Join us for an evening of conversation and celebration surrounding the culmination of work from the LakouNOU 2024 Artists-In-Residence over the past year.
Expo Showcase
Thursday, May 1, 2025
6-9pm
The 2024 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 personal and collective history, identity, and creative empowerment in Brooklyn’s Haitian community. Through oral history, creative cultural mapping, multimedia and visual art installations, Lakou NOU artists-in-residence Tania Balan-Gaubert, Zamí Germain, Watson Mere, and Stephanie Pierre welcome us into a dynamic experience highlighting the power of storytelling, documentation, and cultural narrative.
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. The Lakou NOU Culminating Expo will include visual art installations, audio soundscapes, participatory workshops, spoken word and musical performances, and an interactive map.
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, April 27 – Sunday, May 4, 2025
Gallery Hours
Thursday – Sunday, 1-6pm;Wednesday by appointment.
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This program is made possible in part by the Jerome Foundation.
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EXHIBITOR DECRIPTIONS
Tania Balan-Gaubert, Canarsie
STR.DST.MRKT. (pronounced Stardust Market) is an innovative mobile creative platform inspired by the vibrancy of the Haitian marketplace and the dynamic spirit of Tap Tap vehicles. Combining elements of a hands-on studio, gallery, and concept shop, this project reimagines public spaces as hubs for creativity, cultural exchange, and community engagement.
This conceptual art project envisioned a community-based experimental mobile market where art is a shared, lived experience that strengthens community bonds, sparks dialogue, and reflects the transformative power of creativity in Canarsie. As a collaborative, maker-driven initiative, STR.DST.MRKT. invited local artists, artisans, and community members through an open call to co-create a hybrid space where art, commerce, and social dialogue intersect. By transforming a mobile structure—such as a retrofitted dollar van or box truck—into a traveling cultural market, STR.DST.MRKT. activated the southeastern Brooklyn neighborhood/lakou of Canarsie, cultivating innovation, and celebrating the diverse voices of its collaborators and partnerships.
This nomadic marketplace showcased artwork and crafts, an exhibition, and hosted pop-up workshops that amplified the talents and stories of Rasin Okan, Natou Ma’at, Christopher Leveille, and Tania Balan-Gaubert. Rooted in the principles of accessibility, equity, and cultural resilience, STR.DST.MRKT. aligns with broader movements for social and economic empowerment, offering a tangible model for creative engagement that transcends traditional gallery walls.
Laurie Zamí Germain, Crown Heights
LAKOU SEKRÈ // SAKRE is an altar to the queer Haitian experience in Crown Heights. The participatory, oral history installation is inspired by el secreto abierto, or the open secret ~ a phrase coined by Rosmand King to articulate the ways that queerness is the Caribbean moves as something seen but unsaid, resulting in a mandate of discretion around what is perceived as culturally transgressive approaches to love and sexuality.
The installation’s hollow, circular shape mimics the experience of the open secret, while the materials it is made of are informed by oral history interviews had throughout Laurie’s residency project, exploring themes of visibility/invisibility, religion/spirituality, home/belonging. The strung cowrie shells are interpretations of the rosaries Nat invited into the conversation while reflecting the rituals that grounded them in their Haitian church as a child. The religious reference also pays homage to Marla’s background as a former Jehovah’s Witness and evolving spiritual practice. The use of cowrie shells, an ancient symbol of wealth and contemporary reference to African Traditional Religions, such as Haitian Vodou, evokes the spirit of Ginen that Akesh carries with them. In this way, the installation is an altar, not only to the Lakou Nou La narrators, but to the role of religion and spirituality as a portal for queerness in Haitian cultural fabric, and a reference to the indigeneity of gender and sexual creativity seen within Haitian traditional religion. The photos strung between the rosaries become material markers of memory, creating a semi-transparent boundary between the inside and outside of the circle in order to invert the open secrets mandate of discretion by allowing those standing inside it to be seen within a queer experience. The conch shells suspended in the center invite pairs to step in and listen with curiosity to the stories of Nat, Marla, and Akesh in reflection of their own experiences as queer Haitians in our Lakou.
LAKOU SEKRÈ // SAKRE makes undeniable what hides in plain sight in terms of the queer diasporic Haitian experience: the laughter, the love, the invisibility, the tension, the tenderness, the care, the things that our Lakou’s house but often refuse to home. The installation denies that refusal through an embodied encounter with the open secret, and the invitation to step into its embrace and listen to the life worlds alive within.
Watson Mere, Flatbush
Yon Nouvo Rèv is comprised of three interconnected pieces spanning the mediums of visual arts, video, and performance art, all rooted in his residency’s focal theme: Haitian spirituality and its relationship to the modern-day Haitian, particularly those living in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
“Potomitan” is an 8-foot by 7-foot painting inspired by the central pillar of Haitian Vodou temples that go by the same name, which serves as a conduit for the Loa to enter the physical world. Throughout his residency, Watson explored the potomitan’s significance as a spiritual gateway and the painting symbolizes the magnitude and gravity of these portals.
Mere’s video piece features interviews with three Haitian women and three Haitian men from Flatbush and Brooklyn, offering diverse perspectives on their relationships with Haitian spirituality, particularly Vodou. These conversations provide an intimate look at how Haitian spirituality permeates identity, whether openly embraced or quietly embedded in the subconscious.
Lastly, his performance art piece, Modern Ancient Entity, is a four-minute dialogue in which the protagonist grapples with his Christian upbringing and the persistent presence of the Loa, who reveal themselves in his dreams and daily life. This internal struggle reflects the complex interplay between ancestral spirituality and colonial religious influence, a duality many Haitians continue to navigate today.
Together, these works of art illuminate the ever-evolving presence of Haitian spirituality in contemporary life and finding creative voice while seeking this connection.
Stephanie Pierre, East Flatbush
Roots to Routes is a digital map that follows the story of Haitian social action movements that have taken place in East Flatbush, identifying the physical locations related to those movements as well as the organizations that were involved with those movements as well.
Tracing key moments in history and subsequent watershed social action movements of the Brooklyn Haitian community, Roots and Routes creatively highlights cultural context and historical information, navigating archival materials and accounts from following five moments in Haitian history: The Fall of “Baby Doc” in 1986, March on Brooklyn Bridge in April 1990, The Military Coup of Jean Betrand Aristide in 1991, Police violence against Haitian Immigrants (Abner Louima/Patrick Dorismond), and The 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti in January 2010.
Three of these stories were activated to draw local attention to the publicly accessible digital resource map, physical photographs, ephemera, and microfilm of select moments were placed on the facade and in the windows of places in East Flatbush that serve as sites of information exchange – Bonbonbon and the Brooklyn Public Library – Clarendon Branch.
Elements from those public installation sites highlighting the community story on the assault of Abner Louima in August 1997, the murder of Patrick Dorismond in March 2000, and the AIDS policy protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge in April 1990 are exhibited here.
Collaged microfilm periodicals from well known Haitian publications of the time, Haiti Progres and Haiti Observateur, alongside noteworthy New York based publications The New York Times and The New York Daily News will set the foundation of this installation. The layered disorder of these archival materials represents the disorienting journey of collecting this information through the lens of the first generation Haitian American, seeking and locating a mosaic of information, connections, and materials to build a mere snapshot of community history.
Map illustrations recontextualize the boundaries of the East Flatbush neighborhood by marking locations connected to researched historical moments (identified by conch shells) and local institutions and sites of interest that give East Flatbush its textured character.
Key snippets from event specific media, ephemera, and a very Haitian American playlist embody the blending of Haitian and Brooklyn culture formed during that time offer context before leading to a space of remembrance for the 15th year anniversary of the Earthquake in Haiti, the 25th anniversary of Patrick Dorismond’s murder and the 25th anniversary of the March on Brooklyn Bridge.