Haiti’s most famous expatriate artist, Edouard Duval Carrie, was born in 1954 and educated in Paris, France and Quebec, Canada.  His art has been widely exhibited internationally, with shows at the Museo de Arte Contemparaneo de Monterrey in Mexico and the Musee des Arts Africans et Oceanians in Paris, France among other venues.  He held two artist-in-residence positions in France in 1998 and 2000 and his works are in many museum collections.  

 

The art of Duval Carrie, now a resident of Miami, Florida, bespeaks his ineradicable connection to the island of his birth.  Knowledgeable about Vodou since childhood, he incorporates the religion’s theatrical sacred personages as players in his visual dramas of upheaval and transcendence.  Migration from Haiti, with consequences for leaving the country behind, is a persistent theme in his paintings.

 

Working  both as a painter and sculptor, Dual Carrie has an unblinking view of Haiti in its grappling with a legacy of slavery and as a French colony.  The artist is a visual storyteller who pictures Haiti’s brutality along with its beauty.  Despite imagery specific to a time and a place, he creates works with profound global resonance.  

 

Russell, Candice.  Masterpieces of Haitian Art.  Atglen:  Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.  2013