An interview for Arts Brookfield about the commission “For Those Of Us Who Live At The Shoreline” and the Chaney series installation on display in NY from September-November 2020.
Interview | Released May 2017 | Documentary Film “We Carry It Within Us” by Helle Stenum
Belle was one of the main subjects featured in this 1hr long documentary entitled “We Carry It Within Us-fragments of a shared colonial past” directed by Helle Stenum. The documentary investigates collective memory and different perspectives on the shared colonial past between Denmark and their former colony, the US Virgin Islands. This is a 3 min clip from the film.
Artist Talk for for solo exhibition project “For Victor and Alberta, a collection of conjurings and curiosities” at Ariel Feminisms, December 1, 2021
A talk on her exhibit La Vaughn Belle: A History of Unruly Returns, in which investigates the legacy of colonialism in the Virgin Islands. The talk explores her artistic process and how the images become a visual metaphor for the diverse origins and identities of Caribbean people today.
Interview | 2016 | La Vaughn Belle at her studio in St. Croix
This 3 part mini-series for Danish National Television entitled “Kald Mig Brun/ Call Me Brown” explores the identities of people of color in Denmark and the legacies of colonialism. Belle makes an appearance in episode 1 at 27.49 in St. Croix in her studio with the host Anna Neye.
Artist Talk | May 11, 2017 | La Vaughn Belle at National Historic Site
In this 20 minute artist talk Belle presents the background for her painting series "Chaney: we live in the fragments" and the collaborative exhibition she produced with Gitte Westergaard on colonial era pottery in Virgin Islands at the Christiansted Fort.
Interview | May 7, 2018 | Experimental Film
Call and Response in an experimental film that uses the sound archive of an interview done by a teenage student at the St. Croix Educational Complex on May 7, 2018 for a joint project with the drama and art class. The artist later added images from her archives to to create a multilayered self portrait.
Interview | December 2016 (published May 16, 2018) | Gekko Mediaprodukktioner
This 10 minute documentary was commissioned by the Danish Ministry of Culture to educate school children about the colonial history and relationship with the Virgin Islands by doing documentary profiles of Virgin Islanders today. La Vaughn Belle was one of the four people selected for this series.
Interview | March 8, 2018 | David Christian on "It's Your Perspective" talk show
In this hour long interview Belle discusses her background and studies in Cuba, projects such as "Se Permuta", "The House That Freedom Built" and "I Am Queen Mary".
Panel Discussion | February 9, 2019 | “Archiving Colonialism” | Barnard Center for Research on Women
Featuring La Vaughn Belle, Justin Leroy, and Cameron Rowland. Moderated by Saidiya Hartman. This panel discussion - "But words live in the spirit of her face and that/ sound will no longer yield to imperial erase": Archiving Colonialism - was part of the 44th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, The Politics and Ethics of the Archive.
Panel Discussion | March 5, 2019 | Black Imaginaries, Scandinavian Diasporas | Barnard Center for Research on Women
Featuring Jeannette Ehlers, Ellen Nyman, and La Vaughn Belle, Moderated by Monica L. Miller ,Jeannette Ehlers (Denmark/Trinidad), Ellen Nyman (Sweden), and La Vaughn Belle (St. Croix) discuss how their art practices across different media are designed to provoke conversation about colonial legacies and contemporary racial politics on the ground in Sweden, Denmark, and St. Croix.
Panel Discussion | September 26, 2019 | Engaging the Danish Colonial Archive | Barnard College
A conversation featuring La Vaughn Belle, Helle Stenum, and Tiphanie Yanique. Moderated by Tami Navarro. The year 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the sale and transfer of the islands now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States.
Panel Discussion | October 17, 2019 | Black Portraitures Conference | New York University
Where you gon go burn? is a rallying cry that almost every Virgin Islander learns perhaps even before they learn to read. These words from a popular folk song about Queen Mary and the 1878 labor revolt known as the Fireburn, harken the Afro-Caribbean tradition of queendom bestowed upon women who were fierce leaders. The refrain is a cry of defiance that forms a significant part of Virgin Islands’ collective memory and identity and has manifested in various forms that stand in sharp contrast to the Danish colonial archives. Although the Danes boast some of the most expansive archival records of the transatlantic slave trade, their removal of them in 1917 when they sold the Danish West Indies to the United States meant that the newly named US Virgin Islands would be a community that would have to form collective memory without their records. This panel presents different perspectives- on a painting, a monument, a performance and reenactments- as examples of the alternative archival systems and ways of remembering that have developed in the Virgin Islands. Unlike the colonial archives, these alternative memory systems center the agency and subjectivity of Virgin Islanders in their still ongoing quest for self-determination. In addition to the four founding members of VISCO (the Virgin Islands Studies Collective) the panel will be moderated by Dr. Cynthia Oliver, also a Virgin Islander and author of “Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean”.
Hadiya Sewer, Brown University, Visiting Scholar, philosopher/Africana studies
La Vaughn Belle, Barnard College, Columbia University, Artist & Fellow at the Social Justice Institute for the Barnard Center for Research on Women
Tami Navarro, Barnard College, anthropologist
Tiphanie Yanique, Emory University, Professor, poet and novelist
Panel Discussion | February 11, 2019 | “African Diasporic Countervisualities” | Barnard Center for Research on Women
Discussion featuring La Vaughn Belle, Dixa Ramírez, and Vanessa K. Valdés. Moderated by Tina Campt. This panel challenges the overproduction of certain images of Caribbean men, women, and children that have allowed for dominant, often nationalist, narratives from the region. Instead, each speaker reveals how the subjects of the archives from which they draw exhibit their own agency in confronting those chronicles. Speaking about the Danish West Indies / the US Virgin Islands (La Vaughn Belle), the Dominican Republic (Dixa Ramírez), and the Puerto Rican community in New York (Vanessa K. Valdés), the panel highlights inconvenient histories previously ignored, erased, silenced, ghosted.
Artist Talk | December 8, 2017 | La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers at Prizm Art Fair
As a part of the panel series at Prizm Art Fair 2017 LaVaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers present their project "I Am Queen Mary", a collaborative public art project that creates a monument in the city of Copenhagen that challenges the narratives around the Danish colonial history. In this hour long presentation they discuss the impetus behind the projects, the themes and challenges and engage with the audience in a question and answer dialogue.
In this conversation La Vaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer and Tiphanie Yanique, who together form the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO), discuss their ongoing engagements with the archives of Danish colonialism in the US Virgin Islands (USVI), formerly the Danish West Indies. The conversation takes departure from the collectively written essay “Ancestral Queendom, Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI”, published in a special issue of the Nordic Journal for Information Science and Cultural Mediation, co-edited by Daniela Agostinho, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Karen Louise Grova Søilen.