ranmase, sonje” (throw away, forget, gather, remember), I approach creation as a process of recovery. I am interested in what remains beneath the surface: the histories I was not taught, and the cultural and spiritual knowledge that has been marginalized or made invisible.
Much of my work draws from Haitian Vodou and folk songs—oral traditions that carry collective memory across generations. Through transcription, interpretation, and image-making, I translate these sonic and embodied archives into visual forms.
My visual language blends photography with hand-drawn elements, creating layered compositions that move between the real and the imagined. I build these images intuitively, allowing symbols, figures, and landscapes to emerge through a process of accumulation and transformation.
This work is both personal and collective. It reflects an ongoing inquiry into how we locate ourselves within inherited histories, and how memory—fragmented, evolving, and sometimes obscured—continues to shape who we are.

Vané Russo | Website
Vané Russo was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she grew up amid ongoing political instability and conflict, including an embargo that deeply impacted the nation. Surrounded by art from an early age, she began painting and drawing in her great-grandmother’s studio, Atelier de la Tête de l’Eau, alongside artists such as André Naudé, Tamara Baussan, and Michèle Manuel.
In 1999, she enrolled at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her early work reflects memories of Haiti and the lasting impressions of her upbringing. Through bold color and expressive gesture, she developed a visual language that brings her personal history to the surface. Working often on large-scale canvases, she invites viewers into an immersive and emotional experience.
In her later collage series, Les Vierges, Russo reinterprets religious imagery to construct complex portraits of contemporary women. Rather than expressions of faith, these works explore the tension between sexuality and spirituality. Drawing from both Catholic and Vodou traditions she encountered in her youth, she uses collage to create a new visual language—one that offers a sense of freedom she had not previously achieved through painting.
Since leaving Puerto Rico, Russo has lived in Lebanon, Paris, Hawaii, New York, and Los Angeles, among other places. Despite her global experience, her identity remains deeply rooted in Haiti. Through her work, she seeks to capture the island in its full complexity—its vibrant culture and landscapes, as well as the shadows cast by its history of conflict.
Artist Statement
The portrayal of women as virgins has shifted profoundly over time. In this body of work, I explore that duality—questioning the idea that purity exists within a single, fixed context. My contemporary interpretations often evoke discomfort, confronting viewers with images of women who resist societal expectations and assert their individuality. I challenge traditional representations of saints, loa, and women, reimagining them beyond inherited conventions.
Here, virginity is reinterpreted through a modern lens, bridging historical ideals with the complexities of contemporary life. By merging these worlds, a more nuanced understanding of women’s roles and identities emerges—one that acknowledges both continuity and transformation. At the same time, formal elements remain central to my practice: composition, layered detail, intricate patterns, and the vibrant choreography of color are as vital as the ideas they carry.
I move constantly between two impulses—being a devoted colorist and an engaged social provocateur.

Vizyon Atistik | OPENING NIGHT | What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor
2026-04-25 18:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
Join us for the opening reception of What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor on April 25, 2026, presented by Haiti Cultural Exchange, Vizyon Atistik.
Opening Reception, April 25
6–9pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
On view from April 25 through June 7
—
About the Exhibition
Through drawing, printmaking, collage, and mixed media, the exhibition considers paper as a material that carries memory, labor, and cultural continuity. Paper absorbs gesture records pressure and hesitation, time, revision and return, while holding traces of the hand and the persistence of ideas. Centering practices shaped by embodied knowledge and movement across place, the exhibition affirms paper not as a provisional surface, but as one that remembers and endures.
Curated by HCX fellow Yvena Despagne and Executive Director Régine M. Roumain.
—
Featured Artists
Sally Yolaine Binard | Ani Brutus | Jennica Drice | Mel Isidor | Nathalie Jean-Baptiste | Rejin Leys | Julie Rouzier Mevs | Vané Russo
—
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »
