
This project offers an opportunity to consider the connections and departures between the work of two artists of Haitian descent, M. Florine Démosthène and Didier William. Both artists often represent the complexity of personhood through multiple forms—a reference to the divine twins of Haitian Vodou, Marassa Jumeaux, as well as a reflection of the myriad experiences that inform the artists’ hybrid identities. Both also leverage ambiguity, often placing figures of undeterminable gender and race within imaginary geographies that suggest a liminal space between here and homeland. And both artists emphasize eyes, asserting the need to be seen while subverting the judgmental gaze too often cast upon immigrants and other marginalized people. Démosthène animates the eyes of her figures with glitter; William carves hundreds of eyes into the wooden panels that serve as the substrate for many of his paintings. In doing so, the subject’s and viewer’s eyes meet, and a connection is forged.
While each artist embraces the impact of their familial and cultural tethers to Haiti, these legacies manifest in their art in very different ways. Démosthène is particularly influenced by Haitian—and, by extension, West African—spiritual traditions and mythology, as can be seen in sculptures suggestive of shrines and deities and in the otherworldly aura of her collages. William’s work engages politics through personal history. Often using his coming of age in Miami with his family as new immigrants as a springboard, he dives into critical inquiries into nationhood and borders, familial memory and mythmaking, violence and tenderness. While immigrant experiences have been fixated upon and flattened in mainstream media throughout the history of the United States, the works presented in this exhibition ask us to attend to questions about who is granted the grace of a full humanity and how the stories we carry with us form the foundations of our communities, means of survival, and vitality.