La Vaughn Belle

Title: Effluvia

Year: 2023

Medium: 4K Video, 5:02 min LINK TO VIEW

Effluvia was commissioned by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on the occasion of Belle’s solo exhibition in 2023. Shot in the marshes and swamps of South Carolina Belle traverses former rice plantations, sites of slave rebellions to explore what histories ooze from the earth and water.

Title: Por El Viento y La Curriente

Year: 2022-2023

Medium: public sculpture, public intervention

Medium: video, 4:31 (password: Loiza)

Por el Viento y La Corriente (Becoming Wind and Current) is a site specific project developed by La Vaughn Belle (b. Tobago, 1974. Lives in Christiansted, St. Croix. USVI) in Loíza as the result of research linking a history of maritime marronage of the hundreds of enslaved Africans who fled the island of St. Croix by creating dugout canoes or hijacking ships in their search for freedom. The title stems from the words of the governor of the then Danish West Indies in the early 1800's commenting on the northern trade winds and the ocean current that assisted those escaping to Puerto Rico by sea. Among the results of the project are this installation created with floating coconuts whose shape takes inspiration from descriptions of the physical tribal markings bore by fugitives who escaped bondage included in advertisements seeking their return as property. These markings, scars that reflected a cultural identity and heritage, are a lasting reminder of the uncrushable spirit of these freedom-seeking people. The coconuts, as the raw material for the sculpture, evoke the equally maritime migration of this plant, which originates in the Indian subcontinent, and was introduced to the Caribbean by Europeans in the 16th century, as well as its culinary, artisanal, and spiritual aspects. This sculpture is installed amongst mangroves, a natural sanctuary that was historically used as a maroon route. The piece is conceived as an offering to this history and those men and women.

Another aspect of the project consists of a video art piece that serves as a poetic investigation on the history of marronage and its implications today. Commissioned by MAC en el Barrio, a program of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, in collaboration with COPI (Coorporación Piñones se Integra, Inc.).

Title: strange gods before thee

Year: 2020

Medium: Video, 5 min (password:ritual)

In this 5 min 2-channel video Belle explores a set of magical, religious, and healing practices known as obeah which existed among enslaved labourers across the Caribbean, and came to be seen as an expression of defiance of Danish colonial rule. The work takes its title from the first commandment of the decalogue which states that ‘one shall have no strange gods before me’, a decree that set the framework for the punishment of witchcraft practices in Denmark and its colonies. Interweaving images of the baobab tree in Saint Croix, where women were said to have been burned alive for their participation in the 1878 Fireburn uprising against contractual servitude, Belle cultivates a commemorative network of lesser-told narratives of resistance. strange gods before thee traces the spectral landscape of Saint Croix to illuminate the continual haunting of colonial infrastructure on the island. Language from court texts indicating how obeah practices transgressed the social order interplay with the artist re-enacting related rituals at various sites. The work underscores how these rituals and the resulting embodied knowledge has been used as a transformative tool to counteract the violence that was central to the colonial project.

Credits:

Video: Kevin Moolenar & La Vaughn Belle

Sound: La Vaughn Belle, Leonardo Benzant, Ochin Diaz Belle

Exhibited: Charlottenburg Kunsthal, Copenhagen

Title: In The Place of Shadows

Year: 2022

Medium: Video, 7:20 min (password:shadows)

In the place of shadows was a created as a site-specific video in the project space Ariel-Feminisms in the Aesthetics in Copenhagen. It aims to create an intimate space of care for the memories of Alberta Viola Roberts and Victor Cornelius, two children who were taken from the Danish West Indies in 1905 at the behest of Emma Gad, founder of the Women’s Building where Ariel Feminisms is located. The children were displayed in a colonial exhibition at Tivoli, organized by Emma Gad, and never returned to the Caribbean. Instead, they were placed in orphanages, with Alberta dying of tuberculosis at age 16 and Victor living out his life in Denmark. Historical reports indicate that these children were looked at everyday by thousands of visitors during the colonial exhibition.

Shot in St. Croix Belle speaks directly to the children in an epistolary style narration and uses critical fabulation to imagine Alberta and Victor’s childhood memories in the Danish West Indies while connecting them with her own. The video weaves these transatlantic narratives with archival material across time and space, reframing them in Belle’s body.

Title: Between the Dusk and Dawn (how to navigate an unsettled empire)

Medium: video, 7:21

Year: 2023

This work was developed in response to the curatorial proposal that asked this critical question: Is the sun rising or setting on the experiment of American democracy? Belle’s response pulls not only from the historical context the theme of exhibition is based upon, but also connects it to the imperial conditions of today.

Upon the signing of the U.S. Constitution one of the oldest members of the convention, Benjamin Franklin, commented on the chair that George Washinton famously sat on. At its top was a carving of a sun with rays that Franklin said he had wondered if was a rising or setting sun. After the signing of the constitution Franklin felt that indeed it represented a rising sun and the hope for America.

Belle positions herself between two locations, Point Udall in St. Croix and Point Udall in Guam, spaces that represent the eastern and westernmost point of the American empire. Filming the sunrise in St. Croix and the sunset in Guam, Belle anchors herself between the two to reflect on notions of democracy, citizenship and mythmaking from the position as someone from the U.S. colonies. As her body moves between the two locations they become indistinguishable from one another, suggesting that the answer to the question of whether the sun is rising or setting on American democracy will always rest on a colonized land.

Exhibited: African American Museum of Philadelphia

Storm (How to Imagine The Tropicalia as Monumental) explores the turbulent histories that have shaped the Caribbean and the resilience required by its inhabitants to live there. Belle’s studio was damaged during Hurricane Maria and instead of throwing away the paper that was salvaged she chose to incorporate them as an archive to the storm.

Storm (How to Imagine The Tropicalia as Monumental) pieces together the torn fragments and explores the aesthetic possibilities of land, sea and storm. It is an attempt to formulate new geographies and new conceptions of space and self. Belle also incorporates cuts and burns into the paper, a gesture that has been a part of her vocabulary since 2016. Belle works to memorialize the dual states of violence and repair that are endemic to the Caribbean.

Title: Chaney (we live in the fragments)

Year: 2014-present

Medium: Painting

Materials: oil paintings on hardboard

Statement: Chaney is colloquialism, a hybrid word combining "china" and "money". It describes shards found in the dirt on many properties and locations throughout the Virgin Islands that often resurface after a hard rainfall. Originally from pieces of colonial fine china imported both in display of and as a result of the wealth of the plantation economy,  "chaney" serves as a reminder of both the colonial past and the fragmented present of Caribbean societies. These shards tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures reimagine themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative.

Exhibited: Christiansted National Historic Site, Peachcan Gallery

Title: Chaney Series (a topography of reconstruction)

Year: 2020

Medium: Installation of eight paintings of oil on wood

Statement: This work is inspired by the 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, calling them chaney - a hybrid of China and money. This would be their currency, something fashioned from their own labor and imagination. Belle’s Chaney series explores the process of reconstructing the fragments- charting the loss and the imaginary required for repair. As she takes the petal of one flower and appends it to the stem of another truncated bloom, connects and expands geometric motifs, she creates a topography that mirrors the process of identity formation of those who are the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.

Dimensions: 8 panels of 40” (h) x 32 “ (w) x 1.3/8” (d), total width 256”

Exhibited: Brookfield Place, NYC

Photo credit: Jakob Dahlin, courtesy of Brookfield Place New York

Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers and Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle teamed up to create a monumental public sculpture entitled I AM QUEEN MARY that was revealed on Saturday, March 31, 2018 at the Danish West Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen. This project is the first collaborative sculpture to memorialize Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it. 

Timed to be unveiled at the end of the centennial year commemorating the 100th anniversary of Denmark’s sale of the Virgin Islands to the United States in March 1917, this project challenges Denmark’s role in slavery and the commemoration of its colonial past. It aims to change the narrative around this history and demonstrates how artists can be leaders in this conversation. 

For more information see project website here: www.iamqueenmary.com

FOR THOSE OF US WHO LIVE AT THE SHORELINE

Title: For Those Of Us Who Live At the Shoreline

Year: 2020-present

Medium: Digital Collage

Statement: Taking the first line of Audre Lorde’s poem, “A litany for survival”, this work explores the relationship between the body, landscape, history and memory. The topography is constructed by blending plant species that grow specifically at the coastline and function to both hold in and feed the soil. Species such as sea purslane, sea grape, manchineel and mangroves are the keepers of boundary, constructing a kind of living archive as the roots systems hold in the erosion of memory and time. They also protect, filter and some even poison as they are a part of dynamic marginal ecosystems. For those of us who live at the shoreline, at the liminal spaces between subject and citizen, our survival is based on the crucial decisions of what we remain rooted in and what we know must wash away.

The work was first commissioned for a public intervention at Brookfield Place in NY. The series was expanded in 2023 for a solo exhibition at the Halsey Insitute of Contemporary Art in South Carolina.

Exhibited: Commission at Brookfield Place New York, Prism Art Fair, Baja El Sol Gallery, Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art

Title: Collectible

Year: 2008

Medium: Drawing

Materials: nine drawing on paper plates, printed log with the descriptions of the plates as found in the historical archives

Statement: Collectible is a series of drawings on paper plates that reproduce a series of collectible plates produced by the Royal Copenhagen luxury china brand in the early 1900's. These plates all reference the Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) and allude to the nature of the colonial relationship.

Exhibited: Overgarden Institute of Art, Maufe Gallery

Title: Chaney

Year: 2017

Medium: Porcelain plates produced by the Royal Copenhagen

Materials: 12 porcelain plates

Statement: Chaney is colloquialism, a hybrid word combining "china" and "money". It describes shards found in the dirt on many properties and locations throughout the Virgin Islands that often resurface after a hard rainfall. Originally from pieces of colonial fine china imported both in display of and as a result of the wealth of the plantation economy,  "chaney" serves as a reminder of both the colonial past and the fragmented present of Caribbean societies. These shards tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures reimagine themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative. This series was produced in collaboration with the Royal Copenhagen (formerly the Royal Porcelain Factory), a luxury brand of porcelain products with an over 200 year history. 

Exhibited: Christiansborg Palace

How To Survive Colonial Nostalgia was commissioned as part of the digital humanities project Mapping a Colony in collaboration with ETHOSLab at ITU and Uncertain Archives at the University of Copenhagen.

It examines how the digitization of the archives brings into focus the ontology of the colonial project. As the materiality of photographs and objects become transmuted questions around being and the metaphysical realm connect to the lived experience of being a colonial subject. The piece reflects on the omnipresence of the colonial gaze in dealing with the archives and explores ways to confront and transform its power. Through a combination of textual interrogations and digital manipulations the piece aims to interrupt the hegemony of colonial nostalgia.

The piece can be viewed here:

https://blogit.itu.dk/mappingacolonyen/how-to-survive-colonial-nostalgia/

Title: On The Service To The Kingdom

Year: 2017

Medium: Painting/Installation

Materials: Acrylic painting on 45 paper plates

Statement: "On The Service To A Kingdom" is based on an investigation of the dessert service series of plates commissioned by King Frederik 6 of Denmark to represent his expansive Kingdom. This extravagant gesture was made to show off his wealth. There is only one plate, #75, of the 81 that depicts the colonies in the Caribbean from which much of this wealth was gained. The series also references the sugar industry as the taste for sugar was in high demand in Europe at the time and would have represented also the most expensive part of the meal. The image depicted however is a fictitious one, a copy of a copy. The artists commissioned in 1834 to do the series never visited the Danish West Indies, but instead create a composite of other paintings while adding in the Caribbean signifiers of the coconut trees, the sugar mill and the aloe plant. The piece explores the ideas of colonial image-making and consumption and the resulting processes of fragmentation of identity.

Exhibited: GL Holtegaard

Title: Cuts and Burns

Year: 2016-present

Medium: Drawing/ Installation

Materials: cuts and burns on paper and vellum

Statement: The "Cuts and Burns" series developed from an interest in the historic fretwork designs in Frederiksted whose proliferation is a direct result of the town being largely burnt down after the 1878 Labor Revolt (or Fireburn) and then being rebuilt during the Victorian era when these designs were popular. This work seeks to to develop a vocabulary that models the language of resistance during this colonial era. Two of the most common forms of rebellious activity were cutting, using the same machete you were forced to labor with as a weapon; and burning, burning down the plantations and other structures. The work also references the ritualistic aspect of resistance as well as the psychological expression of trauma.

Cuts and Burns (ledgers series001) 36”x108”

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery, Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, Meterspace

Swarm is a series that utilizes images from the Danish colonial archives of the Danish West Indies and transforms them by making hundreds or cuts and burns into the printed photographs. The amorphous interventions into the photographic image penetrate time and space while transforming the colonial hierarchies of the constructed image.

Title: Swarm series

Year: 2020-present

Medium: Drawing/installation

Materials: cuts and burn in archival printed paper

Dimensions: 24”x36”

Title: Wall Rubbings (record of the work of others)

Year: 2017

Medium: Drawing/ Installation

Materials: wax rubbings on aquaba paper

The foundations of many of the buildings in the former Danish West Indies are made from the coral cut from the ocean by the enslaved Africans. Normally these foundations are plastered and covered, allowing for their labor to be invisible.

Exhibited: meter, Copenhagen

Title: Constructed Manumissions

Year: 2017

Medium: Installation

Materials: handmade wooden houses

Dimensions: 23” (h) x 15” (w) x 23” (d)

"Constructed Manumissions" draws inspiration from the ornate building embellishments that became popular in Frederiksted during its reconstruction following the 1878 labor revolt known as “Fireburn.” The design also reflects the homes of the working-class Free Colored community of Christiansted, historically known by a name that included a now-offensive racial term. This community of formerly enslaved Africans navigated their freedoms in various ways during the colonial era—domestic space was one of them.

The houses are built without frames or glue, held together only by small metal pins and their own weight. This construction method allows them to be taken apart and reassembled, mirroring the mobility that was often essential for survival.

Exhibited:

meter, Copenhagen

Title: “Errata”

Year: 2017

Medium: Installation of two texts: the book “Stedet Fortæller om Dansk Vestindien” and email correspondence between the author and the artist

This work is a form of counter-archive based on juxtaposing two texts: the book “Stedet Fortæller om Dansk Vestindien” by Ulla Lunn in which includes a description of the artist and her work renovating buildings in the town of Christiansted and the email correspondence that occurs between the artist and the author upon the discovery that there is an error in the book.

Exhibited: meter, Copenhagen

Title: Hideaway

Year: 2008

Medium: book

Materials: 10-page handmade book of cut-outs

Statement: This project was inspired by the cut-outs made by the famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Similar to the Danish narrative and collective memory about their colonial history, the book presents “Hideaway” as a fairytale, part fiction- part reality. The book's images and text are taken from the real-estate websites and magazines popular in the Virgin Islands that "sell" the islands as a fairy tale, an adventure, an escape, a hideaway.

Exhibited: Salt Gallery, St. Croix, Overgarden, Denmark, El Museo del Barrio, NY

Title: "Upward Mobility", "Learning To Be", "Preacher Man Belle, Obeah Man Brown", "St. Croix Pickney"

Year: 2016

Medium: Photography

Materials: Photographic Print

Statement: These photomontages are a series that explores images from the Danish archives of the Danish West Indies and juxtaposes them with images from the personal archives and albums of the artist. They included images of the artist as an infant in the Virgin Islands and young child in Wisconsin while her father went to seminary school. There is an image of her mother carrying her youngest brother and an image of her father who was a Moravian and later an Anglican priest. The narratives embedded in the images become collapsed, converted, contested and re-imagined in the simple gesture of juxtaposition and/or adding captions to the images. Most of the captions are directly quoted from the archives and original sources.

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery

Title: Somebody's Been Sitting In My Chair, Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed

Year: 2011

Medium: Performance, Video

Materials: Video

Statement: This video is a reenactment of the fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in a plantation “Great House”. As the artist moves within the space there is a similar questioning of trespassing in a “forbidden” space.

Exhibited: Whim Plantation Museum, St. Croix, Medulla Gallery, Trinidad and Tobago

Title: Planter’s Chair

Year: 2011

Medium: Performance

Dimensions:

Materials: planter’s chair, participants, polaroid camera

Statement: The planter’s chair is a unique piece of furniture whose design is based on the function and power of the planter in the colonial plantation system. The long arms of the chair double as both an arm and foot rest as it was typical that a servant would assist in the removal of the planter’s boots as he propped up his feet. Individuals were asked to pose for a Polaroid photograph while sitting in the planter’s chair allowing each participant to reimagine themselves into this colonial narrative.

Exhibited: Whim Plantation Museum

Title: Trading Post (articulated hierarchies and visible displacements)
Year: 2015
Medium: Sculpture
Dimensions: 36"x18"x18"
Materials: Reclaimed coral stone cut by enslaved Africans, encased in plexiglass
Statement: During the construction of the Danish colony on St. Croix enslaved Africans were sent into the ocean to cut coral to be used in the foundations for the buildings to be constructed. Much of these foundations are plastered and invisible except in buildings that are in ruin. Reclaiming the stones from ruins and abandoned structures Trading Post mediates the space, object and history, showcasing the labor of the often forgotten enslaved population and laboring class and inverting the hierarchy of the visible narrative. 
Exhibited: artist studio
 

Title: Fatalism, Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything

Year: 2016

Medium: Photographic Montage

Materials: Photographic Print

Statement: “Fatalism and Fairy Tales and the Predictable Magic of Everything” is a photo-montage that uses two images: one, of a story written by the artist’s brother as a young child and saved by their mother; and two, of the same brother as a teenager captured in the middle of the act of dunking a basketball.  The work questions which of these images in the fairy-tale, the act of the boy attempting to fly, or the story of the boy with the fatalistic future, surprisingly imagined by a young boy himself. The piece re-creates a tension between the hope and hopeless often experienced in the growing up of black boyhood.

Exhibited: Top Hat Gallery

Title: A Countess, a Negress, a Dog and a Baby

Year: 2011

Medium: Installation

Materials: two paintings: Danish Countess and Neky with Baby

Statement: Two juxtaposed portraits painted from roughly the same era, one located at Whim Plantation Museum depicting a Danish countess holding her puppy, the other a replica, originally from the Danish National Museum of Cultural History, depicting a Danish West Indian woman holding a Danish infant. The work both inverts and exposes the hierarchy in the Danish colonial system, interrogating the tropes of wealth and privilege.

Exhibited: Whim Plantation Museum

Title: The First and The Last

Year: 2011

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: This video is comprised of images from the castle of the Danish king who began the colonies in the Caribbean and the final resting place of the last Danish governor of the colonies under enslavement. The work contrasts the quiet beauty of these spaces with text that interrogates its in the style of a folktale its equally violent history.

Exhibited: Salt Gallery, St. Croix

Title: La Pelota Roja

Year: 2002

Medium: Performance

Materials: tape recording of collective and anonymous story

Statement: This piece is a version of “the exquisite corpse” in which a story is collected by asking random people in Havana to participate in the construction of this story. Each person was asked to listen to the piece and then add to it. The piece explores how metaphor and multi-layered narratives operate as tools of survival and resistance in a society that has limited freedom of expression.

Exhibited: Center of Visual Arts, Havana, Cuba

Title: Storm (and other violent interruptions of the pintoresco)

Year: 2016

Medium: Drawing

Materials: charcoal drawings on paper

Statement: This series of charcoal drawings on paper puts in direct contrast the sublime palm tree images with those of the chaos of the storm creating a tension between fragility and resistance.

Exhibited: Yacht Haven Grande

Title: Branding

Year: 2006

Medium: Installation

Materials: reprinted labels on various household products

Statement: This artist exchanges the images used on various products to sell their brand and replaces it with her image.

Exhibited: Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St. Croix

This proposal reinterprets Shirley Chisholm’s famous quote, ‘If they don’t give you a seat at the table bring a folding chair’ and positions it into a larger framework of mobility. This monument invites visitors to not only think about Chisholm’s personal journey from childhood to elderhood, but also the movement of a people and a nation. For what her historic run for the presidency challenges most is our imaginary of what is possible. Wearing a turban and an eagle pin, she steps boldly into a re-envisioned version of the presidential seal. She challenges us to think about how this petite black woman with a Bajan accent marking her immigrant roots, could represent the promise of the United States both literally and symbolically and how her trail -to use her campaign slogan- could ‘bring U.S. together’.”

Title: Los Diaros de Porcelana

Year: 2002

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: Translated into english as “The Porcelain Diaries, this video examines the narratives inherent in the figurines that often populate Caribbean homes. Filmed in Havana among five houses, the video creates spontaneous narratives using stop-motion animation.

Exhibited: Centro de Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Walsh Metal Works, St. Croix, Alice Yard, Trinidad, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC

Title: Coronation

Year: 2011

Medium: Sculpture/ Installation

Materials: hand carved forks, knives and spoons

Statement: “Coronation” takes the image of a Danish coin made in honor of the three islands that consisted of the Danish West Indies and uses  the mythology that developed around the coin to create a series of cutlery that emulates those of great wealth. The three women on the coin had been re-interpreted to represent the three “Queens of the Fireburn”, a major mostly female led labor revolt in 1878.

Exhibited: Walsh Metal Works, Whim Plantation Museum, St. Croix

Title: La Telenovela

Year: 2004

Medium: Video

Materials: video

Statement: Telenovela, “soap opera”, is a piece that combines the audio of the popular government sponsored Cuban melodrama with eight different homes as the members and neighbors are watching simultaneously. Creating a mirroring effect the audience also becomes a part of the “melodrama”.

Exhibited: Centro de Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Walsh Metal Works, St. Croix, Rush Arts Gallery, NY

Title: Home Theater

Year: 2005

Medium: video

Materials: 10 tv monitors with 10 dvd players and pedestals of various heights

Statement: Home Theater is a video installation of ten homes filmed from such angles that when when put together feel like a singular space. `the piece comments on the virtual reality and the domestic space.

Exhibited: Centro de Wilfredo Lam, Cuba

Title: Moving Pictures

Year: 2009

Medium: video

Materials: video

Statement: This project is an investigation on the Hollywood films that have been filmed in the Virgin Islands which typically use the islands as a backdrop, ignoring the people and culture. Audio and visuals from movies such as "Weekend at Bernies II", “Shawshank Redemption”, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and "Trading Places" are deconstructed and then reconstructed to create new narratives.

Exhibited: Caribbean Museum Center of the Arts, St. Croix