One of the coolest experiences is meeting the creator of
something (a book, a song, a piece of artwork) that has inspired you, and today
in Little Haiti, I got to experience just that.
On our second day in Miami, we
visited the very new, very modern museum PAMM just on the outskirts of urban
Miami. About an hour into our visit, I wandered into a room that contained an
exhibit that appeared to be a glitter wonder world. Each gigantic piece was an intricate world of
blues, greens, purples, darkness, and sparkling details of glitter. I was
entranced. This darkly magical room was not without humor though; one of the
pieces depicted Disney characters such as Mickey, Daffy Duck, and Batman in a
boat floating among these beautiful glittery trees in a crystalline body of
water. I had no idea what inspired that humorous touch or even how these
amazingly intricate works could have been produced. I left the room in awe and
with a lot of questions. This was why I was so excited to find out that we were
going to have the opportunity to meet the creator of this exhibit in person in
little Haiti.
The artist
is Edouard Duval-Carrie. He grew up in Haiti until he was nine years old and
then moved to Puerto Rico only to move back to Haiti at 15. At around that
young age, his first piece of art was bought by a museum in Iowa and thus his
art career started.
He has works all over the world—in European museums, in
Latin American ones, and in the United States. He currently lives and works out
of Little Haiti. He was very welcoming to us Duke students because he had
worked at Duke for about a semester as the head of the Haitian art department. And so today (SideBar/Blogger Interruption: This was written Tuesday when we actually had visited the artist. Yes I know today is Friday. Yes I am a little late posting this, my bad.) we were welcomed to his studio to ask him questions, hear his
story and see some more of his work.
Meeting Edouard in person and just talking
to him was a unique experience. With a rich mixed accent of French, Spanish and
Creole influences, he warmly welcomed us in and answered all of our questions.
He laughed and joked and was very open about his experiences and work.
The
second he started talking I thought of a million questions I wanted to ask him:
How did he create those sparkly pieces of art? Where did he get his
inspiration? How did he plan out an exhibit? The questions kept coming, and he
was willing to answer them all. I discovered that he made those beautiful
pieces of art with glitter glue (he claims he has mastered the art of the
childhood craft). He painted on a metal surface and had aluminum on the top, so
if he “messed up” it would still shine through. He spray painted on the
beautiful colors he needed and then used the most delicate hand to create each
leaf, petal, tree, and flower with sparkly glitter finesse. I could stare at
his work for hours and ended up spending a lot of my time just gazing at the
two pieces of art from that collection that he had in his studio. He also took
us into his back room, which had pieces of art he had collected from India,
Africa, and Latin America.
He was one of those people from whom I felt like I
could learn a great breadth of information, and I was disappointed that we only
had an hour or so with him. He made us promise to come back to share our
stories from our summer with him so that we could do some of the talking, and I
really do hope we get to see him again.
-Meghan
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