Artist Fabiola Jean-Louis explores her Haitian heritage for inspiration

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Now a look at art that reimagines history and identity through a deeply personal lens.

Artist Fabiola Jean-Louis has been researching and exploring her Haitian heritage, and her work is now on display in Boston.

Special correspondent Jared Bowen takes us there for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jared Bowen: With its funerary vessels, spiritual beings, and sounds of the sea, this gallery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum assumes the sacred air of a chapel.

Fabiola Jean-Louis, Artist: When we focus on spirits, when we turn our attention inward, we become everything we’re meant to be. We operate from a space of absolute wonder and beauty, and the world is a better place because of it.

Jared Bowen: Fabiola Jean-Louis is the artist behind these creations, her earthly forms that serve as portals to other realms. It’s work, she says, that makes her both an artist and an alchemist.

Fabiola Jean-Louis: I am transforming this interesting information from an external world and converting it into something that’s different, giving it meaning and hopefully putting it back into the world in a new way.

Jared Bowen: Waters of the Abyss at the Boston Museum is an exploration of Jean-Louis’ Haitian heritage and the island’s voodoo culture and legacy.

Fabiola Jean-Louis: Through my studies of Haitian history, it was very clear to me from the beginning that freedom isn’t just political and physical. It’s very deeply spiritual.

Jared Bowen: Her studies, she says, show that African-centered spiritualities, especially voodoo, may have played a role in the uprising that led to Haiti’s independence. There are tales of spiritual ancestors urging the island’s enslaved population to fight for its freedom against 18th century French colonial rule.

Do you feel ancestors?

Fabiola Jean-Louis: I feel them all the time. I feel them now. I feel them during the process of creating. In fact, they tell me — they guide me through the work, through the process. They exist in a spiritual world, period. They are our connection and bridge to the metaphysical world.

Jared Bowen: These galleries are populated with portals, objects, figures and images that connect worlds. They come with their own tools, like these mermaid figures embedded with mirrors.

Fabiola Jean-Louis: It also requests people to look inward, to look at yourself and go deeper. And then the other portal that does not have the mirror is to come out of self, into the world that way, hopefully a better version of yourself.

Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: She was a natural artist. She’s self-taught, which is amazing. And art was, I think, her salvation.

Jared Bowen: Pieranna Cavalchini is the Gardner Museum’s contemporary art curator. The artist being self-taught is even more extraordinary, she says, given that all of these objects, bearing the texture of ancient stone are actually made mostly with paper.

Pieranna Cavalchini: You can do it in your kitchen, basically, you know. I mean, you can cut up the paper and make the pulp, but you have to be a great artist to be able to do what she’s done with it.

Jared Bowen: Cavalchini says that, beyond the marvel of the material, paper, especially in this context of freedom, is profoundly symbolic.

Pieranna Cavalchini: Paper is at the basis of our identity. I think of public records. Think of birth certificates, and especially think about people who immigrate or who are refugees, how important these papers become to identity and who they are.

Jared Bowen: Jean-Louis’ inspiration is also derived from the museum itself. Its founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, traveled the globe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, amassing the renowned collection on view today. Piece by piece, painting by painting, every object here is just as Gardner left it upon her death a century ago.

You are an artist in residence here. How did it begin to inspire you?

Fabiola Jean-Louis: I mean, I don’t know how I couldn’t be inspired. This place is magical, every inch, every sculpture, the garden. There’s that floor that has the religious relics, which spoke to me, obviously, because of the way we honor our ancestors, so I have pretty much taken as much as I can to create Waters of the Abyss.

Jared Bowen: But Fabiola Jean-Louis has also left as much as she’s taken, her insights into the beyond, her call to understand history, and she has left herself, as we find in this self-portrait.

Pieranna Cavalchini: She has this concept of being a future ancestor, which is also very powerful, that eventually you too will be an ancestor, and you too will serve as a path to understanding and knowledge for those who follow you.

Jared Bowen: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Boston.