After the 1991 military coup, thousands of Haitians fled the country. Edouard Duval- Carrié had recently moved to Miami, where he observed this mass migration. Stories of Haitians drowning in the Caribbean evoked memories of the transatlantic slave trade. The artist wondered, What did the Haitian people bring with them? The answer was clear: the spirits known as the lwas. Adapted and reconfigured from various parts of Africa, the lwas are central to Haitian vodou, a religious practice, a cosmology and a system of thought deeply embedded in the cultural, social and political history of Haiti and central to the Haitian revolutions (1791-1804).
Thus emerged a series of deities in bronze and oil on canvas. We stand before this pantheon – before the Bawon Samdi, who reminds us of death and rebirth; before Ezili, who is dressed in her finest, surrounded by US Marines – and understand that the artist has not only illuminated history but intervened in a historic moment. Duval-Carrié’s work makes clear that the spirits/gods/lwas are always amongst the Haitian people. His work imagines a rich panoply of lwas that create the counter-symbolic imaginative order of Haiti.
—Anthony Bogues
