Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom: Artist Talk

Join artists Edouard Duval-Carrié, Jess Hill, and Rénold Laurent featured in the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice’s 10th-anniversary retrospective exhibition Racial Slavery, Marronage, and Freedom in a discussion about the exhibition, their creative processes, and their connections to the Center.

The artist talk will be held at Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center, 75 Waterman St, Providence, RI in the Petteruti Lounge, followed by a reception in the CSSJ gallery at 94 Waterman St., 02912.

Edouard Duval-Carrié is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based in Miami, Florida. Born and raised in Haiti, Duval-Carrié fled the regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier as a teenager and subsequently resided in locales as diverse as Puerto Rico, New York, Montreal, Paris, and Miami. His works address the complexities of the Caribbean and its diaspora. He has exhibited in major museums, art institutions, and galleries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Some of his exhibitions are: The Art of Embedded Histories (2019); Decolonizing Refinement (2018-19); Mémoires Encastrées/Memory Windows (2018). Duval-Carrié’s work was recently shown at the fifteenth edition of documenta, a prestigious international exhibition held in Kassel (2022). In 2018, Duval-Carrié was the inaugural recipient of The Ellie’s Michael Richards Award, given to a Miami-based artist who has cultivated an original practice over a long period of time. He has collaborated with the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice on several exhibition projects.

Jess Hill received her BFA in Printmaking, with a minor in Art History, at the University of West Georgia. She is a recipient of the 2017 Emerging Artist Residence from the Atlanta Printmakers Studio and was the Heimark Artist in Residence at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice in 2018. She has been a part of several group exhibitions across the United States. Jess Hill is a mother of three beautiful children. She is currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was also born and raised. Her work focuses on how we view each other through the prisms of race and gender. She explores and celebrates the differences among the human race.
Other themes that appear in her work include class, religion, and cultural patterns. She uses printmaking and mixed media methods in expressing her art form. Her ultimate goal is to dismantle the barriers and institutions that allow human beings to believe they are separate from each other so we can truly embrace each other’s differences.

Rénold Laurent was born in Source Bretoux, a village at the foot of the Marbial Valley—a few kilometers from the city of Jacmel, Haiti. At the age of ten he began to draw and paint under the direction of his father, Maccène Laurent. Soon he abandoned the style of his father and began to create new perspectives and techniques in his paintings, eventually settling on abstraction as his mode of visual communication. He views abstract painting as the most expressive means to explore the extraordinary powers of the imagination. He has collaborated with several cultural institutions in Haiti including the Haitian Art Museum in Port-au-Prince. In 2019, he was the Heimark Artist in Residence at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice. His work has been exhibited several times in Haiti and in other countries.

To register for the Artist Talk, please click here or the link below.