Postcard from Massachusetts: Kathia St. Hilaire at The Clark Art Institute

 Kathia St. Hilaire at work in her studio. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli

By NINA CHKAREULI-MDIVANI July 13, 2024

Kathia St.Hilaire’s nearly twenty new and recent works combine printmaking, painting, collage, and weaving creating a vast panoramic tapestry of postcolonial landscapes by Haitian-American artist in Kathia St.Hilaire: Invisible Empires. The exhibition is on view at Clark Art Institute through September 22, 2024, and will travel to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky from October 25, 2024, through February 9, 2025. The show is curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects at the Clark Art Institute, and Tyler Blackwell, curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum.

Lunder Center at Lone Hill at Williamstown is a short walk away from the main building of the museum. A walk to Lunder Center takes you through a forest trail that smells of summer grass and childhood. The galleries where Kathia St. Hilaire’s exhibition takes place are also surrounded by the new greenness of the Berkshires. To a degree, the green outside is translated onto the gallery walls. Yet, the main difference between the two types of landscapes is the uneasiness of history and the ensuing presence of imperialism woven into St.Hilaire’s elaborate tapestries. 
 

Detail of a tapestry by St.Hilaire
 

St.Hilaire, a second-generation immigrant who grew up in the Caribbean and African American neighborhoods of South Florida uses a diverse set of media and techniques to intereave these histories. The reduction linocut and photo transfer are used on canvas, paper with steel, oil-based inks, aluminum, enamel, tire skins, leaves, fabric metal, skin-lightening cream packaging and paper, banana leaves, canvas with tires, resin, rabbit skin glue, thread, canvas with banknotes, banana stickers, silkscreen, price tags, foam, and nails. These materials attest to the detritus of life and practice the artist has encountered in her hometown and her past. As Gabriel Garcia Marques wrote, what matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it. The question of historical memory and personal memory and how they intertwine is at the center of St.Hilaire’s phantasmagorical pictures. The aftermath of the French empire that dominated Haiti through extracting natural and human resources is conjured up here from banknotes, aluminum, and banana stickers. The Haitian-American artist uses her personal and family history as building blocks for the larger historical narratives. 
 

Kathia St. Hilaire, Mamita Yunai, 2023, Reduction linocut in oil-based ink on canvas with skin-lightening cream packaging, steel, aluminum, banknotes, price tags, banana stickers, silkscreen, and tires. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli. 71 × 66 in. (180.3 × 167.6 cm)

By doing so the artist processes the intergenerational trauma aptly recognized by theorist Marianne Hirsch as being transmitted through cultural/archival memory and communicated through symbolic representations. Using this approach is of interest to many artists of her and earlier generations.  St.Hilaire touches on the practices of Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019), but also Cecilia Vicuňa (1948), Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), and Eva Hesse (1936-1970). All these artists used their bodies as instruments to work through trauma inflicted by them either through patriarchal or imperial structures, which often meant the same thing. Some of these artists used fabrics, but all of them fought for a change in the status quo.

St.Hilaire’s Our Only Guide to Justice, 2021 is a reduction linocut on various media, consisting of an uneven rectangle dissected by twenty-five rhombuses. Judging by the title this work presents a call to action but is also contemplative by the composition. A figure is standing in the center signifying a freedom fighter or perhaps a leader of the resistance within the Haitian revolution, around him figures are lying on the horizontal surface of enameled grass composed of tire skins, leaves, and fabric. These figures are either deceased or sleeping, but the message of resistance and resilience comes forth as they need to rise to fight to overcome the oppressive regime. The abstract quality of the background is an anchoring point for the viewer creating a negative space for the figures. Brutal neoclassical works by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) as well as lyrical landscapes by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) come to mind when observing this work. The doubling sense of peace and violence is present, a brief interlude in between political struggles.
 

Kathia St. Hilaire, Boula Cinq, 2023, Reduction linocut in oil-based ink on canvas with skin-lightening cream packaging, steel, aluminum, banknotes, banana stickers, silkscreen, price tags, paper, foam, nails, and tires collaged onto foam. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli 24 × 15 × 10 in. (61 × 38.1 × 25.4 cm)

Skin Lightening $2.49, 2018 is the earliest work in this exhibition and a more feminist in its focus. Another reduction linocut in oil-based ink on canvas has skin-lightening cream packaging and paper embedded into the canvas. This tapestry has abstract herbal elements and women’s faces from cream ads appear here and there. They create an elaborate statement on the commercialization of beauty, but also on cultural imperialism and standards subservient to a very specific white-skinned feminine ideal that required women of other races to use skin-lightening creams. 

In presenting these multilayered works Kathia St.Hilaire uses an approach close to Eva Hesse (1936-1970), with whom she also shares her alma mater (Yale). As Hesse St.Hilaire uses highly developed, complex techniques, but does not capitalize on a specific reading, producing in Hesse’s terms “work [that] is expressive of its own materiality.” By bringing in disparate elements St.Hilaire follows the media beyond their limits. Hesse though is minimalist to an utmost degree something that St. Hilaire does not at all aspire to. Minimal in her approach to figurative representation St.Hilaire brings in real historical figures of Haitian guerilla fighters Rosalvo Bobo, Benoit Batraville, Charlemagne Péralte alongside nameless colonized Haitians.  One particularly interesting figure that appears in the exhibition is of François Duvalier also known as “Papa Doc” (1907-1971), a populist president who used Vodou religious practice to cement his political power. Papa Doc shows up holding a human head of his opponent that he allegedly was keeping in his closet.

St.Hilaire’s works with references to Vodou practices as an integral element of Haitian culture. As in other colonized countries, Vodou was a form of national resistance infusing local beliefs and traditions. By using various elements of this practice within the works the artist draws the lineage to magical realism that is important to her. Vodou empowers the supplicants by providing them with magical attributes and objects. By connecting Haitians with the ancestral cults of West and Central Africa Vodou was extending the origins of colonized citizens to the continents they were initially forced to leave due to the slave trade in the XVI-XIX centuries. By highlighting this connection, the artist is bringing together various strands of colonial pasts in one panoramic vision on view.

Kathia St.Hilaire: Invisible Empires is one of those exhibitions that need in-person encounters as photographs do not do justice either to the intricacies of these works or to the depth of references the artist uses. We need more of exhibitions like this that bring more clarity and light to colonial encounters and their uneasy aftermaths. We might need to look past single stories to see a vista. WM