Photo credit: Stephanie Chalana Brown
Artist BIO
La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Through exploring the material culture of coloniality Belle creates narratives from fragments and silences. Working in a variety of disciplines her practice includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) with large solo exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (SC) and the National Nordic Museum (WA). Her art is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark and the National Gallery of Art and the Virgina Fine Art Museum in the U.S. She is the co-creator of I Am Queen Mary, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC and Le Monde. Her work has also been written about in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Small Axe and numerous journals and books.
Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from Columbia University in NY. She was a finalist for the She Built NYC project to develop a monument to memorialize the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and for the Inequality in Bronze project in Philadelphia to redesign one of the first monuments to an enslaved woman at the Stenton historic house museum. As a 2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women at Columbia University she researched the citizenless Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO). Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.
Artist STATEMENT
My work is about unbecoming a colonial being and the power of story in that process. I was born in the dual island nation of Trinidad in Tobago with all my political rights intact. I would soon lose them when my parents migrated to the U.S. Virgin Islands when I was 5 months old and I became something between a subject and a citizen. I belong to this place that has changed colonial hands seven times—the longest being Denmark and the last being the United States. My work deals with this history, that is both personal and global, and tells new stories that validate freedom and self-determination. In my practice I examine archives, architecture and other aspects of material culture from the colonial period. I look for the narratives inscribed in various objects and places. I find ways to add to them and subvert them by layering other narratives including my own. I also look to elements in the natural world like the land or sea and powerful forces like the hurricane or the black hole for strategies to create new geographies. I move fluidly between painting, sculpture, video, public intervention and writing. In this way I am sometimes making myths, other times maps, counter monuments and archives. What is constant are my desires to piece together the fragments, to move beyond colonial nostalgia and to make visible the unremembered.