SOLO EXHIBITIONS (selected)
La Vaughn Belle: A History of Unruly Returns | National Nordic Museum, Seattle, USA I January 13-July 21, 2024
In fall 2020, the National Nordic Museum opened the first solo exhibition of La Vaughn Belle’s work in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately the exhibition was closed for most of its duration due to the coronavirus pandemic. The exhibition, titled La Vaughn Belle: A History of Unruly Returns, was reimagined and represented in an expanded form in the Museum’s Barbro Osher and Fjord Hall Alcove Galleries.
In the mid-17th century, Denmark established a colonial presence in the Caribbean and participated in the transatlantic slave trade until the early 19th century.
Though Denmark was the first European country to abolish the transport of enslaved Africans in 1792, approximately 120,000 people from present-day Ghana were brought to the Danish West Indies (now the United States Virgin Islands) to plant and harvest sugar cane. The emancipation of slaves on the Danish West Indies occurred in 1848, and the Virgin Islands’ former plantation economy collapsed. In 1917, Saint Croix, Saint John, and Saint Thomas were sold to the United States and introduced into yet another national narrative. This exhibition brings to light whole truths of this historical episode through the fragments of material culture it left behind.
This exhibition is organized by Leslie Anne Anderson, Chief Curator, National Nordic Museum. Photo credit: Jim Bennett/Photo Bakery for the National Nordic Museum
La Vaughn Belle: Being Of Myth Of Memory | Caribbean Museum Center of the Arts | St. Croix, Virgin Islands, December 2, 2023-January 13, 2024
Living requires us to remember. But how does one live, thrive, dream about futures when so much of one’s memories have been erased; when remembering requires our bodies to relive the violence and shame of the past, making forgetting a form of protection? How do we live fully when the landscape we encounter daily holds histories of our subjection? And how might we craft postcolonial futures in this landscape, the same arena as our abjection?
In the wake of catastrophic histories, La Vaughn Belle’s generative practice is activated by a belief that myth and memory are not only foundational to collective identity but are necessary for life. While memories tend to be tethered to an event that has been directly experienced, myths are negotiated, may have multiple versions and are capable of reinvention. They are open and continual discourses that are alive.
Belle’s art takes form amidst memory and myth being as lieu de mémoire. In recent years her multimodal conceptual art practice has been concerned with creating myths, maps, monuments, and memories through aesthetic forms that work to draw the past into the present while gesturing towards futures we can imagine and inhabit. The work that comprises this exhibition is grounded in this ethos and in process, asserts a similar claim to life. The videos, sculptures, digital collages, and paper collage paintings, all draw on decolonial practices of refashioning, reimagining, and rebuilding in process and content. They invite audiences to imagine a world where the weight of history is lighter and one can step into a liberated future, unbound. Curated by Erica Moiah James, PhD.
Photo credit: J Price courtesy of the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts
La Vaughn Belle: When The Land Meets The Body | Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, USA I August 25-December 9, 2023
In this exhibition, La Vaughn Belle seeks to explore the relationship of history, land, and the bodies between them. When the Land Meets the Body presents a selection of existing work and new commissioned works inspired by the Lowcountry landscape. Through this process, Belle will consider the idea that who we are individually and collectively is a product of historical processes that are often represented in the landscape. Over the last decade, Belle’s work has been centered in decolonial art practices that challenge the narratives in colonial archives. With this project, she weaved biography and history to create interventions in historical sites and considered how landscapes and ecosystems are manipulated by those who live within them.
La Vaughn Belle: A History of Unruly Returns | National Nordic Museum, Seattle,USA I October 8, 2020-April 11, 2021
This exhibition featured six large-scale paintings from her series “Chaney (We Live in the Fragments)” (2015-present). “Chaney” refers to ceramic shards found in abundance in the soil of Saint Croix. Belle explains, “There are small fragments of pottery, often blue and white, that surface the soil in the Virgin Islands after a hard rain and glimmer. Coming first as plates, tea pots and cups from Holland, England, Denmark and North America as part of the vast transatlantic trade of the last centuries of the second millennia, they became its detritus, broken down into the soil, just like the traded bodies. The fragments return to the open air as offerings. Children would pick up these shards, claim them and grind them round to mimic coins.” The unearthing of this patterned pottery evokes the past and its legacy. Belle paints enlargements of different Chaney patterns and, when pieced together as a series, the images become a visual metaphor for the diverse origins and identities of Caribbean people today. Belle notes that “as daughters and sons of the dispersion, we are but many fragments – Danish, British, Yoruba, Akwamu, Kalinago, Taino – we are pieces of patterns and peoples that we may no longer recognize or acknowledge.” For more info see link.
La Vaughn Belle: Possessions | Peachcan Gallery, St. Croix | January 12-February 28, 2018
"Possession" is an exhibition by Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle featuring her "Chaney series" of oil paintings. Having changed colonial hands seven times, the longest being Denmark and the last being the United States, the Virgin Islands has a long history of being a possession. In this exhibition Belle conceives of a possession as both an object and a state of ownership and control and seeks to highlight the transformative force of reclamation. "Chaney" is a hybrid word "china" and "money", that describe the shards of colonial era pottery that are found in the ground in the former Danish West Indies. These shards serves as a reminder of our colonial past and fragmented Caribbean identities. The paintings suggest a symbolic gesture of restoration, a type of map that charts both the real and the imagined. Belle gathers and takes control of the fragments and recasts them as embodied wholes, making visual the process of taking control of one’s narrative and being one’s own possession.