News & Events

News and Events

News & Events

Artist Edouard Duval Carrie branches out but keeps roots in Miami

Print Email

The Miami Herald
Posted on Fri, May. 18, 2012

Artist Edouard Duval Carrie branches out but keeps roots in Miami

By John Coppola
Special to the Miami Herald

"The Messenger,''
by Edouard Duval Carrié,
from his exhibition at the
Bernice Steinbaum Gallery,
May 2012.

This is my life as a tree, says Edouard Duval Carrié as he singles out an eight-foot-square work that is the centerpiece of his current exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.

Purple Lace Tree, a backlit mixed media work on water-jet cut aluminum, depicts a single tree, its serpentine roots not anchored in the ground, its beleafed and flowering branches sprawling above. He describes the lone tree as “standing erect, keeping its dignity, yet rootless.”

The peripatetic artist was born in Haiti in 1954, immigrated as a child with his family to Puerto Rico, studied in Montreal and Paris before moving to Miami a dozen years ago. Here, he says, he found his anchor: “I’m very happy in Miami. I won’t move!”

Duval Carrié also cites the trees as a metaphor for the ecological problems in his native Haiti, which has been severely deforested, as well as symbols of family and history. He has made the images even more concrete by incorporating actual tree branches in his mixed media sculpture, Grand Bois.

Many of the works in his current gallery show, The Three Dimensional God and Goddesses Met Their Cousins The Trees, are back-lighted stencils. Duval Carrié says this Haitinizes stained-glass windows by incorporating the technique used in the oil drum metal cutouts.

Mothers Who Will Change the World

Print Email

By Matt Damon for the Huffington Post

Mother's Day is a day to celebrate our mothers. It's for brunches, flowers, and time spent with your beloved mom. But for millions of mothers around the world, it's a day they'll lose to one of the world's most preventable causes of death -- waterborne disease.

Mother's Day is another day where in many countries women will be responsible for finding and fetching water for their families. All the water they need for drinking, washing, cooking, cleaning. They'll walk miles, carry heavy burdens, wait for hours and pay exorbitant prices. The work will be back-breaking and all-consuming. Often the water will be contaminated, even deadly. In these instances, they'll face an impossible choice -- certain death without water or possible death from illness.

Breakthroughs in Health in the Millennium Villages

Print Email

Co-authored with Sonia Sachs and Prabhjot Singh

In Africa's Millennium Villages (MVs), local communities are taking many actions in health care, agriculture, education, and other challenges to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Their hard work is paying off. In just three years, the mortality rate among children under five dropped by 22 percent. This pace is three times faster than national trends in the rural areas, and is fast enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goal for child mortality (MDG 4). These results, detailed in a Lancet study published today, reinforce the global effort to build effective, low-cost, community-led health care systems that can end millions of deaths of young children and pregnant women each year.

Haitian Women in Production Photos

Print Email

HAITI FEATURED IN LANDMARK EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK

Print Email

toussaint The New York Historical Society re-opened after several years of renovation on November 11th, 2011 with Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, an exhibition that explores the enormous transformations in the world's politics and culture between the 1763 triumph of the British Empire in the Seven Years War and the end of the Napoleonic Wars – and compares three globally influential revolutions in America, France and Haiti. This is one of the first times that the story of the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions will be explained as a global narrative.