Phaidra Sterlin’s impassioned canvases address daily life in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and confront the inequities she witnesses there. The island nation’s inability to provide its citizens with basic resources is at the heart of her exhibition Esansyèl [Essential], currently on view at Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery.
“Most of my work speaks of infrastructure, social inequalities,” she explained last week as she prepared for the show. Images of lightbulbs and fuel tanks—"the things that we need as the essentials”—recur in the textural acrylic paintings she creates as a way to grapple with the injustices in her homeland. “I always say we have a responsibility, whether it’s individually or collectively, to bring about change.”
Born in New York, Sterlin’s father brought her to his native Haiti when she was an infant to be raised with the help of his family. “My mom was from the south,” she said. “[As a] white southern woman [her mother] said the reason she didn’t bring me back home was because I was black, hence I was raised in Haiti,” the artist said.
Sterlin recalls a happy childhood in Haiti, filled with “fun memories…wholesome memories.” Her summer vacations were spent in NYC visiting her physician father. In the mid ‘80s political strife in Haiti —protests to overthrow President Jean-Claude Duvalier—prompted Sterlin’s father to move her back to the Upper West Side with him when she was 14. “I felt like I was being ripped away from all the things I was beginning to enjoy,” she said of the relocation during her formative years. “At the time you just feel like you’re pulled away from everything that you know.” She “immediately became a rebel kid” and left home soon after.
She surrounded herself with friends in the arts over the years and worked alongside them in fashion, photography, and set design. “I was always painting,” she notes. About six years ago she decided to focus on her own art. “I had a 'fuck it' day,” she recalls. “I figured now is as a good time as any to just indulge myself fully. I woke up one day and [decided] I didn’t want to live life with regrets.”
“I’m going to use my voice the best way that I can…being the best me, doing what I can do best,” she decided. In order to immerse herself in the work, she moved back to Haiti, “back to when everything was wholesome.”
While she finds the country more “connected” now, thanks to the internet, with a more modern mindset, she says that the nation’s infrastructure has not improved over the years. “Structurally it’s sad to me,” she said, noting the inequalities that pervade the society. “The environment, the people’s struggles, the structure…even a question of light.” Electricity, something often taken for granted in the States, can be difficult to access in Haiti. Only a quarter of Haitians have access to electricity, according to USAID. Many Haitian residents are forced to illegally connect to the electric grid to power their homes.
“It bothered me seeing my side having electricity but I cross the street, that side does not have it. That went on throughout the country, so it was socioeconomics,” she said. A powerful series of richly layered paintings from 2019 features dozens of lightbulbs dotting unsettling canvases. The bulbs, which bear an uncanny resemblance to tiny skulls, address the country’s power problem and symbolize Sterlin’s “anger and frustration” with the inequitable distribution of resources. “That was my own way of protesting,” she says. The lightbulbs in Sterlin’s paintings are actually rechargeable bulbs the artist purchased for her own home, but at $4 each she notes that these are inaccessible to many in Haiti.
The first work in the series, Promès c dèt 1 ("a promise is a debt"), features lightbulbs on a stunning yellow background, standing in for the illumination absent from many homes. “The land being bright yet there is no light. It’s a tropical island,” Sterlin mused, noting that sustainable options such as renewal energy and solar energy are “really for the privileged when [they] should be really a standard. There’s no reason why we [all] shouldn’t have that.” Other works in the series depict the lightbulbs in black and white—a color pairing the artist finds comforting—on an angry, fiery red background, or on the blue and red of Haiti's flag, showing pride in her heritage.
Another large canvas featuring a grid of red cylinders against a ghostly black and white background represents the gas tanks that are commonly used to fuel cooktops in Haitian kitchens. “A lot of the people can’t afford to get that tank filled up every day to be able to cook,” Sterlin notes. The majority of Haitian households cannot afford propane and must rely on a cooking option that is harmful to both their health and the environment. “A lot of people use charcoal and now you think about charcoal, you think about deforestation,” Sterlin said of the country’s increasingly devastated forests. “The other alternative we have is [gas], so you have to have a little more cash flow to have this.”
Sterlin hopes her evocative works will raise awareness to the injustices experienced in her homeland and elicit change. “I hope that it provokes thoughts, questions, dialogue…that then lead to actions,” she says. “Conversation starts an action.”
The artist will return to Haiti this week to prepare for an upcoming exhibit there in which she will include a tribute to her father who passed away two and half years ago. Based on Ezilí Dantor, a Haitian voodoo icon often depicted holding a child, her father will replace the female figure in the image she says, “because I was raised by my dad.”
After years of a strained relationship, Sterlin and her father made amends prior to her return to Haiti five years ago. “I have to say that when I made my decision to go to Haiti, he was one of the few people that supported it. He said, ‘Haiti is also your home and you’re going home,’” she fondly recalls.
Her father championed her art career and proudly watched its “progression and change” over the years. “As a kid I used to draw over all of his anatomy books…he knew what he had in me,” she said of her early signs of creativity. “He had hoped for a doctor but in the end, he was pleased with what he had.”
Phaidra Sterlin: Esansyèl [Essential]
Brooklyn Arts Fellowship Gallery, 210 24th Street, Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri, by appointment; Saturday 12pm - 6pm; Sunday 1pm - 5pm
Exhibition on view November 20 – December 20, 2020
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