An excerpt of Kurt Mc Vey's piece for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art:
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| La Vaughn Belle in her studio in Christiansted, St. Croix, photo by Wyatt Gallery |
"Day three involved a tour through a
small vernacular cottage in Free Gut, a part of Christiansted where free
Africans lived during Dutch colonial times. The space is owned by
Tobago-born artist La Vaughn Belle and will be featured in her forthcoming documentary, The House that Freedom Built.
The small cottage, a work of art as much as a work in progress, was
serving as a quaint studio for Belle. The small abode stood in stark
contrast to the previous evening’s Mango Hill Greathouse. There was no
concerted follow up discussion regarding the polarized nature of the two
locations or how the island remains economically polarized, while
serving as a clear microcosm for wealth disparity in America; perhaps
because it’s only appropriate to deconstruct the nature of white
privilege when you’re not directly enjoying the fruits of it.
Since 2011, Belle has been
uncovering the complex and tumultuous history of the small cottages and
is quite vocal about the prevailing obstacles in place for black members
of the Caribbean community to take out bank loans in order to purchase
land and property. Much of the funding for her artwork and the
documentary comes from various artist grants. It should also be noted
that Belle had to personally contend with a deeply embedded drug addict
who had been squatting there, even weeks after she officially owned the
space. I found her compassionate tone regarding his removal and ultimate
fate to be quite touching. Once Belle was able to enter and fully
evaluate the amount of work that was needed to bring the space up to
code, a new, ongoing internal conflict developed for the artist
concerning the erosion of the house’s original architecture and the need
to replace it with new materials not directly linked to its historical
roots.
Belle walked us through a series of
unfinished paintings featuring zoomed-in images of the blue patterns
often found on “chaney,” a Virgin Island slang term for fragments of
European fine china, unearthed in the dirt by children who would use the
fragments as faux money (china+money=chaney). Belle has become so
fascinated with these fossilized artifacts of fractured European
decadence that she traveled to Denmark to examine the country’s
preserved collection of colonial fine china, dating back to the 17th
century. She was flatly denied permission to see the china, as major
institutions are not always enthusiastic about exhuming their various
skeletons, however pretty they may be.
One of Belle’s more impactful pieces
was a sculpture featuring various fossilized fragments of the
surrounding coral reef, which slaves and eventually free men, bloody
feet and all, would use for the foundations of their Free Gut housing.
The gray coral was piled and encased in a see-through Plexiglas
pedestal. Belle’s studio visit fell directly on the heels of our
“Harvard erected by slaves” discussion in the van. This unassuming work,
inside this humble structure, illustrated the idea, and rather
powerfully, that no matter how far we thrust into the future as a
collective Western society and bury our transgressions in the past; we
must push ourselves to fully comprehend, as transparently as possible,
both the real and metaphorical foundations of our homes, communities,
and institutions, whether they be academic, economic, or governmental.
Despite Belle’s hospitality, and perhaps due to her extensive and
ever-flowing knowledge regarding the space’s history and her warm but
penetrating eyes, the walls started to creep in on me, and I had to step
outside and take five with the island’s numerous little lizards. "
TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE SEE HERE
