Vizyon Atistik | Papier-mâché Workshop with David Sainté
2026-02-28 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
In this participatory workshop, join artist David Sainté to learn methods of mask making and why Jacmel’s Carnival is not only a cornerstone of Haitian cultural identity, but an essential history for the Haitian diaspora to learn, preserve, and pass on.
Each participant will receive a pre-made mask to decorate with demonstrated techniques , a complementary beverage, & light refreshments.
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for JAKMÈL | The Unveiling of Kanaval on view until March 29, 2026.

Saturday, February 28
3–5pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY

RSVP required. Limited Capacity.
Get your tickets here »

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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 »

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About the Instructor
David Sainté is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and interdisciplinary visual artist of Haitian descent whose work bridges experimental documentary, installation, and new media. His practice merges archival footage, video, and sculptural environments with emerging technologies to create immersive, narrative-driven experiences that explore memory, grief, and cultural identity.
His recent work includes Bedsheet Bunker, presented in Oslo as part of Nou La: Apertures into Haiti at Kunstnernes Hus, alongside Jelsen Lee Innocent’s exhibition Truth Has No Friends in The West. The generative film explores Haiti’s artistic legacy and diaspora through themes of spirituality, resilience, and resistance, situating Haitian voices within global contemporary discourse.
Another cornerstone of his practice is Nou Mache lè Solèy Kouche, a part-sculptural, part-generative documentary installation supported by the En Foco Media Arts Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Originally intended for the Ghetto Biennale in Jacmel, the project was left without a home after the event was cancelled due to the crisis in Haiti. The installation has continued to evolve in Sainté’s studio, weaving light, film, and memory with car parts, sequin fabrics, found objects, and glowing masks that evoke Jacmel’s Kanaval traditions and ancestral memory.
Sainté’s broader projects have been supported by institutions such as The Shed, MIT, the MUD Foundation in Miami’s Little Haiti, the Museum of the Moving Image, where he has developed XR environments, sound, and experimental moving image installations.

Vizyon Atistik | An n Pale with Steven Baboun, Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre, and Lori Martineau
2026-03-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Join this in-person conversation with featured artists of the current exhibition Jakmèl: The Unveiling of Kanaval on view now in the HCX: Steven Baboun, Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre, and Lori Martineau.
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for JAKMÈL | The Unveiling of Kanaval on view until March 29, 2026.
Saturday, March 7
4–6pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
Limited capacity, RSVP strongly suggested.
Seating first come, first served.
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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 »

Ti Atis Second Saturdays: Haitian Folkloric Dance with Robenson Mathurin
2026-03-14 14:00 - 16:00 | Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 145 Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11213
Through music, rhythm, and creative play, families will learn the basics of Haitian folkloric dance while discovering the stories and meanings behind each step. This Ti Atis dance class will nurture self-expression, cooperation, and cultural pride, helping children connect with Haiti’s spirit of resilience and joy in a fun and supportive environment. Led by caring and experienced teaching artist Robenson Mathurin, families will dance, learn, and celebrate together—honoring their heritage while creating something new.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
2-4pm
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
145 Brooklyn Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11213
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Attendance free with museum admission.
Limited number of free tickets provided to the HCX community.
RSVP below while availability lasts!
Purchase a ticket to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum here »
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Artist Bio
Robenson Mathurin is a New York–based dancer, choreographer, and teacher who shares the beauty and spirit of Haitian culture through dance. Trained in many styles and having performed around the world, he continues to teach and inspire students of all ages. In 2022, he founded NANM, his own dance company, which uses movement and storytelling to celebrate Haitian traditions, honor personal stories, and bring families and communities together through the joy of dance.
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About Ti Atis
Ti Atis returns to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum for a new season of interactive youth and family programming! Ti Atis (Little Artists) engages youth of Haitian descent and their peers with Haitian history and heritage via the arts, giving young people the tools to build an inclusive and culturally informed future as they learn about diverse art forms from professional Haitian artists.
Mark your calendars! Happening on the second Saturday of every month from November 2025 to May 2026.

Vizyon Atistik | An n Pale with Steven Baboun, Tania L. Balan-Gaubert, Bacheler Jean-Pierre, Christina Rateau, and Kedler St-Hilaire (Virtual)
2026-03-14 15:00 - 17:00 | NY
Join this virtual conversation with featured artists of the current exhibition Jakmèl: The Unveiling of Kanaval on view now in the HCX: Steven Baboun, Tania L. Balan-Gaubert, Bacheler Jean-Pierre, Christina Rateau, and Kedler St-Hilaire.
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for JAKMÈL | The Unveiling of Kanaval on view until March 29, 2026.
Saturday, March 14
3–5pm
Virtual. Register for the webinar here »
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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 »

Vizyon Atistik | Closing Reception: Jakmèl: The Unveiling of Kanaval
2026-03-28 16:00 - 18:00 | 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
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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 »

An n Pale | Mini-Jazz: An Immigration Story with Hervé Sabin
2026-03-29 14:00 - 19:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
In this interactive salon, reimagine the classic Haitian immigrant living room: sofas covered in squeaky plastic protecting the fabric below, the ceramic decorations and the photo albums and the China and the bars with Rhum Barbancourt, crémas, Manischewitz, and tranpe lined up in a neat row. In the corner of the room: a record player.
Scholar, archivist, and artist Hervé Sabin brings us together to reminisce on iconic musical genres of mini-jazz and konpa direk and how they made their way to Brooklyn in our suitcases, bals, and right here in recording studios across the US.
For this session, serenade us with your memories of Haitian mini-jazz as we listen to vinyls from the Ace Frape collection of Jean H. Marcelin and Hervé Sabin’s inherited collections from Montreal, New York, Miami, and Port-au-Prince.
Patrice Espérant joins as the afternoon’s DJ to keep the vinyl spinning!
We welcome you to sit a while, listen to a few of iconic albums, and share stories of home – old and new.
Sunday, March 29, 2026
2-7pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave BK, NY 11217
2pm: Welcome & Flip through Marcelin & Sabin’s Records Archive. Sign up to share your Mini-Jazz music memory!
2:30pm: Story Sharing with Hervé Sabin & Patrice Espérant
3-7pm: Community Story Sharing Cycles
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About Orchestre et Mini-Jazz: An Immigration Story Through Music by Hervé Sabin
During the late sixties compas direct/konpa direk which was founded in July 1955 by Nemours Jean-Baptiste* began transforming from a big band orchestra format to a more compact unit of five to eight members called Mini-Jazz. To this very day most Haitians refer to a compas band as jazz la or the Jazz!
The bands developed structures and distinct sounds. The typical instruments were electric guitars, bass, drums, keyboard, and sometimes brass instruments like saxophones and trumpets. The electric guitar was dominant with intricate solos. Mini-Jazz retained Compas’ distinctive rhythm of steady beat and syncopated bass lines, played at a faster tempo danceable groove.
They were from various neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities. In Port-au-Prince, certain bands were known as king of their neighborhood: Les Shleu Shleu were in Bas-Peu-de-Chose; Les Fantaisistes were from Carrefour; in Petionville the bands Les Difficiles which became Les Gypsies, Tabou Combo which was born from Los Incognitos, Les Frères Dejean, Choupa Choupa all dominated the hills of Carrefour Feuille.
The early seventies saw many bands emigrating to the United States in parallel with the great migration spurred by the entrenchment of the Duvalier regime. They settled predominantly in the northeast where Tabou Combo had established itself and became an international superstar (even adding Superstars to the name of the band). They did it with hits such as “New York City”, “Juicy Lucy”, “Chercher la Femme” and “Let’s Dance” which married funk, early hip hop, and Compas to create a hybrid sound representing the era. The city of Boston hatched Volo Volo de Boston and Djet-X, both products of migration.
Here in New York City, Prospect-Lefferts, Flatbush and Crown Heights became the epicenter of the Haitian migration. Franklin, Nostrand, and Flatbush Avenues became the hubs where many record labels erected domicile. Geronimo records, Marc records, Mini Records and Fred Paul were the big players. Albert Chancy from Tabou Combo started Chancy Records which became at one point the label for the band.
This project looks to tell the parallel stories of a musical genre, its transformation along stories of migration that transformed neighborhoods in cities on both sides of the Atlantic in the US and Haiti. It looks at the lives of Haitian in the US and Haiti, particularly their connections to the music and how Haitian urbanism was been shaped by political and economic immigration.
*The famous Sicot vs Nemours konpa direk origin story battles with Sicot developing a nuanced merengue style called Cadence or Cadence Rampa and Nemours having created a more direct 1,2 rhythm.

Ti Atis Second Saturdays: Printmaking & Storytelling with Nathalie Jean-Baptiste
2026-04-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 145 Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11213
Haitian artist and storyteller Nathalie Jean-Baptiste leads this engaging children’s workshop combining storytelling, live music, and hands-on artmaking. The program begins with a reading of Trogon’s Song of Hope accompanied by live drumming. In the story, we meet Trogon, the national bird of Haiti and his new friends.
Then, take part in a simple block printing workshop inspired by the birds, foliage, and natural themes. Using various materials—styrofoam plates, pencils, and paint—children create their own prints while learning the basics of printmaking. This workshop encourages imagination, creativity, and sensory engagement through story, rhythm, and art.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
2-4pm
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
145 Brooklyn Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11213
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Attendance free with museum admission.
Limited number of free tickets provided to the HCX community.
RSVP below while availability lasts!
Purchase a ticket to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum here »
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Artist Bio
Nathalie Jean-Baptiste is a Haitian painter and creative host whose work blends tradition and innovation through art and curated dining experiences. Rooted in cultural pride, her creations explore identity, spirituality, and human connection, celebrating Haitian heritage with a modern touch. She is the founder of an exclusive dining series centered on culture and storytelling, a former Guggenheim Learning Through Art resident teaching artist in NYC public schools, and the author of Trogon’s Song of Hope, a children’s book about Haiti’s national bird, the Hispaniolan Trogon.
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About Ti Atis
Ti Atis returns to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum for a new season of interactive youth and family programming! Ti Atis (Little Artists) engages youth of Haitian descent and their peers with Haitian history and heritage via the arts, giving young people the tools to build an inclusive and culturally informed future as they learn about diverse art forms from professional Haitian artists.
Mark your calendars! Happening on the second Saturday of every month from November 2025 to May 2026.

HCX Salon d’Ayiti Book Club | Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre Hosted by Kaiama L. Glover
2026-04-15 - 2026-05-09 | Virtual
This April, 𝗐𝖾 𝗐𝗂𝗅𝗅 read the English translation of Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre in conversation with the novel’s translator Kaiama L. Glover, prizewinning translator and professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University.
Professor Glover will lead three virtual sessions in April as well as a closing in-person meet-up and lunch on May 9 at Salon d’Ayiti hosted by Haiti Cultural Exchange and the Center for Fiction in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
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About Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
Winner of the 1988 Prix Renaudot, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is widely considered René Depestre’s finest novel. Set during 1938 Carnival in the Haitian village of Jacmel, it follows Hadriana, a young French woman who collapses at the altar after drinking a mysterious potion, is transformed into a zombie, buried, revived by a sorcerer, and vanishes into legend. The story is narrated first by her adoring god-brother Patrick, then — in a hilarious corrective — by Hadriana herself, whose account exposes the hidden sensuality beneath her bourgeois community’s respectable surface.
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JOIN THE CONVERSATION WITH KAIAMA L. GLOVER
Discussion to be held in multi-part virtual sessions:
Virtual; meeting link shared after registration. Readers are welcome to join mid-way through the session if they get started late.
Session 1: April 15, 6-7pm ET
Foreword + Movement 1, Chapters 1-2
Session 2: April 22, 6-7pm ET
Movement 1, Chapters 3-4
Session 3: April 29, 6-7pm ET
Movement 2

CHANGED!
In-person lunch meet-up for virtual session attendees:
May 9, 1-3pm
May 13, Virtually
Movement 3 + Epilogue
All registered attendees of the book club will receive details for the virtual meeting via email.
Special conversation and staged reading following the meet-up with Kaiama L. Glover, Edwidge Danticat, and guests: Salon d’Ayiti: A Living Tribute to René Depestre.
$10-$30 Suggested donation includes access to all sessions.
If you are in NY, you can purchase the book, Hadriana in All My Dreams with our partners over at the Center For Fiction. Learn more about visiting their bookstore, here »
RSVP on Eventbrite while availability lasts! »

Mizik Ayiti! Residency Spring Series | Twoubadou Lakay
2026-04-16 - 2026-05-14 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Join us on Thursdays for the Mizik Ayiti! Residency Series. The Spring residency will be held by Twoubadou Lakay.
Twoubadou Lakay is a collective of master musicians rooted in the rich traditions of Haitian music. The ensemble blends the storytelling spirit and dancing guitars of Haitian Twoubadou with deep Haitian rhythms, jazz sensibilities, and improvisational dialogue. Twoubadou Lakay is tradition reimagined through a contemporary lens. Their sound is both intimate and expansive—grounded in lakou culture, yet reaching across the diaspora—creating a musical space where heritage, memory, and innovation meet.
Twoubadou Lakay’s Haiti Cultural Exchange residency will feature core members Bobby Raymond, Markus Schwartz, Gary Josama, Gama Josama, Joe Montour, Camille Hostin and Roland Cameau in revolving formations. Twoubadou Lakay invites audiences into a living, breathing experience of Haitian musical expression—honoring the past while shaping its future.
Twoubadou Lakay’s five-week residency at HCX will feature unique performances weekly.
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Dates & Tickets
Get your tickets today and don’t miss out on these incredible performances!
Performances will take place on Thursdays April 16, 23, 30 and May 7 and 14, 2026.
6-9pm
Get your tickets to one, or all these performances, here »
Tickets include a complimentary beverage.
Special pop-up offerings from Bon Pâtés.
Limited capacity, RSVP strongly recommended.
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HCX | Mizik Ayiti! Residency
HCX positions this invitational residency as an opportunity to innovate and workshop concepts and works-in-progress, showcase new work, and build networks for artists’ future presentation (e.g. booking, touring) at other cultural institutions and stages.
Rarely do artists receive a consistent opportunity to create and share in “real time”–to develop their ideas in a beta form, experiment, and refine amidst presenting publicly. Over the course of 6 weeks, resident artists receive a platform to fine tune approaches, activate jam sessions, and explore sonic possibilities while developing relationships with their audiences.
On Thursday evenings, artist-composers host unique sets joined by a rotation of guest artists and ensembles. Performances offer the opportunity to showcase new work and workshop arrangements across the musical landscape, from traditional genres reverberating the strength of the tanbou to the contemporary sound like fusion jazz and electronic music carrying Haitian vibration into the future.

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 »

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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 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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
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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.
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Featured Artists
Sally Yolaine Binard | Ani Brutus | Jennica Drice | Mel Isidor | Nathalie Jean-Baptiste | Rejin Leys | Julie Rouzier Mevs | Vané Russo
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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 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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
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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.
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Featured Artists
Sally Yolaine Binard | Ani Brutus | Jennica Drice | Mel Isidor | Nathalie Jean-Baptiste | Rejin Leys | Julie Rouzier Mevs | Vané Russo
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Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

Mizik Ayiti! at Brooklyn Botanic Garden featuring Pauline Jean
2026-05-03 12:30 - 16:00 | Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 990 Washington Avenue, Brookyln, NY, United States
Haiti Cultural Exchange presents Mizik Ayiti! celebrating the traditional rhythms of the island of Haiti, featuring Pauline Jean.
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Two Sessions: 12:30 & 2:30
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Plant Family Collection
990 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225
Pauline Jean is a Haitian-American vocalist whose artistry gracefully bridges jazz with global traditions and the rich rhythms of the African diaspora. Celebrated for her warm, expressive tone and captivating stage presence, she creates performances that are both intimate and expansive, inviting audiences into a deeply moving musical experience.
Rooted in her Haitian heritage, Pauline’s work reflects themes of identity, memory, and cultural connection, brought to life through nuanced storytelling and dynamic musicality. She has performed on distinguished stages and at festivals across the United States and internationally, earning recognition for performances that are as emotionally resonant as they are artistically refined.
Through her voice, Pauline Jean honors tradition while embracing a contemporary sensibility, offering music that is timeless, soul-stirring, and profoundly human.

Presenting in collaboration with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Free with Garden admission.
Click here to purchase tickets for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden »

Ti Atis Second Saturdays: Haitian Heritage Month Selebrasyon!
2026-05-09 11:30 - 16:00 | Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 145 Brooklyn Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11213
Join us for the season finale of HCX Ti Atis Second Saturday series at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Ti Atis Haitian Heritage Month Selebrasyon!—a joyful, immersive celebration of Haitian culture! This special day is packed with family-friendly fun, featuring vibrant dance, hands-on arts and crafts workshops, and captivating storytelling rooted in Haitian culture and traditions.
Bring the whole family and experience the richness of Haiti’s heritage through creativity, movement, and community.
Featuring some of our favorite Ti Atis Second Saturday artists, be there for a day-long carousel of fun & Haitian pride!
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Saturday, May 9th, 2026
Three sessions from 11:30am–4pm
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
145 Brooklyn Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11213
11:30am-12:30pm in the Colorlab
Artist Nica Drice will lead a hands-on printmaking session where families will explore Haitian culture through cyanotype, a sun-printing (UV) process that creates vivid blue images. Using recycled, repurposed materials and natural objects, participants will design paper or fabric inspired by Haitian culture.
1:00-2:00pm on the BK Voices
Immerse yourself in the vibrant spirit of Haitian and Caribbean culture with author and educator Justine A.P. Louis of VivLiv Books! This dynamic session brings culture to life for Haitian Heritage Month with interactive Haitian game stations & crafts for children and parents.
3:00-4:00pm on the Rooftop Terrace
Join dancer and choreographer Robenson Mathurin who will be teaching using music, rhythm, and creative play. Families will learn the basics of Haitian folkloric dance while discovering the stories and meanings behind each step.
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As a special offer for the HCX community, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum is offering FREE admission for 20 people.
Limit 3 tickets per family. (Tickets will be held at the counter on the day of.)
RSVP below!
Attendance FREE with museum admission.
If free HCX Community RSVP is no longer available on this page, please purchase a ticket to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum here [insert link]
Spaces limited.
Purchase a ticket to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum here »
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About Ti Atis
Ti Atis returns to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum for a new season of interactive youth and family programming! Ti Atis (Little Artists) engages youth of Haitian descent and their peers with Haitian history and heritage via the arts, giving young people the tools to build an inclusive and culturally informed future as they learn about diverse art forms from professional Haitian artists.
Mark your calendars! Happening on the second Saturday of every month from November 2025 to May 2026.

Salon d’Ayiti: A Living Tribute to René Depestre
2026-05-09 16:00 - 18:00 | The Center For Fiction, 15 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11217
updated as of May 7, 2026
POSTPONED | Salon d’Ayiti
Following the recent loss of beloved writer & community leader Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, HCX and our hosts have made the decision to adjust May 9th’s Salon d’Ayiti program schedule to allow our community to attend memorial gatherings.
We will soon share a new date for Salon d’Ayiti: A Living Tribute to Rene Depestré.
All are welcome to join in celebrating Michèle’s life at the Opening Reception of “Creativity has no Border” on Saturday, May 9, from 3-6 pm at Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba (219 East 2nd Street, New York, NY).
Our hearts are with Michèle’s family, friends, and the many circles where her ripples carried. We believe it’s important to take this time to honor her life and hold space for one another.
Thank you for your understanding and care.
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Haiti Cultural Exchange and The Center for Fiction collaborate to celebrate the work & living legacy of Haitian author René Depestre.

“The real conversation between spirit and flesh most likely takes place in some undefined realm, a place neither here nor there, where the soul pounds into the body—or flees the body—in a way that only some among the living can fully understand.”
—Edwidge Danticat on René Depestre

This afternoon at The Center for Fiction will feature select readings & panel discussion featuring the English translator of his work, Yale University professor Kaiama L. Glover, renowned author Edwidge Danticat, and special guests.
Join HCX after the program in their new space at 35 Lafayette Ave for a special post-salon gathering featuring live music.
Haitian author René Depestre is one of the most important voices of twentieth-century world literature. Depestre was born in Jacmel, Haiti, on August 29, 1926. His vast corpus includes works of poetry, prose fiction, literary criticism, and political essays. A peer of and collaborator with such influential political and literary figures as Aimé Césaire, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Amado, and André Breton, Depestre has engaged with the politics and aesthetics of Negritude, Marxism, social realism, and Surrealism, among other major twentieth century phenomena, over the course of a career that has spanned more than half a century.
Having lived and written through significant moments in Haitian, New World, and Pan African history––from the overthrow of Haitian dictator Elie Lescot in 1946, to the first Pan African Congress in Paris 1956, to a struggle with Haiti’s François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, to collaboration with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a fraught relationship with Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 70s––René Depestre has been uniquely placed to narrate how the entirety of the Americas and Europe are implicated in Haiti’s past and present reality.
Depestre’s distinct style is at its best in such timeless works as Hadriana dans tous mes rêves [Hadriana in All My Dreams], Le Mât de Cocagne [The Festival of the Greasy Pole], and Un arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien [A Rainbow for the Christian West], among other major publications, many of which have been awarded prestigious literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle, the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde

FREE. $10-$30 Suggested donation.
RSVP on Eventbrite while availability lasts! »

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About the panel
KAIAMA L. GLOVER
Kaiama L. Glover is a translator and scholar of Black Studies, French and Literary Studies. She is a professor at Yale University in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Glover’s research, writing, and teaching are situated at the intersection of French, francophone, Caribbean, and Haitian literary studies. Her work explores phenomena of border-crossing, marginality, gender, and canon-formation, querying––through rigorous textual study––the shifting categories of ‘center’ and ‘margins’ as they are constituted across the postcolonial Afro-Americas. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017), and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (2019). Glover is an awardee of the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to her published works, Glover has contributed to the field of digital humanities through projects such as In the Same Boats, which visualizes networks of “Caribbean, Latin American, African, European, and Afro-American intellectuals” in the 20th century. She also serves as a founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Brother, I’m Dying, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, The Art of Death, Everything Inside, a Reese’s Book Club selection and National Book Critics Circle Awards winner. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, Haiti Noir, and Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for children and young adults: Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, Untwine, My Mommy Medicine, and a travel narrative, After the Dance. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “Art of Change” fellow, the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize, the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award, the 2011 Bocas Nonfiction Prize and 2020 Bocas Fiction Prize, the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Literature, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, a two-time winner of The Story Prize, and the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her essay collection, We’re Alone, will be published in September 2024. She teaches at Columbia University.

Haitian Flag Day Selebrasyon!
2026-05-20 17:00 - 21:00 | Prospect Park Boat House, 101 East Dr., Brooklyn, New York, 11225
In celebration of the 223rd anniversary of the Haitian Flag, Haiti Cultural Exchange, in partnership with the Prospect Park Alliance, presents a Haitian Flag Day Selebrasyon!
Featuring live music by Mizik Ayiti! Residents Mikaëlle Aimée, Okai Musik, Rasin Okan, and Bobby Raymond & Markus Schwartz with Lakou Brooklyn Quartet. 2CENT will be our DJ for an evening of outdoor fun! Enjoy artist & lifestyle vendors including Bon Pâtés, Cantave de Saint Marc, Pikliz Please, Se Lakay, Alyn Defay, Watson Mere, and Kenley Simon!

Wednesday, May 20, 2026
5 – 9pm (performance at 6:30pm)
Prospect Park Boathouse
101 East Dr, Brooklyn, NY 11225
RSVP on Eventbrite while availability lasts! »
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Haiti Cultural Exchange (HCX) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop, present and promote the cultural expressions of the Haitian people. Founded in 2009 by seven Haitian women to create a permanent presence for Haitian Arts & Culture in NYC. HCX’s programs in the arts, education and public affairs raise awareness of social issues and foster cultural understanding within and beyond the Haitian community. For more information, follow us @haiticulturalx.
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Prospect Park Alliance is the non-profit organization that sustains, restores and advances Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s Backyard, in partnership with the City of New York. The Alliance provides critical staff and resources that keep the Park green and vibrant for the diverse communities that call Brooklyn home. Learn more at www.prospectpark.org.

Bazaar Kreyòl | Memorial Day Weekend Market
2026-05-23 - 2026-05-25 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Join HCX for a special Memorial Day edition of Bazaar Kreyòl! Shop from a curated array of local Haitian vendors or take home unique artisanal goods from the HCX Boutik. Savor Brooklyn’s historic first step into the sunshine season with a cool drink, a tasty bite, and afternoon DJ sessions with Okai Musik right here on Lafayette Ave.
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217
Saturday, May 23 | 12-10pm
Sunday, May 24 | 12-8pm
Monday, May, 25 | 12-8pm
RSVP to let us know you’re coming!

Mizik Ayiti! Residency Late Spring Series | Rasin Okan
2026-05-28 - 2026-06-25 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Join us on Thursdays for the Mizik Ayiti! Residency Series. The Spring residency will be held by Rasin Okan!
This residency honors the legacy of mizik rasin in Haiti and abroad and its role in collective storytelling. Rasin Okan will share popular folk songs from legends such as Lenord Fortune (a.k.a. Azor) and Jacques Fortere (a.k.a. Wawa), as well as original songs that echo the courage of Haiti’s freedom fighters while calling us to remember, reconnect, and rise. This residency is a sacred pilgrimage home—a journey for healing, reflection, and protection. We invite you to take this symbolic trip with us through rhythm, drum, dance, and song. Let the music move your spirit. Let the memory ignite your soul.
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About Rasin Okan: Born of Haiti’s mizik rasin movement, Rasin Okan is a Brooklyn-based Haitian roots ensemble. In the spirit of rasin sèch (directly translated to dry roots), Rasin Okan emphasizes the sounds and songs of traditional Haitian Vodou ceremonial music without much electric accompaniment. Led and co-founded by Jean E. Montina, Sanba Mayombe, the group writes original songs and evocative folk music to insight the revolutionary spirit of Haiti’s freedom fighters, set to a pulsating rhythm.
Members: Jean E Montina (Sanba Mayombe), Trudy Pierre (Sanba Verite), Wilgainson Toussaint (Sanba Nènèl), Gregory Fanor (Atis Alèz), Véronëque Ignace (Awoyo)
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Dates & Tickets
Get your tickets today and don’t miss out on these incredible performances!
Performance will take place weekly on Thursdays this Spring:
May 28 and June 4, 11, 18 and 25
6-9pm (45 min sets at 6:30 & 7:45)
Get your tickets to one, or all these performances, here »
Tickets include a complimentary beverage.
Special pop-up offerings from Bon Pâtés.
Limited capacity, RSVP strongly recommended.
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HCX | Mizik Ayiti! Residency
HCX positions this invitational residency as an opportunity to innovate and workshop concepts and works-in-progress, showcase new work, and build networks for artists’ future presentation (e.g. booking, touring) at other cultural institutions and stages.
Rarely do artists receive a consistent opportunity to create and share in “real time”–to develop their ideas in a beta form, experiment, and refine amidst presenting publicly. Over the course of 6 weeks, resident artists receive a platform to fine tune approaches, activate jam sessions, and explore sonic possibilities while developing relationships with their audiences.
On Thursday evenings, artist-composers host unique sets joined by a rotation of guest artists and ensembles. Performances offer the opportunity to showcase new work and workshop arrangements across the musical landscape, from traditional genres reverberating the strength of the tanbou to the contemporary sound like fusion jazz and electronic music carrying Haitian vibration into the future.

Vizyon Atistik | Collage Workshop with Mel Isidor
2026-06-07 14:00 - 16:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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.

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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

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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.

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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 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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
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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
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Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

Lakay Foutbòl | World Cup 2026 | Haiti vs. Scotland
2026-06-13 19:00 - 22:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
HCX is HQ to watch Haiti’s national team Les Grenadiers bring us to World Cup victory!

Hosted in collaboration with Maison Demar, this series of watch parties will feature summer evening kick-backs with cold drinks, great vibes, exclusive product releases by Haitian fashion designers and lifestyle brands.
Grenadye Alaso!

Saturday, June 13: Haiti vs. Scotland
Doors open at 7pm | Kick off at 9pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217

RSVP on Eventbrite & grab exclusive add-ons while availability lasts! »

Join Us for More Watch Parties
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Friday, June 19: Haiti vs. Brazil
Hosted in collaboration with Rooftop Films & Council Member Chi Ossé
Event start TBA | Kick off at 9pm | NO RSVP NEEDED
Location: Von King Park, 670 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216
Wednesday, June 24: Haiti vs. Morocco
Doors open at 4pm | Kick off at 6pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217

Lakay Foutbòl | World Cup 2026 | Haiti vs. Brazil
2026-06-19 19:00 - 22:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
HCX is HQ to watch Haiti’s national team Les Grenadiers bring us to World Cup victory!

Hosted in collaboration with Maison Demar, this series of watch parties will feature summer evening kick-backs with cold drinks, great vibes, exclusive product releases by Haitian fashion designers and lifestyle brands.
Grenadye Alaso!

Friday, June 19: Haiti vs. Brazil
Hosted in collaboration with Rooftop Films & Council Member Chi Ossé
Event start 12pm | Kick off at 8:30pm | NO RSVP NEEDED
Location: Von King Park, 670 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216

Join Us for More Watch Parties
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Saturday, June 13: Haiti vs. Scotland
Doors open at 7pm | Kick off at 9pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217
RSVP Required
Wednesday, June 24: Haiti vs. Morocco
Doors open at 4pm | Kick off at 6pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217
RSVP Required

RSVP on Eventbrite & grab exclusive add-ons while availability lasts! »

On View: 2025 Lakou NOU Culminating Expo
2026-06-21 - 2026-07-05 | kafou gallery, 1120 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11225, United States
A week-long exhibition featuring the culmination of work from the Lakou NOU 2025 Artists-In-Residence.

On View
Sunday, June 21 – Sunday, July 5, 2026
Kafou Gallery
1120 Washington Ave 2nd floor
Brooklyn, NY 11225
Gallery Hours
Thursday, June 25 6–9pm
Friday, June 26 6–9pm
Saturday, June 27 12–6pm
Sunday, June 28 12–6pm
Thursday, July 2 6–9pm
Friday, July 3 6–9pm
Sunday, July 5 12–6pm

Hosted & Curated by Haiti Cultural Exchange and Kafou Gallery
The 2025 Lakou NOU Culminating Expo highlights four expressive and collaborative projects that seek to empower, understand, and archive the Haitian experience. This cohort of artists explore core themes of care, familial connection, and the Haitian community’s relationship to their homeplaces and the natural world. Lakou NOU artists-in-residence Bo Dautruche, Georgie Exinord, Cici Osais, and Zarita Zevallos welcome us into a dynamic experience of oral history, creative storytelling, and visual art installations.
This free event and week-long exhibition presents the artists’ work in conversation with each other, highlighting their distinct approach to unpacking stories and approaches to cultural preservation in Brooklyn.
Unlike traditional artmaking, where an artistic creation amplifies a sole perspective, Lakou NOU residents generated their projects collaboratively with community members, providing creative outlets to convey inner experiences and share histories that are rarely shared or often under-presented.
Established in 2016, Haiti Cultural Exchange’s Lakou NOU artist residency program provides artists of Haitian descent with the opportunity to create and present new work by connecting their skills and talents to historically underserved Brooklyn neighborhoods, home to generations of Haitians and Haitian-Americans: Crown Heights, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatbush. Lakou NOU artists develop collaborative community engagement projects that address neighborhood issues and highlight community assets. Artists in residence received individualized mentorship from HCX staff and interacted with each other as a cohort through discussion and support around topics relevant to Lakou NOU projects. HCX-facilitated additional professional development workshops and exchanges with a consortium of community stakeholders and creative placekeeping professionals.
Join us for the Expo Showcase on Sunday, June 21, 2026 from 2-6pm.
Details here »
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This program is made possible in part by the Jerome Foundation.

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Artists Project Descriptions
Bo Dautruche, East Flatbush
Bo’s project “anvan ou bliye//before it’s too late…” moved freely between writing, critique, strategy, research, and embodied practices to explore death and grief as it pertains to Black life. Her project sought to (re)discover our relationships to and with transitions and endings. What does death and grief look like for us under the oppressive systems we wish to liberate ourselves from? Understanding the many reasons why this could be a tender subject, Bo and a myriad of creative workshop collaborators worked together to remind people what real community may feel like – where we could take off our masks, where we could hold each other, where we could really talk to each other, where we could process things in real time with each other, and build, learn, and exchange.
This culminates in her expo work focused on witnessing, not as judgement or exploitation or extraction or burdening, but as connection and ritual that honor both our life and death. Her altar installation welcomes the community to let go of what they may need in order to feel seen, either through physical objects they bring or reflecting on what is needed to let go of in order to show up for the community.

Georgie Exinord, Flatbush
Georgie’s “Good Daughter Project” sprang from one constant: her fervent belief that your stories are already within you. During her residency, Georgie hosted a series of writing exercises, memory work, drawing prompts, and collective dialogue workshops that sought to capture memory and language earned through the mosaic of one’s lived experience.
What does it mean to be a good daughter? What unfolded through these workshops were slippages of tenderness, unexpected intimacies, and moments of recognition between women who began as strangers. Together, participants explored the emotional interiority of Haitian and Caribbean diasporic daughters, particularly the invisible labor, parentification, responsibility, and survival embedded within first-generation daughterhood.
Her archive and final exhibition work serve as an offering: an account of our lives in our own words, preserved so those who come after us may know we were here and that we felt deeply.

Cici Osais, Crown Heights
Cici’s project “Nou kominike ak twal” (We communicate through cloth) is inspired by the communal art-making practices of the Black diaspora. It is rooted in an understanding of artmaking as something we are all capable of, and that’s best as a collective experience. Cici activated this idea to foster a space for individuals to create in unison, where works became parts of a whole.
Across the Diaspora cloth is used to hold stories. Within her textile practice, Cici uses techniques from her parents’ and grandparents’ motherlands: Haiti, Congo, Nigeria, and Black America. Because most of these places are out of reach and these traditions passed down orally, Osais have spent many years learning and researching these methods. I owe my craft to the archives and people who were willing to share this knowledge with me, and see it as my duty to continue passing along all that I have learned.
Through natural dyeing workshops in local community gardens focused on conversation and connection, neighbors learned new ways of communicating creatively and were able to contribute textiles to a selection of Cici’s culminating works that will live in the gardens where they were born.

Zarita Zevallos, Canarsie
Zarita’s residency was centered on introducing participants to both new material and new ways of creating. She used the novel Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain as a conceptual foundation while also introducing participants to beginner-friendly cameras and film photography as an accessible creative medium.
Using the immediate environment of Canarsie, Zevallos’ workshops explored themes of Haitian identity, community labor, displacement, and the importance of reconnecting with one’s roots by drawing parallels between the experiences in Masters of the Dew and contemporary Haitian realities.
What revealed itself were deeply personal and intergenerational ties to philosophical, timeless, and keenly relevant experiences that remain in play today. Creatively building alongside the work of her workshop participants, Zevallos will capture some of the powerful spaces for remembrance, dialogue, and cultural preservation through her installation work arriving at the culminating expo.

Lakou NOU Culminating Expo Showcase
2026-06-21 14:00 - 18:00 | kafou gallery, 1120 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11225, United States
Join us for an evening of conversation and celebration surrounding the culmination of work from the Lakou NOU 2025 Artists-In-Residence.

Expo Showcase
Sunday, June 21
2-6pm
Kafou Gallery
1120 Washington Ave 2nd floor
Brooklyn, NY 11225

Hosted & Curated by Haiti Cultural Exchange and Kafou Gallery
The 2025 Lakou NOU Culminating Expo highlights four expressive and collaborative projects that seek to empower, understand, and archive the Haitian experience. This cohort of artists explore core themes of care, familial connection, and the Haitian community’s relationship to their homeplaces and the natural world. Lakou NOU artists-in-residence Bo Dautruche, Georgie Exinord, Cici Osais, and Zarita Zevallos welcome us into a dynamic experience of oral history, creative storytelling, and visual art installations.
This free event and week-long exhibition presents the artists’ work in conversation with each other, highlighting their distinct approach to unpacking stories and approaches to cultural preservation in Brooklyn.
Unlike traditional artmaking, where an artistic creation amplifies a sole perspective, Lakou NOU residents generated their projects collaboratively with community members, providing creative outlets to convey inner experiences and share histories that are rarely shared or often under-presented.
Established in 2016, Haiti Cultural Exchange’s Lakou NOU artist residency program provides artists of Haitian descent with the opportunity to create and present new work by connecting their skills and talents to historically underserved Brooklyn neighborhoods, home to generations of Haitians and Haitian-Americans: Crown Heights, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatbush. Lakou NOU artists develop collaborative community engagement projects that address neighborhood issues and highlight community assets. Artists in residence received individualized mentorship from HCX staff and interacted with each other as a cohort through discussion and support around topics relevant to Lakou NOU projects. HCX-facilitated additional professional development workshops and exchanges with a consortium of community stakeholders and creative placekeeping professionals.
Exhibition On View
Sunday, June 21 – Sunday, June 28, 2026
Gallery Hours
Thursday – Friday 6-9pm
Saturday 12-6pm
Sunday 12-6pm
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This program is made possible in part by the Jerome Foundation.

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Artists Project Descriptions
Bo Dautruche, East Flatbush
Bo’s project “anvan ou bliye//before it’s too late…” moved freely between writing, critique, strategy, research, and embodied practices to explore death and grief as it pertains to Black life. Her project sought to (re)discover our relationships to and with transitions and endings. What does death and grief look like for us under the oppressive systems we wish to liberate ourselves from? Understanding the many reasons why this could be a tender subject, Bo and a myriad of creative workshop collaborators worked together to remind people what real community may feel like – where we could take off our masks, where we could hold each other, where we could really talk to each other, where we could process things in real time with each other, and build, learn, and exchange.
This culminates in her expo work focused on witnessing, not as judgement or exploitation or extraction or burdening, but as connection and ritual that honor both our life and death. Her altar installation welcomes the community to let go of what they may need in order to feel seen, either through physical objects they bring or reflecting on what is needed to let go of in order to show up for the community.

Georgie Exinord, Flatbush
Georgie’s “Good Daughter Project” sprang from one constant: her fervent belief that your stories are already within you. During her residency, Georgie hosted a series of writing exercises, memory work, drawing prompts, and collective dialogue workshops that sought to capture memory and language earned through the mosaic of one’s lived experience.
What does it mean to be a good daughter? What unfolded through these workshops were slippages of tenderness, unexpected intimacies, and moments of recognition between women who began as strangers. Together, participants explored the emotional interiority of Haitian and Caribbean diasporic daughters, particularly the invisible labor, parentification, responsibility, and survival embedded within first-generation daughterhood.
Her archive and final exhibition work serve as an offering: an account of our lives in our own words, preserved so those who come after us may know we were here and that we felt deeply.

Cici Osais, Crown Heights
Cici’s project “Nou kominike ak twal” (We communicate through cloth) is inspired by the communal art-making practices of the Black diaspora. It is rooted in an understanding of artmaking as something we are all capable of, and that’s best as a collective experience. Cici activated this idea to foster a space for individuals to create in unison, where works became parts of a whole.
Across the Diaspora cloth is used to hold stories. Within her textile practice, Cici uses techniques from her parents’ and grandparents’ motherlands: Haiti, Congo, Nigeria, and Black America. Because most of these places are out of reach and these traditions passed down orally, Osais have spent many years learning and researching these methods. I owe my craft to the archives and people who were willing to share this knowledge with me, and see it as my duty to continue passing along all that I have learned.
Through natural dyeing workshops in local community gardens focused on conversation and connection, neighbors learned new ways of communicating creatively and were able to contribute textiles to a selection of Cici’s culminating works that will live in the gardens where they were born.

Zarita Zevallos, Canarsie
Zarita’s residency was centered on introducing participants to both new material and new ways of creating. She used the novel Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain as a conceptual foundation while also introducing participants to beginner-friendly cameras and film photography as an accessible creative medium.
Using the immediate environment of Canarsie, Zevallos’ workshops explored themes of Haitian identity, community labor, displacement, and the importance of reconnecting with one’s roots by drawing parallels between the experiences in Masters of the Dew and contemporary Haitian realities.
What revealed itself were deeply personal and intergenerational ties to philosophical, timeless, and keenly relevant experiences that remain in play today. Creatively building alongside the work of her workshop participants, Zevallos will capture some of the powerful spaces for remembrance, dialogue, and cultural preservation through her installation work arriving at the culminating expo.

Lakay Foutbòl | World Cup 2026 | Haiti vs. Morocco
2026-06-24 16:00 - 22:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
HCX is HQ to watch Haiti’s national team Les Grenadiers bring us to World Cup victory!

Hosted in collaboration with Maison Demar, this series of watch parties will feature summer evening kick-backs with cold drinks, great vibes, exclusive product releases by Haitian fashion designers and lifestyle brands.
Grenadye Alaso!

Wednesday, June 24: Haiti vs. Morocco
Doors open at 4pm | Kick off at 6pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217

RSVP on Eventbrite & grab exclusive add-ons while availability lasts! »

Join Us for More Watch Parties
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Saturday, June 13: Haiti vs. Scotland
Doors open at 7pm | Kick off at 9pm
Location: HCX, 35 Lafayette Ave Brooklyn, NY 11217
Friday, June 19: Haiti vs. Brazil
Hosted in collaboration with Rooftop Films & Council Member Chi Ossé
Event start TBA | Kick off at 9pm | NO RSVP NEEDED
Location: Von King Park, 670 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216

Records & Rhum Day Party with Patrice Espérant
2026-06-27 14:00 - 19:00 | Prospect Park Boat House, 101 East Dr., Brooklyn, New York, 11225
Join Patrice Espérant for an old school day party with vinyl sessions featuring Haitian vintage sounds and rhum. Ayiti cheri, vinyl is alive!
Haitian & French Caribbean Classics
70s · 80s · 90s
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RSVP is required for entry!
Additional admission will be available at the door until capacity is reached.
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Saturday, June 27, 2026
2–7pm
RSVP on Eventbrite while availability lasts! »

Mizik Ayiti! at Brooklyn Botanic Garden with Gashford Guillaume & Creole Fusion Ensemble
2026-07-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 990 Washington Avenue, Brookyln, NY, United States
Join Haiti Cultural Exchange at Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Thursday, July 9, 2026 for Mizik Ayiti! featuring Gashford Guillaume & Creole Fusion Ensemble.
Thursday, July 9, 2026
7–8pm
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Plant Family Collection
990 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225
Gashford Guillaume & Creole Fusion Ensemble blend Haitian culture with jazz, soul, R&B, and world music vibes live at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This is a night truly not to be missed!
Gashford Guillaume is a Brooklyn-based Haitian American drummer and bandleader living in a legacy of music. Leading his Creole Fusion Ensemble, Gashford brings together a dynamic group of musicians fusing Haitian grooves with jazz and soul. The evening features vocalist Marla Roy, a Haitian American artist known for her powerful, heartfelt voice alongside special guest musicians.

Presented in collaboration with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Free with Garden admission.
Click here to purchase tickets for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden »

An n Pale with Paul Beaubrun | VERTIÈRES Album Listening Party
2026-08-01 18:00 - 21:00 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
Join us for the first listening party of the album release tour! Hosted by Haiti Cultural Exchange & Rhum Barbancourt. Paul Beaubrun brings his highly anticipated album VERTIÈRES to HCX for the first listening party of the album release tour!
Paul will treat us to an acoustic set of select songs from his newest album VERTIÈRES, share a special screening of the album’s trailer and join HCX Executive Director Régine M. Roumain in conversation about his work and latest project.
Savor the night with hors d’oeuvres and specialty cocktails provided by Rhum Barbancourt. Paul Beaubrun’s latest album VERTIÈRES is a transformational album and cultural movement inspired by Haiti’s revolutionary victory. Rooted in the Battle of Vertières–Haiti’s historic battle on November 18, 1803 against France, leading to Haiti’s independence–it brings together ancestral memory, spiritual awakening, and modern music to open a new chapter for Haitian art.
VERTIÈRES is a deeply personal journey from heartbreak to spiritual sovereignty. Through facing an inner war, the artist discovers self-mastery, discipline, and personal power. This is not a story about defeating others, but about taking full responsibility for one’s life, choices, and existence.
By merging the personal and the collective, VERTIÈRES reflects a central truth of Haitian history: true revolution begins within. VERTIÈRES goes beyond an album, it serves as a cultural platform grounded in legacy, presenting Haiti’s new sound to the world.
Sponsored by Rhum Barbancourt

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Saturday, August 1, 2026
6–9pm
RSVP is required for entry.
$20 Suggested Donation
Entry based on capacity. Additional admission will be available at the door until capacity is reached. Your donation supports the mission of Haiti Cultural Exchange, the home for Haitian arts & culture in New York City.
RSVP on Eventbrite »
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About Paul Beaubrun

Paul Beaubrun is a Haitian musician and songwriter known for his fusion of traditional Haitian music with elements of rock, blues, afrobeat, and reggae. Raised in Port-au-Prince and the son of the Grammy-nominated band Boukman Eksperyans, music has shaped his life from an early age. After moving to New York City as a youth, he expanded his musical influences while remaining deeply rooted in his Haitian heritage.
A gifted guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, and vocalist, Paul blends Haitian Creole, French, and English into a distinctive sound that explores identity, resilience, and culture. His work has earned recognition both in Haiti and internationally.
Paul has collaborated and performed with artists including Ms. Lauryn Hill, Maxwell, Michael Brun, Arcade Fire, Jackson Browne, Sheryl Crow, and Bob Weir. He has appeared at renowned venues and festivals including Radio City Music Hall, The Beacon Theatre, Massey Hall, The Ryman Theatre, the Montreal Jazz Festival, Coachella, Festival International Nuits d’Afrique, Le Trianon in Paris, Paleo Festival, and Afropunk.
His career highlights include receiving the UNESCO-Aschberg Artist in Residency Scholarship, topping the iTunes World Music chart with Vilnerab, earning a Dora Award nomination for Espwa/Espoir, performing at the United Nations, receiving the Coup de Coeur award for his music video “Naissance,” being featured on the cover of The Haitian Times, and being named one of the Haitian Roundtable’s “100 Most Influential People in the Haitian Community.” He also contributed to Let The Rhythm Lead: Haiti Song Summit Vol. 1 alongside Jackson Browne, Habib Koité, Jenny Lewis, Raúl Rodríguez, Jonathan Russell, Jonathan Wilson, and members of Lakou Mizik.
Beyond his music, Paul is an advocate for social and environmental causes, partnering with organizations including the Lambi Fund of Haiti, Haiti Cultural Exchange, 350.org, Playing for Change, and Music Heals International. His work reflects a commitment to using music as a platform for cultural pride, resilience, and positive change.
Since 2022, Paul has been a touring member of Arcade Fire, joining the band’s WE tour and appearing on Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and stages around the world.
Website »
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Main feature photos by Jean Oscar | Photo of Paul Beaubrun in bio by Vladim Vilain

ON VIEW | Vizyon Atistik | Rasin San Bout | Roots Without End
2026-09-19 - 2026-10-18 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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

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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
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Sat. Sep 19 | 6-9pm
Opening Reception and An n Pale with Artist and Gage Averill
RSVP Here »
Sun. Oct 18 | 6-9pm
Closing Reception
RSVP Here »
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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 | Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11217, United States
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
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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.
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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.

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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
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