From Little Haiti to Venice Biennale: Duval-Carrié builds a pantheon of memory

He calls it the “magic calabash.”

For years, visitors to Edouard Duval-Carrié’s Little Haiti studio would find among his glittery and translucent historical figures and Vodou gods a story the artist could not shrug. Tacked to a wall was a tattered Miami Herald newspaper clipping that told a familiar story: A group of Haitian migrants washing ashore in South Florida after a perilous journey at sea.

Buried in the details about the overcrowded boat was the tale of a $3,500 calabash that someone carried to ward off capture by the U.S. Coast Guard.

“Can you imagine?” he said recently, recalling the story. “The most expensive item was not just a calabash but a magic calabash. Somebody’s holding this thing, and they throw it at the Coast Guard so it can disappear?”

The extravagance of the hard shelled spherical fruit, which is often used as bowls in rural Haiti, first registered as “outrageous” to Duval-Carrié, who tried to reconcile the fact that the voyage cost $20,000 to launch, and the boat was packed with four times the number of people it was built to hold. But then, as it usually does for the Haiti-born artist and sculptor who often explores Haitian identity and spirituality in his work, something sparked.

“I am going to make a painting of it,” he recalled deciding.

The painting of a group of well-dressed, wry Vodou deities, known as lwas in Haitian Creole, arriving on a crowded boat, one carrying a calabash, would make up part of his first big exhibition, “Who’s Coming to Dinner to Miami,” at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Now the installation — and the calabash that triggered it — is serving inspiration once more.

It’s become the foundation for one of the biggest moments of Duval-Carrié’s already internationally acclaimed career: his exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, the art world’s premier international exhibition. Staged every two years since 1895, it includes dozens of national pavilions and large-scale group shows organized by a curator.

It is an important moment for Miami and for the contemporary artist who in November 2024 became the second artist-in-residence in Miami-Dade County. He is one of two Haiti-born artists invited to exhibit at the Biennale’s premier event, which runs Saturday through Nov. 22 in Italy.

“Haiti is all I am going to speak about,” Duval-Carrié gushed during a recent visit to his studio where he spoke about his Venice installation and the inspiration whose themes of migration, spirituality and identity still resonate today.

‘In Minor Keys’

This marks Duval-Carrié’s second appearance at the Biennale. His first appearance was 10 year ago when Haiti mounted a pavilion with support from the French government. This time, the artist doesn’t have a country behind him and had to independently raise funds through a network that includes longtime supporter Oolite Arts.

He will be exhibiting alongside another Haiti-born contemporary artist, Manuel Mathieu of Montreal and Paris, in the main exhibition. Their works will be among those of more than 100 artists and collectives who were handpicked by the late curator Koyo Kouoh and her team.

The first African woman to lead the Biennale, Kouoh died suddenly of liver cancer in May of last year at age 57. But before her death, she conceived the exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” and had outlined her vision for its execution, and the artists she wanted to be featured. Duval-Carrié was among them.

“I’m very touched,” Duval-Carrié said about his selection, which he learned about when he received a call from Kouoh’s team.

His selection has generated excitement in South Florida where supporters and donors have collaborated to help him get to Venice. For those who follow Haitian art and culture closely, the inclusion of Duval-Carrié Vodou Pantheon in the Biennale carries even more of a special meaning because he’s bringing the ancestral spirits of Haiti to take their place in Venice, a city that understands the power of water, memory and transformation, said Kimberly Green, founder of Green Space Miami art gallery and longtime supporter of the country and its arts community.

“His detailed and intricate, brightly colored work reminds the world that Haiti’s spiritual brilliance travels, endures and reshapes every shore it touches,” she added.

It was Kouoh’s staff who ultimately selected the direction for Duval-Carrié’s exhibition after he shared various examples of his work with them. Known for his vibrant, mixed-media works that explore Caribbean history and culture, his innovative vision has earned him international acclaim, and showings in some of the world’s leading art galleries. Earlier this year his painting of Haitian revolutionary hero, Toussaint Louverture, riding a red horse into battle, was used as inspiration for Haiti’s Winter Olympic team’s uniform at the Milan Cortina Winter Games.

In the Perez Museum exhibit “Who’s Coming to Dinner in Miami” that his Biennale show builds upon, the Vodou deities are headed to Miami, the gateway where the Haitian community, Duval-Carrié said, is “a force.”

“I imagined them as the people of Haiti, those gods, because that’s what they are,” he said. “They represent the people and all I had to do was to put them together.”

“It’s daring, and it’s human and there’s a tragedy involved,” Duval-Carrié added, switching into Haitian-Creole to explain the painful decision Haitians have to make before embarking on such a perilous sea crossing and challenges they encounter on the other side of that decision.

“They are forced to leave their country and take what you can, including a magic calabash with you,” he said.

In his Biennale installation, they are part of a Vodou pantheon in which Duval-Carrié explores more of Haitians’ interrelationship with Africa, while expanding on the idea of Haiti’s Pan-Africanism, forced migration and Haitian identity. There are many more gods he sculpted for the pantheon, and he has drawn from different corners of Africa to show its influence in Haiti’s current Vodou beliefs. An element of technology has also been added with the construction of a vertical post, where with the aid of artificial intelligence it looks as if the spirits, painted on resin, are descending “like confection.”

Followers of Vodou will recognize familiar figures among the spirits or lwas, such as Baron Samedi, the guardian of the cemetery; Erzueli, who represents different aspects of love, resistance and motherhood in her various feminine forms, and Damballa, represented by a serpent and associated with the origins of life. But there are also more obscure figures that he has added, discovered during his research and preparation for the Biennale.

‘Haiti is like a synthesis of Africa’

The exhibit builds on a conversation Duval-Carrié had with Kouoh two years before she was selected as curator for the Biennale.

Duval-Carrié told Kouoh about a show he wanted to do on the African continent tying Haiti and Africa together when she made an unexpected trip to his Little Haiti studio to thank him for a piece she had borrowed from Perez.

During their meeting, Kouoh spoke of her own father who, prior to his death, envisioned closer ties between Haiti and Africa, where the African Union would play a greater role in Haiti. And, of course, the two spoke about art, a conversation Duval-Carrié would use as the framework to tell the Haitian story in relation to its African beginnings, and her vision.

Kouoh wanted “to see what Africa is in the imagination of people,” he said, recalling his conversation with her about how Haiti was Pan African before the phrase was even coined.

“There isn’t a corner of Africa that isn’t represented in Haiti,” he said. “It’s what I told Kouho; Haiti is like a synthesis of Africa.”

The idea animates not just in the installation but in a broader sense when one considers enslaved Africans from across the African continent were brought to Saint-Domingue by the French, and they came with distinct languages, religious practices and cultures that did not disappear after they won independence from France.

Indeed, in works like “The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe,” scholars like Marlene Daut traced how Haiti’s complex and multi-ethnic Africans shaped the society.

“It took me a while to understand why that country is so complex,” Duval-Carrié said of his homeland. “It is because the French went and bought people from everywhere.”

“For the revolution, the Vodou priests managed to rally everybody against slavery,” he said, noting that divisions continue to percolate in Haitian society presently.

“All these tribes in Africa, they would have never met in Africa,” he said. “Somebody from the Congo would have met somebody from Benin? I don’t think so. So I wanted to show that and explain to people that this situation in Haiti was very complex from the get-go.

“It’s an extraordinary history that no one understands,” he said, and yet it begs the question: “Where do we come from?”