Image detail credit: Firelei Báez, Ode to La Siréne (and to muses beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), 2014, Gouache, acrylic, and ink on paper and canvas, 108” x 88” (274.3 x 223.5 cm), Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

Image credit: Bernard Sejourne (1947-1994) dated 1980. 36” x 32” Collection of Dion Kohler

September 30 – December 17, 2017

Presented by The Shelley and Donald Rubin Exhibition Series

Part of a campus-wide celebration of culture of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the exhibition Hispaniola is comprised of a large body of work on loan from the Haitian collection of Dion Kohler and a small selection of permanent collection Haitian works that were given to OUMA by the Melamed family.

The Kohler Collection is based primarily on first and second generation Haitian Masters who painted in the 60s, 70s and 80s, including Arijac, Prefete Duffaut, LaFortune Felix, Andre Normil and Seymour Bottex among others. Also on view will be a small selection of permanent collection Haitian works given to OUMA by the Melamed family, and a selection of loans from the Haitian collection of Andjela Kessler, OUMA advisory board member.

These primarily traditional Haitian works will be counterbalanced by a selection of contemporary pieces by emerging Dominican and Haitian/Dominican artists. Dominican American artist Pilar Martínez, who is based in Miami, received her MFA from SCAD, Atlanta in 2010. This emerging artist creates mixed media pieces that reflect, in her words, “the convergence of cultures and recollected experiences.”

Angela Bortone is a painter, video artist and art writer. She mixes other people’s voices into her paintings and videos. Born in the Dominican Republic, Bortone was raised in Brooklyn and spent nearly a decade abroad in Germany before moving to Atlanta in 2002. She earned a BFA in studio art with a concentration in drawing, painting and printmaking from Georgia State University in 2010.

Also on view will be the videos and photographs by Dominican artist Polibio Diaz, who is from Barahona, Dominican Republic.  Diaz is a mid-career multi-media artist who has stated, “My art is oriented first to my Dominican compatriots, so we recognize and accept ourselves as we are: the wonderful complex mixture of several civilizations with their shades of colour reflected in the complexity of our skin and culture.”

We will highlight the work of celebrated Haitian/Dominican American Firelei Báez, who is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris of San Francisco and based in New York.

“Her art explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies, which have an ability to live with cultural ambiguities and use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions.” – Biography of Firelei Báez by Gallery Wendi Norris