Haiti Cultural Exchange

Vizyon Atistik | Closing Reception: Jakmèl: The Unveiling of Kanaval
2026-03-28 16:00 - 18:00 (America/New_York) | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Kanaval season wraps at HCX! Join artists and curators for a special night of rara, light refreshments and a last look at Jakmèl: The Unveiling of Kanaval. Special performance by Bacheler Jean-Pierre.
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for JAKMÈL | The Unveiling of Kanaval on view until March 29, 2026.
Saturday, March 28
4–6pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn NY
—
About The Exhibition
JAKMÈL | The Unveiling of Kanaval is more than a celebration, it is a living archive of survival stories, memory, and self-expression.
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

ON VIEW | Vizyon Atistik | What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor
2026-04-25 - 2026-06-07
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
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 »

Vizyon Atistik | An n Pale | What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor
2026-05-02 16:00 - 18:00
Join us for this in-person conversation with featured artists of What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor.
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor on view until June 7, 2026.
May 2
4–6pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
—
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 »

Vizyon Atistik | Collage Workshop with Mel Isidor
2026-06-07 14:00 - 16:00
In this participatory workshop, join exhibiting artist Mel Isidor to discover the art of collage in this engaging, beginner-friendly workshop designed to spark imagination and experimentation. Using a mix of found materials, papers, images, and textures, you’ll learn how to layer and compose elements into a visually compelling piece that reflects your personal memory.
Participants will be guided through a short introduction to the history of collaging and an overview of key techniques and approaches. With guided support throughout, you’ll explore composition, color, and storytelling as you cut, arrange, and assemble your own original collage. Emphasizing creativity, play, and self-expression, this session invites you to loosen up, try new ideas, and enjoy the process of making something uniquely yours.
Register for this workshop here »
Registration includes a complementary beverage & light refreshments.
Limited capacity, RSVP required.

Sunday, June 7
2–4pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor on view until June 7, 2026.

—
About the Instructor

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. Learn more about Isidor’s work at www. melisidor.com

—
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.

—
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

Vizyon Atistik | CLOSING RECEPTION | What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor
2026-06-07 16:00 - 19:00
Join HCX for the closing reception of What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor on June 7, 2026, presented by Haiti Cultural Exchange, Vizyon Atistik.
Sunday, June 7
4–7pm
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 »

ON VIEW | Vizyon Atistik | Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End
2026-09-19 - 2026-10-18
Haiti Cultural Exchange (HCX) is excited to announce our forthcoming exhibition in collaboration with the Archive of Alan Lomax (1915-2002), a pioneering ethnomusicologist for over six decades. From 1936-1937, at the urging of heralded African American anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, Lomax traveled to Haiti to record the nation’s music and rituals on behalf of the US Library of Congress.
The Association for Cultural Equity, which stewards Lomax’s archive, selected 40 essential recordings from the nearly 50 hours of recorded sound from Haiti,
Building a conversation between the past and present, HCX invited visual artists of Haitian descent to respond and connect their own work through an Open Call.
From textiles to film, the artists selected evoke both personal and resonant responses to the recordings that most spoke to them — from lullabies to Rara, from the sacred to the Konbit. The exhibition will feature curated pairings of recordings and artwork, connecting their modes of communion and communication over time and place.
Curated by Régine M. Roumain and Micaela Walker
Featuring the work of:
Laïssa Alexis • Love Aritus • Marie Casimir • Megan Delianne • Stephanie “Philomen” Dorceant • Jennica Drice • Sydney Rose Maubert • Christopher Mitchell • Marie Guilloto Stuppard • Zarita Zevallos

—
Vizyon Atistik | Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End
Artists in Dialogue with Sounds of Haiti from the Alan Lomax Archive
On view from September 19 to October 18, 2026
Thursday – Sunday, Wednesday by appointment.
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
—
Sat. Sep 19 | 6-9pm
Opening Reception and An n Pale with Artist and Gage Averill
RSVP Here »
Sun. Oct 18 | 4-7pm
Closing Reception
RSVP Here »
—
About the Artists
Laïssa Alexis
Laïssa Alexis (she/her) is a Haitian-born, Chicago-based artist, researcher, and filmmaker working across multiple mediums. She is currently making non-fiction films that broadly explore topics on Blackness, grief, death, and memory. Laïssa enjoys daydreaming about the future and hopes to use her practice to articulate these dreams.
Love Aritus
Love Aritus is a multimedia artist based in Denver, CO whose work examines memory and honors ancestry through figurative portraiture influenced by her Caribbean identity. Her work investigates how everyday rituals, domestic spaces, and cultural traditions shape identity across generations, transforming ordinary moments into visual archives of remembrance and resilience. Drawing from her familial connection to Aquin, Haiti, Love’s work explores the ways cultural traditions and family histories continue to shape contemporary identity.
Marie Casimir| Website
Marie Casimir is a Haitian-born interdisciplinary artist, producer, and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. She was raised in Spring Valley, NY following her family’s immigration from St. Michel de L’Attalaye, Haiti. Her artistic practice often blends improvisational movement, choreography, and text, exploring cultural memory and Black diasporic identity. Featured at venues across the country, including Constellation (Chicago), Oklahoma Contemporary, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, DANCE@30FPS, and the Austin Dance Festival, Casimir’s honors include a Ragdale Artist Fellowship, SixTwelve Residency Award, and a Heartland Regional Emmy nomination for her short film I Dream of Greenwood.
As the founder of Djaspora Productions, she creates interdisciplinary performances, cultural events, and global artistic exchanges that connect artists and communities across the Black diaspora. She co-founded the Instigation Festival, celebrating improvised music and dance in Chicago and New Orleans, and serves as Festival Co-Founder and producer of Juneteenth on The East (OKC). Casimir previously served as Associate Director of Links Hall, Curator of Public Programs and Performances at Oklahoma Contemporary, and taught in the Clara Luper African & African American Studies program at the University of Oklahoma. Her work can be explored at www.marie-casimir.com. Photo credit: Colin Danville
Megan Delianne | Website
Megan Delianne is a computer graphics generalist and multimedia artist based between New York and Berlin, working at the intersection of technology, history, and collective memory. Born in America to Haitian parents who emigrated in the 1990s, their practice is shaped by the experience of holding two worlds simultaneously.
Stephanie “Philomen” Dorceant | Website
Philomen is a Brooklyn, NY- and São Paulo, Brazil-based Haitian-American audiovisual artist, filmmaker, photojournalist, and cultural producer whose practice moves between both cities. Rooted in her family’s Haitian heritage and informed by a background in journalism and international media production, her work explores identity, memory, spirituality, migration, and cultural preservation through documentary film, visual storytelling, and cultural production. Her documentary Where We Walked, an intimate portrait of the Guarani people’s struggle to protect their ancestral lands in São Paulo, was officially selected for the 33rd Ecocine International Film Festival. Working across documentary, experimental film, photography, and visual arts, her practice draws from visual anthropology to examine the intersections of history, tradition, and contemporary culture.
Beyond filmmaking, Philomen co-produced Black: Cite; Sight-Site Black Arts Festival, a week-long festival presented alongside the 36th São Paulo Biennial that transformed Galeria do Reggae into a vibrant platform for contemporary Black artistic expression and public dialogue. Through her Black and Queer woman-owned production company, PhilOmen Media, she develops films and cultural initiatives that amplify the histories, traditions, and contemporary experiences of African diasporic and Indigenous communities, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and preserving cultural memory through storytelling.
Jennica Drice | Website
Jennica Drice is a Brooklyn-based textile artist and first generation Haitian American, raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her practice explores how identity is carried, altered, and reconstructed across displacement, informed by her own hyphenated experience between Haiti and the United States. Working primarily in blue through cyanotype and indigo, her work draws from personal and communal histories to explore memory, migration, and cultural inheritance.
She has exhibited across New York City and teaches workshops in cyanotype and natural dyeing.
Sydney Rose Maubert | Website
Sydney Rose Maubert (b. 1996) is a Haitian-Cuban artist and architect based in Miami. Her paternal grandparents emigrated from Haiti, and her maternal grandparents from Cuba respectively. She holds degrees in architecture from Yale University and the University of Miami, with double minors in writing and art.
Maubert is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC., her art and mural practice, which has been awarded by the Graham Foundation, Oolite Arts, and Locust Projects. Maubert has been awarded residencies with Artist in Residence in the Everglades (June 2023), Bakehouse Art Complex (Summer 2025), Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (Spring 2026), DVCAI in Suriname (June 2026), and a residency African Heritage Center in Miami, FL (2025- ongoing). Most notably, her work is in the 21C Museum’s permanent collection.
Maubert was the Strauch Fellow at Cornell College of Architecture (2022- 2024). Maubert is the Rowe Fellow at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture (2024- ongoing). She has assisted in teaching courses at Yale University, Morgan State University, City College of New York, and the University of Miami. Maubert sits on the board of the Center for Architecture’s Scholarship Committee (2023- ).
Christopher Mitchell | Website
Christopher Mitchell (b. 1978, New York) is a Haitian-American photographer and filmmaker whose work explores memory, place, and cultural experience across Haiti and its diaspora. Raised in South Florida, Mitchell lived in Haiti for 15 years, where he developed long-term documentary projects rooted in research, preservation, and close collaboration with local communities. Working primarily with analog film, he uses photography as a means of documenting resilience, ritual, and everyday life, creating archives of cultural traditions that are increasingly vulnerable to erasure. His practice centers on Haitian cultural traditions, particularly Kanaval Jacmel and Vodou ceremonies, as well as the evolving landscape of Little Haiti in Miami, where he currently lives and works. His long-term fieldwork in Haiti also informs two ongoing documentary films examining the ceremonial traditions of Souvenance and Gonaïves and the cultural history of Jacmel Kanaval.
Mitchell is the recipient of the Knight Foundation Art + Tech Expansion Fund, a Wavemaker Grant supported by Locust Projects and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and a Miami Individual Artist Grant. He is currently a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami. Recent exhibitions include Shattered Structures at FIU Miami Beach Urban Studios, commemorating the 15th anniversary of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake; Les Sirènes at MOCA North Miami; and a solo exhibition at the African American Research Library and Cultural Center. Across photography, film, and community-based archival projects, Mitchell’s practice is dedicated to preserving the cultural memory of Haiti and its diaspora.
Marie Guilloto Stuppard | Website
Marie Guilloto Stuppard is a Haitian artist raised in New York City, and living in Seattle. She paints from a place shaped by the play between islands and city blocks, between what was handed down and what had to be learned. Growing up, she adopted different ways of seeing, speaking, and belonging. That tension lives in her work.
Marie uses acrylic paint and materials that have already lived another life. Her process relies on an intuitive “pull” leading her to layer, remove, stain, and rebuild surfaces until they begin to hold weight. Marks are covered, edges blurred, objects are embedded or partially buried. What remains matters more than what is added. The work moves the way memory does—uneven, physical, resistant to comfortable narratives. She stays with uncertainty long enough for something honest to surface. Sometimes, figures appear faintly, as if resisting full visibility. They are not meant to explain themselves. They exist as traces of ancestry, of loss, of survival carried forward.
Marie’s practice holds space for what has been pushed aside or silenced. Her work acknowledges discomfort, allowing its presence to spark dialogue about heritage and the sometimes not so subtle rejection of traditions that are deemed “different”.
Zarita Zevallos | Website
Zarita Zevallos is a Haitian architect, photographer, and conceptual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, she comes from a Haitian family lineage rooted in Cap-Haïtien. She works as a Studio Lead in exterior façade restoration at a Manhattan consulting firm and spends her creative time developing conceptual artwork.
Her practice combines hand-edited photography with materials such as thread, glass, bullets, and barbed wire to create textured, layered images, and more recently she has experimented with sculptures. Through these elements, she explores themes of identity, gender, and the influence of socio-political structures. Her work uses symbolism and materiality to spark reflection, encouraging viewers to engage with both the beauty and the tension present in each piece.
Zevallos holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from CUNY and an Associate degree in Engineering from the Universidad Interamericana in San Germán, Puerto Rico. Her work has been featured in Ocean’s 8 set design and exhibited at the Steven Kasher Gallery, Chashama Galleries, Haiti Cultural Exchange, Photoville, the ICP Museum, and the University of Illinois Chicago, among other venues.

Vizyon Atistik | OPENING RECEPTION and An n Pale with Gage Averill | Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End
2026-09-19 18:00 - 21:00
Join us for the opening night of Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End: Artists in Dialogue with Sounds of Haiti from the Alan Lomax Archive.
This opening night reception will feature a dynamic An n Pale between several exhibition artists and Dr. Gage Averill, a renowned ethnomusicologist and curator of Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37, a Grammy Nominated box set of Lomax’s recordings, films, and writings from his time in Haiti.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
6–9pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
—
About Gage Averill
Gage Averill (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1989) is the Provost and Vice President Academic at the University of British Columbia and was formerly UBC’s Dean of Arts. He was Vice-Principal Academic University of Toronto Mississauga) and formerly Dean of Music at the University of Toronto, and before that Chair of Music at NYU.
He is an ethnomusicologist specializing in popular music of the Caribbean and North American vernacular music. Prof. Averill served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology between 2009-2011. His book on barbershop singing (Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Harmony, Oxford 2003) won best book prizes from the Society for Ethnomusicology (Merriam Prize) and the Society for American Music; his book on Haitian popular music and power (A Day for the Hunter: A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti, Chicago 1997) was awarded the best book prize in ethnic and folk research by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections; and the 10-CD boxed set of music and film he curated, along with an accompanying book, called Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936-37, received two Grammy Nominations.
He has consulted for the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Smithsonian, OAS, Fulbright, and for films, festivals, and copyright cases. For fun he kayaks, bikes, writes/performs music, and works on construction projects.
—
About the Exhibition
We are excited to announce our forthcoming exhibition in collaboration with the Archive of Alan Lomax (1915-2002), a pioneering ethnomusicologist for over six decades. From 1936-1937, at the urging of heralded African American anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, Lomax traveled to Haiti to record the nation’s music and rituals on behalf of the US Library of Congress.
The Association for Cultural Equity, which stewards Lomax’s archive, selected 40 essential recordings from the nearly 50 hours of recorded sound from Haiti, Building a conversation between the past and present, HCX invited visual artists of Haitian descent to respond and connect their own work through an Open Call.
From textiles to film, the artists selected evoke both personal and resonant responses to the recordings that most spoke to them — from lullabies to Rara, from the sacred to the Konbit. The exhibition will feature curated pairings of recordings and artwork, connecting their modes of communion and communication over time and place.
Curated by Régine M. Roumain and Micaela Walker
On view from September 19 through October 18.

—
Featured Artists
Laïssa Alexis
Love Aritus
Marie Casimir
Megan Delianne
Stephanie “Philomen” Dorceant
Jennica Drice
Sydney Rose Maubert
Christopher Mitchell
Marie Guilloto Stuppard
Zarita Zevallos
—
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

Vizyon Atistik | CLOSING RECEPTION | Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End
2026-10-18 16:00 - 19:00
Join us for the closing night of Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End: Artists in Dialogue with Sounds of Haiti from the Alan Lomax Archive.
Closing Night Reception
Saturday, October 18, 2026
4–7pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
On view from September 19 through October 18.
—
About the Exhibition
We are excited to announce our forthcoming exhibition in collaboration with the Archive of Alan Lomax (1915-2002), a pioneering ethnomusicologist for over six decades. From 1936-1937, at the urging of heralded African American anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, Lomax traveled to Haiti to record the nation’s music and rituals on behalf of the US Library of Congress.
The Association for Cultural Equity, which stewards Lomax’s archive, selected 40 essential recordings from the nearly 50 hours of recorded sound from Haiti, Building a conversation between the past and present, HCX invited visual artists of Haitian descent to respond and connect their own work through an Open Call.
From textiles to film, the artists selected evoke both personal and resonant responses to the recordings that most spoke to them — from lullabies to Rara, from the sacred to the Konbit. The exhibition will feature curated pairings of recordings and artwork, connecting their modes of communion and communication over time and place.
Curated by Régine M. Roumain and Micaela Walker
—
Featured Artists
Laïssa Alexis
Love Aritus
Marie Casimir
Megan Delianne
Stephanie “Philomen” Dorceant
Jennica Drice
Sydney Rose Maubert
Christopher Mitchell
Marie Guilloto Stuppard
Zarita Zevallos
—
Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »
