DECOLONIZING REFINEMENT Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié

Overview

In Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits in the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié, Duval-Carrié engages themes associated with the history of the Tallahassee area and North Florida region, including plantation agriculture, race, slavery, historical events such as Florida statehood, and contentious historical figures such as Andrew Jackson. His exhibited works will be accompanied by displays of plantation artifacts loaned from State of Florida collections, including a portion of a nineteenth-century sugar mill and a range of Spanish silver and gold coins, along with objects from The Grove Museum in Tallahassee and Goodwood Plantation Museum in Tallahassee. Following the opening reception on 16 February 2018, the exhibit will be on view through April 1, 2018.

In collaboration with the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and the Department of Art History, an accompanying symposium with topics in African Diaspora and Caribbean Studies will occur on February 17, 2018. FSU art history professors Paul B. Niell and Michael D. Carrasco and doctoral candidate Lesley Wolff, who co-curated the exhibition, are publishing an exhibition catalog that includes scholarly essays by participants in the symposium. The catalogue will be on sale through the Museum of Fine Arts.

Edouard Duval-Carrié’s work navigates the historically rich and culturally complex traditions that comprise a uniquely Caribbean perspective. Haitian born Duval-Carrié’ fled his homeland during the dictatorship of François Duvalier. Educated in Montreal and Paris, the artist estab-lished his workshop in Miami, Florida. Duval-Carrié‘s recent works attend to themes of water, travel, and Francophone culture. For this artist, water becomes both a symbolic passage and a barrier—the means by which enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean and the means by which modern-day Haitians migrate to the United States. Both circumstances have been driven by capitalism, a force that occupies Duval-Carrié’s work materially and iconographically.