A week-long exhibition featuring the culmination of work from the Lakou NOU 2025 Artists-In-Residence.

On View
Sunday, June 21 – Sunday, June 28, 2026

Kafou Gallery
1120 Washington Ave 2nd floor
Brooklyn, NY 11225

Gallery Hours
Thursday – Friday 6-9pm
Saturday 12-6pm
Sunday 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.