Fabiola Jean-Louis

Born in Port Au Price, Haiti, Fabiola Jean-Louis immigrated to New York at two years of age. She attended the High School of Fashion Industries and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, going on to experiment with a variety of media in her work. The artist spent hours in New York museums, gazing at Old Master portraits of European royalty, noting that there were no women of color in them. Inspired by history, her Afro-Caribbean background, and the Black Lives Matter movement, Jean-Louis mixes sculpture, performance and photography in her elaborately designed pieces that re-imagine history.

These are both part of her series, Rewriting History. Women gaze out from their Baroque settings, wearing period paper gowns, hand crafted by the artist, that appear to be made of luxurious silks. Woven into each portrait are references to the artist’s, and Haiti’s, African heritage as well as to the reality of racially based violence that persists until today. The fragility of the paper dresses alludes to the vulnerability of the black body. Described as “visual activism,’ Jean-Louis’ works are simultaneously lavish yet boldly challenging.

Jean-Louis is an emerging artist and has been in exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago and at the Andrew Freedman Home in New York. Her work was commissioned to be part of the AfroFuturist Period Room, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.