Roudy Azor  (b. 1980, Port-au-Prince, Haiti)

Roudy is a master of the densely beaded style of drapo Vodou, or Vodou flag, pioneered by Myrlande Constant (b. 1968).  Constant had worked at a factory in Port-au-Prince which employed the fine skills (and low wages) of Haitian workers to make ornate beaded wedding dresses for the French market.  They used an ornate French beading technique known as tambour to create dazzling surfaces of beads and sequins.  Myrlande was fired from the factory in about 1990, not long before the plants themselves closed due to the harsh economic and political conditions of embargo-era Haiti.  But Constant soon realized that she could put the skills she had learned to good work in the creation of a new kind of drapo Vodou or Vodou flag.  She began to produce ornate, densely beaded and sequined flags for the Vodou temples and predominately for the growing market for flags as artworks.  She transformed not only the technique but the form of the drapo, with asymmetrical compositions, multiple characters, and complex narratives.  What had traditionally been sacred vévé diagrams and symmetrical religious icons on fabric became, in her hands, paintings rendered in beads and sequin.  Several other artists, primarily women who had worked at one of the wedding dress factories, joined her at her studio or formed their own studios.  One of the first men to work in this technique was a young Roudy Azor.  Roudy worked in Myrlande’s studio for a time before forming his own studio at the age of eighteen, in 1998.   Like Myrlande, Roudy works primarily with the symbolism and pantheon of Vodou. But Roudy has shown a talent for taking the Vodou canon in new directions, with a vivid imagination and a free interpretation of relatively obscure Vodou lwa or deities.

Pierrot Barra (1942-99)  was a Haitian Vodou artist and priest, who was president of a  Bizango  society. He was well-known for his use of diverse materials to create “Vodou Things,” which functioned as charms or altars for the Vodou religion. With his wife Marie Cassaise, Barra worked from the Iron Market of Port-au-Prince, where he made Vodou repositories from toys, fabric, glass, sequins, goats horns, rosaries, costume jewelry, compact mirrors, Christmas ornaments, crucifixes, and other discarded materials. His dolls were bought by locals to protect themselves.  He often used discarded American toys and dolls as the basis of his works, embellishing them with "charms, glitter, sequins, beads, and crosses that were originally intended for altars. 

His works have been featured in shows in Port-au-Prince, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and Madrid. The book Vodou Things: The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise by Donald J. Cosentino, is devoted to Barra’s work). Pierrot Barra sold his work, which he called “Vodou Things,” from a stall in the Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Many of Barra’s pieces can be considered gads, very personal items imbued with spiritual power to benefit its owner, or reposwa, items that contains a Haitian Vodou spirit, known as a lwa or a djab (devil), instead of altars or altar pieces.  Like other Haitian Vodou art, Barra’s work is filled with shiny cloth, sequins, symbols associated with the different Haitian spirits or lwa, and imagery from Catholicism. This is because West African slaves brought to Haiti incorporated Catholicism into their belief system in order to gain understanding and power over their French white masters, creating what is now known as Haitian Vodou. Sequins and shimmery elements are used because they attract the Vodou lwa, in some cases for preparation for a Vodou ritual or possession (known as “riding”).

The main guiding lwa of Barra’s life and art, his met tet, are St. Jacques Majeur, Ezili Danto, Ogou Badagri, and Agwe. In his dreams, sometimes these lwa commanded him to make work and other times he used the dreams for inspiration for pieces.  Sometimes, the lwa would first appear to him as creatures with a hundred heads, but as he communicated more with them, he claimed they began to look like average people. In these dreams, Barra would also see the customer who would buy the piece; he claimed each piece was for a specific person. Barra’s works rely heavily on accumulation, a technique heavily used in Haitian Vodou art as well as in Africa. The changing nature of the lwa are why they love so many different kinds of materials and why so many different materials are used for sculptures, altars, and other reverent pieces. Some of his works contain pwen, or points of spiritual power allowing the spirit world to seep into the world of flesh. The most iconic part of Barra’s works are the plastic dolls, which some scholars believe is his greatest contribution to Haitian art and sculpture.  These dolls are not like the “voodoo” dolls of New Orleans, nor are they stuck with pins; rather they function as messengers to the spirits, represent humans or lwa, or serve in place of humans for punishment or channeling magic. He claimed the materials for his pieces were always brought to him by people through the lwa as described to him in a dream.

Public collections:

Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, California

Waterloo Center for the Arts, Waterloo, Iowa

Nottingham Contemporary Art Centre, Nottingham, England

 Principal exhibitions

1996 - Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, California, and various subsequent venues.

2012 - In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art, Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, California

2012 - Kafou: Haiti, Art & Vodou, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, England

2014 - Haiti: Two Centuries of Art and Creativity, Grand Palais, Paris, France

 (Above biography adapted from entry in Wikipedia)

Gabriel Bien-Aimé (b. 1951) in the village of Croix des Bouquets, now known as the “cradle of 20th century Haitian metal sculpture”.  Croix des Bouquets nurtured such great Haitian sculptors as the late Georges Liautaud and Murat Brierre, the brothers Louisjuste, and Serge Jolimeau.  Bien-Aimé worked as an auto mechanic for several years before apprenticing to sculptor Janvier Louis-Juste. Working on his own, he has become one of Haiti’s two leading sculptors.  Bien-Aimé’s work has been exhibited internationally, notably in the groundbreaking 1989 show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris,  Magiciens de la Terre.  It is currently featured in the show “The Enduring Spirit of Haitian Metal Sculpture” at the SFO Museum in San Francisco.  

His works are in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Waterloo Museum, the Figge Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Le Centre d’Art, and the Musée d’Art Haïtien du Collège Saint-Pierre.
His work is published in Where Art is Joy (Rodman, 1988), Forgerons du Vodou/ Voodoo Blacksmiths (Foubert, 1990), Magiciens de la Terre and A Haitian Celebration: Art and Culture(Stebich, 1992).

Gabriel Bien-Aimé (b. 1951)

Fishing, c.1989

Recycled steel oil-drum

26” x 25” x 7.5”

Ex. Collection of Rudi Stern

$1100

Myrlande Charles Constant (b. 1968), 

Myriande is a Haitian textile artist born on 18 June 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Jeanne Constant and Jean Alfred Sanon. Constant was raised by her mother, a seamstress who worked in a factory that made wedding dresses and beaded appliqué. From a young age, Constant helped her mother with small beaded piecework that she would bring home from work. When she was 14, she began working in the same factory with her mother. She quit this job six years later, shortly before the factory closed, over a wage dispute with management. Constant married Wilfred Charles. Together, they had five children.

After Constant left her job at the factory, an artist friend encouraged her to try painting as a vocation. She was inspired to try “painting with bead,” as she describes her textile work. Constant began sketching Catholic saints on canvas and then beading the images. These images of saints are commonly recognized to also represent lwa (spirits) of the Afro-Haitian religion Vodou. For example, the first work that Constant sold was a portrait of Saint Patrick, who is recognized in Vodou as the spirit of snakes and ancestral wisdom.

Like many Haitians, Constant’s mother was pluralistic in her faith, identifying as Catholic while also serving the lwa. While Constant developed familiarity with Vodou as she grew up, when she began her career as an artist, she sought moreformal instruction from her father, a well-known ougan (Vodou priest) in the region of Léogâne. Her father’s instruction is reflected in her detailed depictions of rites, regalia, and myths associated with different lwa.  
 
Constant’s use of beads and the intricately rendered content of her works are innovations to the existing tradition of drapo Vodou (Vodou flags). Vodou flags stem from a longer history of martial banners in the Atlantic world. Formally, many traditional flags resemble Napoleonic standards used in colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) (Polk, 1997). Vodou temples commonly have a pair of flags that are used in important ceremonies to greet the lwa. Typically the most extravagant part of a temple’s regalia, flags may be embellished with sequins and embroidery. Since the mid-twentieth century, a handful of workshops in Port-au-Prince have also made flags as commodities for foreign tourist and art markets.

Read Constant’s Full Bio

Carlos Garcia Huergo (Havana, Cuba, b.1969) 

Carlos is a Summa Cum Laude graduate in Mathematics. In 1990, his mother suddenly died while he was in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) for under graduate studies. During his stay abroad he began to present severe behavior dysfunctions mixed up with aggressive actions toward his school colleagues. His aggressive behavior became really dangerous causing his return to Cuba using a straitjacket and sedated. Once in Cuba, he was admitted in a psychiatric hospital and underwent to treatment with psychoactive drugs and electroshock sessions. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. From that moment on, he has lived in a state of permanent alienation and he had been confined in psychiatric institutions several times. He has paranoid and distrusted attitudes, remaining in constant state of alert while facing the external world. Sometimes he presents aggressive behavior to well-known people and also unknown ones. Time after his diseases debuted, “Carlito” began drawing. He likes to use a palette of pastel colors on pieces of recycled cardboards boxes, old covers of vinyl disks, pieces of wooden tables and worn out pages of newspapers and magazines. In his drawings, he harmonizes the reality of the mathematics with personal imageries. He recreates a hybrid world of fellows who are always in his conscience; like angels or devils who swarm in his mind speaking to him. The human figure, frequently placed in foreground, it has the highest place in his representations. He also employs his own numeric alphabet, algorithms and words games as parables about his life, creating drawings from his abstract thoughts.  Garcia Huergo’s’s work was featured in a Spring, 2023 article in Raw Vision magazine, and  is included in the abcd/ART BRUT collection of Bruno Decharme, among other prestigious collections.  (Above biographical information courtesy of Studio Riera, Havana and others)

Kamante Gatura (1912-1985) was a Kenyan national of the Kikuyu tribe.  As a young boy his family exchanged work for wages and the right to live on the undeveloped farmland of Karen Blixen, better known by her pen name Isak Dinesen the author of  the memoir Out of Africa.  This true tale of Karen Blixen’s life on an African coffee plantation, tells how Kamante entered Karen Blixen’s life as a young boy when he was crippled by a severely infected leg.  She arranged medical treatment and Kamante eventually became her cook and close friend.  He also became a self-taught artist who captured life in Africa with crayon and colored pencils.  He drew upon the prey and predator relationships of the animals around him, along with the fables he heard at the Karen Coffee Farm School, to create a most unique body of work.  Along with Dinesen and the photographer Peter Beard he wrote a book called Longing For Darkness: Kamante’s Tales from Out of Africa which contains stories of his life with Dinesen as well as folk tales of his people.  A collection of African animal-themed drawings by Kamante Gatura was acquired by Kohler Foundation in 2009.

Guyodo (Frantz Jacques)  (b. 1973, Port-au-Prince, Haiti)

The artist known as Guyodo was born as Frantz Jacques, on December 7th, 1973 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.   Guyodo is one of the key figures in the ad hoc community of visionary recycler- artists who call themselves Atis Rezistans (literally the artists of the resistance).  They live in a warren of alleys and shanties off of the Grand Rue, the once grand shopping street of Port-au-Prince, known officially as the Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines.   Most of the buildings along the street were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.  Possessing varying amounts of formal education, they are self-taught (or have learned from each other) as artists.  The community they created is also a kind of school for the children of the neighborhood.  The older artists have gathered about them two loosely organized groups of young artists, the Timoun Rezistans and the Timoun Klere, which Guyodo himself leads.  Since 2009 their community has hosted an international art event, called the Ghetto Biennial.

The sculptures that Guyodo creates are as ad hoc as the community itself – assembled from scraps of plastic and wood and wire and electronic circuit-boards and steel car parts and even human skulls and bones.  His two dimensional works are likewise celebrations of found materials – paintings on scrap plywood, plastic roofing and corrugated cardboard, and ballpoint pen drawings on the backs of calendars and cornflake boxes.  Guyodo and his fellow artists have received considerable recognition over the last few years, with extensive press coverage, films and participation in major international exhibitions. 

Guyodo exhibited his work for the first time at the Sent Kiltirel Afrika Amerika in Port-au-Prince in 1989.  In 2006 Guyodo and three others were chosen by the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to create the Freedom Sculpture, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.  Guyodo’s work has been included in many gallery and museum shows, including at the Frost Museum in Florida (2004), the “Vodou Riche” exhibit at Columbia College in Chicago (2007), the first ever Haitian exhibit at the Venice Biennial (2011), “In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art” at the Fowler Museum at UCLA (2012 – 2014),  as well as the “Haiti:  Deux Siècles de Creation Artistique” at the Grand Palais in Paris.  In September 2018 Guyodo was one of the featured artists in  “POTOPRENS:  The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince” , a group exhibit of 25 artists at the Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY.  The exhibit continued to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2019.

Serge Jolimeau (b. 1952, Noailles, Haiti)

Serge Jolimeau was born 1952 in the village of Noailles, in Croix des Bouquets. Croix-des-Bouquets is home to such great Haitian sculptors as the late Georges Liautaud and Murat Brierre, the brothers Louisjuste, and Gabriel Bien-Aimé. Jolimeau worked for two years as apprentice to Seresier Louis-Juste after he finished high school. Today he is one of Haiti’s two (along with Bien-Aimé) leading metal sculptors. Jolimeau’s work has been exhibited internationally and is published in Where Art is Joy (Rodman, 1988), Forgerons duVodou/ Voodoo Blacksmiths (Foubert, 1990), and A Haitian Celebration: Art and Culture (Stebich, 1992).

In 2009, Serge Jolimeau created a commemorative work for the Clinton Global Citizen Awards. His works have been exhibited in Switzerland, Mexico, Germany, the United States and France, in such places as the Abbaye de Daoulas, the Halle Saint-Pierre, the Grand Palais and the Musée du Montparnasse. His work is part of the permanent collections at the Lowe Museum, the Waterloo Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Davenport Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Le Centre d’Art, the Musée d’Art Haïtien du Collège Saint-Pierre and the Musée de Panthéon National Haïtien.   His work is currently featured in the show “The Enduring Spirit of Haitian Metal Sculpture” at the SFO Museum in San Francisco.

Pushpa Kumari (b. 1969 in Ranti, Bihar, India)
Lives and works in Ranti and Delhi, India
Pushpa Kumari is one of India’s foremost contemporary traditional artists and divides her time between Delhi and her ancestral village of Ranti. Her artistic roots are deep within the Mithila/Madhubani folk art tradition, and she learned this art as a young child from her grandmother, the renowned artist Mahasundari Devi. Mithila or Madhubani art is one of India’s most popular folk art genres from the Indian state of Bihar. Kumari incorporates in her art the stylistic devices and signature elements of Madhubani art. She imbues her works with strong personal statements and compelling pre-occupations. They are often concerned with  women’s issues and the immense ecological challenges facing humankind in the twenty-first century. Kumari both strengthens and subverts the tradition, using it as a medium for her message which can be both overt and subtle, lending a beguiling charm to her intricate black and white and colorful drawings. (Above biographical text courtesy of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022). In addition to the 2022 Sydney Biennale, Kumari’s work has been featured in “Telling Tales”, a 2013 show at the National Museums, Liverpool (UK),  The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2015-2016), and the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Kumari was recently selected as a Global Creator by the Kohler Artist Editions.

Note from artist on this work: Dowry, the practice of giving cash, gold, property, and vehicles as well as household goods by the bride’s family to the groom has become a major social issue in India. Though the intention of paying a dowry is to ensure a good life for the bride, the dowry system has resulted in violence against women. Often the groom and his family are not satisfied with the dowry given and continue to make demands for more money and assets after the wedding.  In this powerful work, Pushpa Kumari has depicted the violence the women are subjected to by their spouse and in-laws - physical and verbal abuse, confinement, harassment and sometimes death. The spirit of the woman wishes to be free and rise above these horrors inflicted upon her.

Lamarre (Port-au-Prince, Haiti)

Biographical information on Lamarre is not available at this writing.  Lamarre works in the densely beaded style of drapo Vodou, or Vodou flag, pioneered by Myrlande Constant (b. 1968), and practiced by such masters as Roudy Azor, Mireille Delice and Evelyn Alcide.  Constant had worked at a factory in Port-au-Prince which employed the fine skills (and low wages) of Haitian workers to make ornate beaded wedding dresses for the French market.  They used an ornate French beading technique known as tambour to create dazzling surfaces of beads and sequins.  Myrlande was fired from the factory in about 1990, not long before the plants themselves closed due to the harsh economic and political conditions of embargo-era Haiti.  But Constant soon realized that she could put the skills she had learned to good work in the creation of a new kind of drapo Vodou or Vodou flag.  She began to produce ornate, densely beaded and sequined flags for the Vodou temples and predominately for the growing market for flags as artworks.  She transformed not only the technique but the form of the drapo, with asymmetrical compositions, multiple characters, and complex narratives.  What had traditionally been sacred vévé diagrams and symmetrical religious icons on fabric became, in her hands, paintings rendered in beads and sequin.  Several other artists, primarily women who had worked at one of the wedding dress factories, joined her at her studio or formed their own studios.

Shantaram Chintya Tumbada (b. 1975, Thane district, Maharashtra, India)

Shantaram Tumbada is an artist of the Warli , a minority tribe from the Thane district of Maharashtra.  Though the Warli people live only about 150 kilometers from Mumbai they have maintained a distinct culture and speak a language,which has no written form. Warli art is famous for its mural paintings of supernatural beings and scenes of everyday life. The works are traditionally painted entirely in white by applying a mix of rice dough, water and gum resin, which acts as a binder, on the terra cotta walls of huts. A bamboo stick is used as a ″brush″⁣ to trace motifs, based above all on the figures of circles, triangles or squares.  

In the last forty years Warli artists, notably the late Jivya Soma  Mashe, have translated this art form onto canvas, painting with white acrylic paint on a ground of clay mixed with cow dung.  Shantaram Tumbada was a young and little-known Warli  artist in 1995 when he was chosen to paint  a huge mural at the Tony Garnier museum in Lyon, France.  He has since become one of the leading Warli artists.  His work is featured in the book Indian Contemporary Art by curator and scholar Hervé Perdriolle.

Damian Valdes Dilla (b. Cuba, 1970)

Born in Havana in 1970, Damian was afflicted with crisis of paranoia and hallucinations during adolescence.  He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and he began treatments with different psychoactive drugs. He was admitted on two occasions in the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana due to the worsening of his paranoia crises and the developing of violent instincts. After time and the use of different treatments it was possible to significantly improve the aggressive aspects of his behavior, as well as to make him partly conscious of his illness. 

Since childhood Damian was interested in drawing. He used to draw comics in his school notebooks. When he was in his forties and observing wooden pieces, it came to his mind to assemble his first building model. He started making up structures of factories and machines that later on, he intuitively put together to create models of future cities.  Since then, Damian has been devoted exclusively and in an obsessive way to represent the cities that are built inside his mind. In times when wood was scarce, he began to build cities assembling all kinds of wasted objects that he gathered from the streets. In addition, he created all types of vehicles like cars, buses, airplanes, space ships, motorcycles, helicopters, ships, etc.  Later, when the waste objects began to run out he decided to put all his imagination on the paper and he began to produce drawings and notebooks filled with images of his own cities. His drawings show us eclectic cities. He uses the perspective in a unique way. Sometimes, the human presence becomes evident in some of his drawings of city scenes while in others it is completely absence. On occasion he shows us an atmosphere of calm and peace; but in other cases violence fills out all the paper with explicit popular riots and armed conflicts.

Damian’s work was featured in the article “Riera Studio:  Independent Art Space in Havana, Cuba” in Raw Vision, Autumn/Fall 2017.   Since 2013 Valdes Dilla’s work has been included in numerous exhibits, in galleries and museums in Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Lehigh University (PA), Paris, and Amsterdam, as well as at the Studio Riera in Havana.  Damian’s work is included in the abcd/ART BRUT collection of Bruno Decharme, among other prestigious collections.