Kathia St. Hilaire: Invisible Empires
In the summer of 2024, the Clark’s Lunder Center hosts an exhibition of artist Kathia St. Hilaire (b. 1995, West Palm Beach, Florida), in her first solo museum presentation outside her home state. St. Hilaire produces highly worked figurative scenes on shaped, unstretched canvas through a relief printing technique that relies on a patchwork of inked linoleum panels. She then adds collage elements to the surface of these images, including fabric, foil, jewelry, and beauty products to produce a unique surface texture. The artist, who grew up in a Haitian diasporic community in South Florida, represents both historical events and legends from Vodou mythology with a visual language that she has described as magical realist. St. Hilaire’s newest body of work focuses on the so-called “Banana Wars”, conflicts prosecuted by the United States in the Caribbean and Latin America in the first quarter of the twentieth century that have, for the artist, shaped culture and geopolitics to this day.
This exhibition is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Robert Wiesenberger, curator of contemporary projects at the Clark, and Tyler Blackwell, curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky.