The Brooklyn Rail

Kathia St. Hilaire, born in 1995 into a family who emigrated from Haiti, grew up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida. Then she studied art at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design. This show of nearly twenty works, most of them large, presents Haitian subjects. La Sirene (2020) shows a Haitian water spirit in undulating waves. Skin Lightening $2.49 (2018) references a skin-lightening product associated with belief in the superiority of light skin tones. And David (2022) is an enormous abstract circular image depicting Hurricane David of 1979. Her title, “Invisible Empires,” alludes to the legacy of foreign interventions in Haiti, and the persistence of imperialism—frequent themes for her paintings. Thus Cacos (2023) are three works depicting Haitian guerrilla figures who fought against occupying US Marines. And Mamita Yunai (2023) represents a scene in 1928 when soldiers killed striking United Fruit Company banana plantation workers.

Political painting shows its subjects in a way intended to inspire an attitude. Thus Picasso’s Guernica (1937) aimed to inspire horror at that barbarous bombing of civilians. And Peter Saul’s works from the 1960s reveal the terrors of the Vietnam War. But Picasso and Saul paint these political subjects in the same ways that they painted a portrait, a landscape, or a still life. St. Hilaire takes this process of political narrative a radical step further, making the artwork itself out of materials which reveal the history of Haiti. According to old master European theorizing, ut pictura poesis: like poetry, painting tells a story. And so the task for the visual artist is to use her pictorial content to effectively communicate an attitude. This slogan, which I believe remains of living interest for St. Hilaire, poses for her a real challenge. In a general way, at least, most art world people know the story of the Spanish Civil War and the Vietnam War. But how can she present in pictures the complicated history of Haiti, which is not likely to be familiar to most visitors to the Clark? How, I am asking, can she tell this story for an American museum audience?

Consider St. Hilaire’s working procedures. Using many layers of ink on carved linoleum block, in a labor-intensive process inspired by Vodun flags, she constructs her paintings from non-traditional materials: banknotes; containers for skin lightening products widely used by dark-skinned Haitians; fabrics; and aluminum and industrial steel. The result is a bumpy picture surface with visible seams. Stand back and you can see her depicted subjects. Some of them are very beautiful. But when you get up close, her pictures dissolve into the welter of these materials which she has assembled. And then they will probably cease to appear to be beautiful.

Collage in Cubist paintings and Robert Rauschenberg’s 1960s works assembles ready-made pictures. St. Hilaire takes that process a dramatic step further, constructing the painted image itself from Haitian materials, which she uses to express her political story. And so for the viewer who can identify the materials that she employs, the unity of form and content in her works presents a picture of Haiti’s political history. Just as the country was (and to some extent still is) ruled together by external imperial powers, so too St. Hilaire’s political pictures are (literally) made out of the very physical stuffs that oppress the people of Haiti. We see her representations of Haitian history, and we see the materials which define that history. The form and content of her art thus are tightly bound together. If you want to understand the sad history of Haiti, read the political literature. Or look closely at her paintings.

St. Hilaire, very young and very ambitious, has thus created a highly original style for narrative history paintings. She presents great, obviously important political subjects in an unclichéd way. St. Hilaire has truly made the invisible imperialist history visible. And that is a great achievement.

“Invisible Empires” is displayed in a bucolic setting, the Lunder Center at Stone Hill, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in a grand new gallery which was designed by Tadao Ando. The show is nicely complemented by a large concurrent Clark exhibition devoted to Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832), who was a renowned biracial Guadeloupean neoclassicist. And since there is no catalog for St. Hilaire’s show, my view of the complicated political background was informed by a good book available at the gift shop, Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Picador, 2013).