Belen Jesuit Preparatory School's Olga M. & Carlos A. Saladrigas Art Gallery at the Ignatian Center for the Arts proudly inaugurates the 2025-2026 exhibition season under new Gallery Director Ignacio Font with this landmark survey exhibition featuring renowned Haitian-American artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.
This comprehensive exhibition encompasses 45 works spanning 13 years of the artist's career (2010-2023), featuring five distinct series that demonstrate the evolution and sophistication of Duval-Carrié's distinctive visual language. The exhibition includes his celebrated President Series featuring Haitian revolutionary leaders and heads of state like Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines, the powerful Important Women Series celebrating figures like Anacaona and Catherine Flon, and works from The Kingdom of This World Series inspired by Alejo Carpentier's magical realist novel.
Working primarily in engraved plexi with artist frames and mixed media embedded in resin, Duval-Carrié transforms historical trauma into artistic revelation. Like an alchemist who transmutes base metals into gold, he takes the raw materials of Caribbean history—colonialism, displacement, cultural syncretism—and transforms them into works of profound beauty and meaning. His translucent and reflective materials create spatial interventions that implicate viewers in their historicity.
The exhibition, "The Alchemy of History: The Vision of Edouard Duval-Carrié," opens on Thursday, September 25, with a reception from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., inviting art lovers, collectors, and the broader community to engage with the works and the artist behind them. The exhibition runs through November 13. Free and open to the public.