La Vaughn Belle

Come Ruin or Rapture, on view in the Carlos Museum’s John Howett Works on Paper Gallery through December 8, includes work from two of Belle’s series, Storm (in the time of spatial and temporal collapse) and Storm (how to imagine the tropicalia as monumental) where she uses materials from her studio that were exposed to Hurricane Maria in 2017. These repurposed materials take on new forms and express the resilience of people of African descent in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the face of both natural disasters and colonial powers. 

The exhibition A Haunting Between Us, on view through December 13 at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, displays work from Belle’s Swarm series, which delves into the Danish colonial archives and uses photographic images from the Danish West Indies. Belle reimagines these images through a method of cutting and burning that not only changes them but utterly transforms their colonial context by removing black bodies from scenes of servitude and highlighting them as subjects of strength and perseverance. The sculpture Sovereign (How to Pull a Spear from the Throat) reminds us that rebellion and resistance was waged by the Indigenous peoples of the West Indies as well as Africans. As she says, “The haunting is a call to decolonization and the dismantling of systems that keep us fragmented.” 

On September 19, 2024, Emory College, Emory University Libraries, the Carlos Museum, and the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum hosted dECOlonial Feelin, an international symposium to raise awareness of lingering coloniality in the Virgin Islands and offered a space to engage with ecological thought and anticolonial practice. Led by Emory Professor of English and Creative Writing Tiphanie Yanique, this three-day symposium used art, poetry, archives, philosophy, storytelling, anthropology, and spiritual practice led by the Virgin Islands Studies Collective as lenses through which to engage in this meaningful work. These two exhibitions opened in conjunction with the symposium.