Blending Secular and Sacred, With Sequins
The scene was a vibrant pastorale, rendered in thousands of shimmering sequins and beads that filled a nearly threemeter-wide canvas with a red tasseled border.
In the background were emerald fields, bulbous trees, a blue-and-white streaked sky. Up front were clusters of small figures in conversation on the ground, beside a bull grazing. And anchoring the center of this bustling tapestry were the many manifestations of Kouzen Zaka, the lwa, or Haitian Vodou spirit, of farming — or as an embroidered inscription read at the top of the piece, the “minister of Agriculture.”
There is so much activity in Myrlande Constant’s tapestries that it can feel unfair to ask her to explain each detail. But recently, in New York for the opening of an exhibition of her newest works at Fort Gansevoort gallery, this Haitian artist, who for three decades has led formal, technical and narrative innovation in the tradition of drapo, or Vodou banners, was happy to talk.
“You can see him as a farmer, with his scythe and his satchel,” Ms. Constant said, indicating a representation of Kouzen (“cousin” in Krèyol, or Haitian Creole, the nation’s primary language). In one place, he was depicted with a dark complexion, white beard, broad-brimmed hat and a blue, red and white shirt, all made kinetic by cascading sequins and thrown into high relief by her lines of pearl beads.
Ms. Constant, 54, is a rigorist whose every action accords with Vodou knowledge and cosmology. But she is equally a trailblazer who has taken the drapo tradition — an image of an icon or a symbolic drawing (vèvè) unfurled at the start of ceremonies — and blown it open into a narrative art, at an ever larger scale. Her works have the centrifugal storytelling of, say, a Bruegel painting.
Long influential locally, she has gradually expanded her international renown from collectors with an interest in Haiti to institutional consecration. Three of her works appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This month a career survey, “Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance,” will open at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.
Ms. Constant grew up in Léogâne, a town west of Portau-Prince. Vodou was a presence in the household, informally. Her father was a houngan, or priest, but he left the family early on and founded a temple in a rural area.
She came to her art through textile craft — tambour embroidery, in which fabric is stretched taut and worked with a hook, an ornate technique perfected in Lunéville, France, in the 19th century.
In Haiti, a low-wage subcontracting hub for the garment industry, Ms. Constant worked with her mother, Jane Constant, in a factory producing elaborately beaded wedding dresses and other items. As a teenager, “growing up in my environment, you have to learn to work,” Ms. Constant said. “I learned how to work at my mother’s side.” But she rankled at the low pay and poor conditions, and one day she confronted her employer, who promptly dismissed her.
She began to paint, without much success or satisfaction. But when she tried her hand at drapo, which traditionally involved only sequins, she found that tambour and beadwork opened new possibilities in contour, depth and detail.
Each piece starts with a line drawing that she formulates, during a meditative process, on the back of the cloth fabric, which is then stretched across a frame and worked upside-down. It is time-consuming work that requires many hands, especially as her tapestries have evolved into large, wall-filling works that can involve 20 people working collaboratively.
Her studio has employed her children, nieces and nephews. Ms. Constant’s mother left the factory and joined the studio until her death in 2005.
Haiti is undergoing a deep crisis, marked by the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 and the spread of heavily armed gangs. They are rampant in much of Port-au-Prince, including Carrefour-Feuilles, the neighborhood where Constant’s atelier is perched high.
She has started a second studio in Léogâne, where conditions are less dire.
Ms. Constant said she would not give up on Haiti. “I have to be home,” she said. Soon after the Fort Gansevoort opening, she was.