In this collection
Bought from the benefit auction at the 21st Annual David C. Driskell Prize Gala at the High Museum of Art, on 19 September 2026, the night the prize was given to the art historian Cheryl Finley.
A woman sits alone on a red rug in a room built from two temperatures, teal behind her and terracotta beside her, with a lamp burning overhead. The title, as far as the wall label survived in the photograph, ends to Return to.
The work
He grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, the son of Haitian immigrants, surrounded by Haitian art and music. He has no formal training. He spent ten years on abstract and experimental work, and came to the figure late.
The paintings deal with gentrification and the way a neighbourhood changes under you, with migration and family history, and with the emotional weight of solitude. Figures sit in domestic rooms, held still.
Depicts the complex narratives of human experience within quotidian scenes of Black America.
His gallery describes the method as photographing people and then painting away from the photograph, until what remains “deviates from naturalism and evokes the abstractionism of ancient Africa and the vibrant color palettes of Haiti.”
Who he paints toward
He engages with Beauford Delaney, Horace Pippin and Ed Clark, and with contemporaries including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Henry Taylor.
Delaney is worth pausing on. He died in Paris in 1979, largely destitute, and his archive only reached an institution decades later. An artist naming him as a forebear in 2026 is naming a gap as much as an influence.
Dior, 2025
Selected as one of ten artists worldwide, and one of only two Americans, for the tenth anniversary of Dior’s Lady Art project. He designed three handbags titled The Pearl of the Antilles, after Haiti’s old nickname, worked in raffia with pearl charms drawn from Haitian craft.
Selected exhibitions
- 2024Solitude, Mariane Ibrahim, Paris
- 202350 lbs., Mariane Ibrahim, Chicago
- 2022Group exhibition, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town
- 2021Where Do We Go From Here?, Gallery 1957, Accra · Art X Lagos
- 2020Collective Reflections, Gallery 1957, Accra
- 2016Deconstruction, BAF Gallery, Brooklyn
Shown by Gallery 1957 in Accra, then by Mariane Ibrahim, who announced global representation in April 2023. He is not on that gallery's roster as of September 2026 and now appears on the roster of Jenkins Johnson Gallery. Work held by the High Museum in Atlanta, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the Dean Collection in New York, LACMA and the Hirshhorn, per his gallery biography.
The label
