Navigating Monarchies and Mythologies and what I'm doing in Denmark for these next 3 months

I am currently on a 3 month residency in Copenhagen. My living arrangements are provided by the Nordea Fonden and the rest is self-funded through the sale of artwork and commission projects. That's a pretty amazing statement to make as I am also here with my 3 children (ages 9, 7 and 4) and my mentally challenged older brother. There was a time in my life where this seemed impossible, so I am very grateful to be in this space realizing projects and sharing that with my family.

I am here working on several projects as the fervor of the centennial year and the anniversary of the transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark is still quite ardent. Upon leaving St. Croix I was busy finishing a new piece for an exhibition at the GL Holtegaard.  The process of how this piece materialized is quite interesting for me. The curator had requested another piece that was not available as it was recently sold to another institution and was on permanent display. The curator pushed me to think about possibly making an edition of the piece which after thinking about it I decided against it, and then later pushed me to think about creating another work that was similar. I say all of this because most of my projects are quite self-generated. It was quite unique to have someone from the outside push me in that way and I am to happy say it expanded my practice. I am grateful to Marie for challenging me and believing in me. And am looking forward to seeing the piece installed. The exhibition is entitled "Colonial Stories: Power and People" and I am thrilled to be a part of it. The piece I am exhibiting is entitled "On The Service To A Kingdom" and its in reference to the series of dessert service plates that were commissioned by the King of Denmark in the 19th century to depict his Kingdom. 

There were 81 in all, and there is only one that directly depicts the former Danish West Indies, a plate of St. Thomas bay and harbor. What is curious about this image is that it looks like all the other landscapes in color and there seems to be no record indicating that the artist actually travelled to the colonies. So this image stands as an imagined space, and I have replicated it across 45 paper plates in acrylic. It was a challenge for me because although I work across a variety of media, I have started painting again over the past 3 years with my Chaney paintings after a 10 year hiatus. So I grew a lot with this work. I am very happy about this. 

In a week I am also about to start a commission project with the Royal Copenhagen, the famous Danish brand of porcelain products. This has been a courtship in my mind of about 2 years with me pitching a project last summer to use my Chaney paintings as an inspiration for a Centennial commemorative plate. It was a real pitch meeting, like the kind of meeting where after someone lets you know how rare it is to even get a meeting with them, and tells you all the different kinds of proposals they receive on a weekly basis they look at you and say: "So who are you?". Although the Centennial plate was off the table because the company no longer makes those kinds of plates anymore, I was invited to do the Årets Harald  or "Harald of the Year" prize. The prize is a figure of an owl decorated by a different artist each year and is given to the most esteemed professor of the University of Copenhagen and presented by the Queen of Denmark. I am quite excited about this.

 Although the Royal Copenhagen has a long tradition working with artists I figured I was the first Virgin Islander, and then was told I was also the first black artist. In addition to the "Harald" the Royal Copenhagen is assisting with the production of a series of plates based on my Chaney paintings that will be exhibited at the Christiansborg Palace in an exhibition entitled "Behind Colonial Mirrors"  I will be showing alongside three other artists and several of the royal collections of objects and furniture that deal with the former Danish West Indies. I am also quite grateful for this experience and the opportunity to be able to be a part of the conversation about the history. The queen will also be formally opening this event which I think is quite significant as the exhibition is entering into a critical dialogue about the history. 

I am also working on the uncertain archives  project with the Department of Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen. This is the entity that helped to facilitate my Nordea Fonden residency. Over the past several years a team from the Danish National Archives have been digitizing the millions documents that represent the archives from the former Danish colonies in Caribbean. The hopes are to make this shared history accessible to everyone and the availability of these documents will coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the transfer of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States in 1917. However, there are structural challenges that are embedded in the creation of such a digital archive: questions surrounding authority, authenticity and subjectivity. I have been invited to create a new work that deals directly with the archives and some of these issues surrounds these questions.

I am also working on a public sculpture project with Jeannette Ehlers. It is a hybrid sculpture that combines two of our previously conceived works into one large scale piece. This requires its own blog post because it is a major project and very complex and multilayered. However, to say something briefly, the piece is inspired by Queen Mary, one of the leaders of the 1878 labor revolt in St. Croix and incorporates coral stones imported from St. Croix that were cut from the ocean to build the foundation of the colonial structures. I'll put a link to the post on the project as soon as I write one.

I also will be working on another commission project with the Flensburg Maritime Musuem, a border town in Germany that used to belong to the Danish empire and who is the originator of the Danish yellow bricks very popular in the colonial structures of the islands. Flensburg is known for the place where the rum was imported too, they even still have a rum regatta I am told, although they don't seem to have much memory of where the rum originated from. The director of the museum wanted to change this by creating an exhibition that dealt with this complex history and has invited me to create a work inside the exhibition.

(pause for a breath)

And I'll be doing some talks and workshops at some institutions along the way and writing, and seeing endless exhibitions and eating a lot of Danish pastries and going to parks and the zoo and Legoland and other things with my kids.

Follow me on

Instagram: lavaughn_belle

Twitter: belleonblast

Subscribe to my mailing list

Interview (video)

I was interviewed by one of my students, Denise S. Canton earlier this year for a photography class she was taking in Maryland, USA. If you have 30 minutes and want to more about my work and background check it out. I talk about earliest influences, my transition to becoming an artist and what's it's like to be an artist in the Caribbean. I also discuss some regrets and some challenges in sustaining a creative life.

Chaney, Chinoiserie

What I find most interesting about this Chaney Project is that re-imagining of cultures through the flow of material objects during colonialism. On some of the fragments you find "Chinoiserie", which is European re-imagining of Chinese porcelain. However the Chinese also started imitating the European re-imagining of their culture.Some of the plates had stories attached to them like this one, a kind of Romeo and Juliet type of story. I hope to do 10-15 of these large scale paintings. They are fun and exhausting, tedious and exhilarating. They come together like a jigsaw puzzle as I study the images and see which pieces make sense. I am not too concerned with exact re-presentations. Although keeping pretty close to the image, I also at times edit them, extend them, I enjoying the process of seeing how the tangle into one another and form something new. I'll be showing the third one of the series at the Open Studio, this Friday, July 3, 2015 from 4-7pm. You are invited!!

New Studio, New Projects

Soooo I have moved into my new studio. I need to clarify that it is not as if I had a previous studio before so that it's not new in this way. I had to surrender my studio space at home as the family expanded. It is neither new in the sense of a new building because if you have been following my documentary project  "The House That FREEDOM Built" this building is over 250 years old. It's new in the sense that it's new beginning for me and the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. It's my art lab. And currently internet free on purpose (except for my cell phone). And also at the moment without a computer, so far, so that I can focus on the production of art and keep distractions to a minimum.

I have begun working on two new projects: one, not so new and the other pretty fresh.

“CHANEY: stories from migrant fragments”

During the 250 years of Danish colonization of the US Virgin Islands, people, products, memories, stories, cultures and languages were transferred and transformed. There are countless reminders of this process and that history in these islands. From the names of our towns after Danish royalty, the sugar mills in various stages of ruin that populate the hillsides to the “chaney” that continues to be found on many properties, often surfacing after a hard rainfall. A morphed version of both "china" and "money", “chaney” serves as a reminder of our colonial past and fragmented Caribbean identities.  

These shards tell the visual stories of power and projection and how cultures saw each other and themselves in this vast transAtlantic narrative.

This work seeks to examine this past in a series of large scale paintings (4’x6’ +) works of oil on board that piece together images of collected chaney into one image. Similar to how we have reconstructed our histories, these paintings will be a symbolic gesture of restoration, a type of map that charts both the real and the imagined. I say this work is not so new because I have worked with images of these plates before in a previous work, "Collectible".

 

In researching the patterns in chaney I have become fascinated with the "Willow Pattern"  and this idea of these designs coming out of China and then being imitated by Europeans and Americans and then the Chinese later imitating the European and American imitation of themselves, and then how these images travel here to the Caribbean and represent a weird fragmented memory-fantasy and how when pieced together they can tell a new story of who we are as Caribbean people. 

I have also begun a new series of work that again deal with transforming a narrative.  Starting off as drawings and hoping to evolve into a larger installation. 

 

“Fortress: fire.burn.victoria”

One of the distinctive aspects of Crucian architecture is the fretwork, or “gingerbread” details found on the buildings. In Frederiksted after the 1878 Labor Riot or “Fireburn” much of the town was burnt and then rebuilt in the “Victorian” Era.  The shapes and patterns of the “gingerbread” are reconfigured to form vernacular houses. These houses, also African and European influenced, form a distinctive “Danish West Indian” style. I see the imitation, translation and transformation of these patterns and designs as a part of a larger “reconstruction” narrative. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

La Vaughn Belle

PO Box 8513

St. Croix, Virgin Islands  00823

340-332-6236

studio@lavaughnbelle.com

www.lavaughnbelle.com

"Big Art Small Place" written by David Knight, Jr

If you happen to be traveling on Caribbean Airlines or Air Jamaica this month look out for an article I have in the inflight magazine, Caribbean Beat, which is also the region's most widely distributed magazine. Written by St. John writer David Knight and portrait photos taken by Quiana Adams (of Q Studios), it is a nice profile of my work. Here is an excerpt:

Her work makes a strong argument that “small island” art should be as much about deconstruction as it is about decoration. She is fascinated by the things we often take for granted: the cultural artifacts, practices, and locations that make our homes distinct. In this way, Belle’s investigations remain grounded in everyday life in St Croix. But despite a self-professed interest in the provincial, her work fixes its gaze outwards. Informed by a Pan-Caribbean heritage (her parents moved to the Virgin Islands from Barbados and Tobago), an international education in New York City and Cuba, and the multi-layered history of St Croix (the island has changed colonial hands seven times), Belle is very much in dialogue with the world.
A tension between the cosmopolitan and the local is a key feature of our times, and one might be forgiven for pointing out that, in small communities, critical discourse does not always flourish. In such an environment, contemporary artists can easily become frustrated by censorship, a lack of an audience, or both.

But La Vaughn Belle’s work contains nothing of this sort of cynicism: her environment is an abundance, not a lack. “The Virgin Islands is an amazing place to make art,” she recently wrote on her personal blog. “We are this small place in the [Jamaica] Kincaid sense of a small place, like many islands in the region. We are full of contradictions, insularities, and strange obsessions. We are still navigating our ‘coloniality’ in a post-colonial world.”

NB: this text is copyrighted, and only limited excerpting with full attribution is permitted. For licensing and reproduction permissions, please contact Caribbean Beat directly.

click here to read the full article

"Losing Our Virginity: Contemporary Art of the Virgin Islands", Presentation at the Biennial Music and Arts Conference

The Virgin Islands is an amazing place to make art. We are this small place in the Kincaid sense of a small place, like many islands in the region. We are full of contradictions, insularities and strange obsessions. We are still navigating our "coloniality" in a post-colonial world. We are are in constant negotiation with our shifting identities. I wanted a space to talk the art that has happened in the past 20 years, the contemporary work that often gets misunderstood or neglected. I wanted to put them all together and look at them and think, ok, so what does this say about us as Virgin Islanders, as artists, as people?

So I have been working with this idea for about a year now, "losing our virginity", as a framework in thinking about contemporary art in the Virgin Islands. Slowly, inactively and used this conference at the University of the Virgin Islands as an opportunity to finally concretize these thoughts on paper.

Here is a an excerpt of this essay/slide presentation. Please contact me studio@lavaughnbelle.com if you are interested in learning more or would like me to give this talk.

Losing Our Virginity:

Contemporary Art of the Virgin Islands

written and presented by La Vaughn Belle, March 2014

(First presented at the Biannual Conference of Music and Art at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas Campus on March 17, 2014)

"One of the ways that Christopher Columbus' dedication to the Virgin cults of Mary and others is demonstrated is in the numerous islands he named after the Virgin.  From Santa María de Monserrate (Montserrat),  Santa María la Antigua (Antigua), Nuestra Señora de las Nieves (Nevis) to our own Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Vírgenes (The Virgin Islands) we see a particular narrative encoded with gender and power relations taking root.  Beginning with these early encounters and namings, the Caribbean continues to be associated with the myth of  a virgin paradise. This idea of a pristine geography that is uncharted, unexplored, and uncultivated is what motivated European exploration and subsequent exploitation. From ‘plantation pictures’ to the images of a picturesque tropical paradise much of the art from the Virgin islands is based on a particular framing as a space of desire with very particular positions of who is in power. This paper plans to outline a trajectory that begins with some of the earliest imagery coming out of the Virgin Islands that promulgates these colonial metaphors of virginity, order and conquest and highlight how artists have either replicated this colonial script or reinterpreted that narrative altogether. In many ways it is this critical discussion of the visual arts in the territory that is virgin. This uncharted analysis, is needed in an era where images increasingly displace words, but also because a better understanding of our visual arts history will lead to a better grasp of our cultural identity and development. This slide presentation and lecture is the beginning of what hopes to be a larger investigation into the visual arts of the Virgin Islands. I will focus on when I believe this “loss of virginity” occurred and the artists, their work and other other factors that contributed to this phase in development of our visual culture

Primarily, it is important to note that the concept of virginity is a social construction. In actuality there is no concrete agreed upon definition of virginity. It is not necessarily penile penetration of the vagina, nor is it necessarily the rupture of a woman's hymen. We then must consider that virginity is an imagined space in which a gendered conversation occurs.  It’s a frontier, whose crossing becomes a rite of passage. In the context of the Caribbean, virginity has become a visual metaphor to express a narrative of a vast wilderness, unbroken forests, a pristine paradise and innocent natives and a space where others could exact their imagination, their desires, dreams, lusts, etc.. In the Caribbean virginity is a part of the allegory of discovery and a part of the colonial narrative of control. "

For more information about the conference:
Biennial Music and Arts Conference
http://biennialmusicconference.com/

For more information about my work:
www.lavaughnbelle.com