ART CITIES: N.York-Myrlande Constant

Myrlande Constant is known for her striking beaded and sequin embellished textile artworks. Since the 1990s, Constant’s hand-beaded and sequin-embroidered textiles have reshaped the traditionally male-dominated vernacular art form known as drapo Vodou*. As a teenager in Port-au-Prince, Constant worked alongside her mother at a commercial wedding dress factory, mastering the tambour embroidery technique of threading beads and sequins through fabric. By foregrounding her specialized skills honed in the fashion industry, Constant’s approach to drapo has broken gender barriers and elevated the overlooked creative labor of Haitian female factory workers to the realm of fine art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fort Gansevoort Archive

Myrlande Constant’s works are immediately recognizable through their dynamic variety of materials and distinctive interplays of texture and colors that coalesce into resplendent painterly compositions. Though she considers her artmaking to be rooted in spirituality, Constant does not create her works for the purpose of display in Vodou temples, preferring instead to exhibit them in museums and galleries internationally. Though the current extreme political instability and humanitarian crises of Haiti have slowed her production in recent years, she continues to work amidst the chaos: for Constant, the act of artmaking is a statement of resistance and a gesture toward perseverance. The works at the exhibition “The Spiritual World of Haiti” have been selected to celebrate the evolution of Constant’s personal aesthetic and highlight the technical and formal transformation by which her oeuvre has expanded in intricacy and optical impact. The earliest work on view, a 1990s flag titled “Marinette Bois Chèche”, epitomizes a graphic approach to image-making that characterized Constant’s early engagement with drapo. The title references an unpredictable Haitian Vodou spirit.  According to folklore, “Marinette” was burned alive for fighting against slavery and taking part in the apocryphal Bwa Kayiman** ceremony that initiated the Haitian Revolution. Today, Vodou ceremonies honoring the martyrdom of :Marinette Bwa Chech” typically take place around a large bonfire. Here, Constant’s visual economy is notable; her simplistically rendered subjects, placed on a white background, gather around a solid red fire at the base of a linear palm. Large vèvè symbols, which represent each spirit in the Haitian Vodou religion, flank the left and right side of the flag in an arrangement of balance and symmetry.  Composed primarily with seed and bugle beads—a departure from traditional drapo use of sequins (“Marinette Bois Chèche” highlights Constant’s technical ingenuity and her formal divergence. This flag additionally establishes the artist’s natural inclination toward narrative) a hallmark of her work since the beginning of her career. While Constant has revisited the same spiritual themes over a nearly 35-year period of artmaking, her narratives have evolved dramatically in their sensuality, sophistication, complexity, and scale. The most recently completed work on view in the exhibition, “Devosyon Makaya” is a nearly 12-foot-wide masterwork roughly three years in the making and represents the apex of Constant’s unbridled maximalism and bravura. With its kaleidoscope of colors and textures rendered in an array of beads and sequins applied with the artist’s signature precision, this enormous work depicts the annual Haitian ritual celebration of Makaya as a profound mingling of terrestrial and spiritual worlds.  Taking its name from a native tree that sheds its leaves and initiates a period of revitalization, Makaya is regarded as a time for introspection and spiritual cleansing. Thus, Constant’s flag tells the story of an important period of preparation, renewal, and rebirth, as Vodou practitioners embrace new beginnings and a new year by engaging in acts of natural healing. Incorporated into this work’s decorative border of symbolic objects, a single eye inscribed in a heart with wings sits at the top of the composition. This powerful image represents Gran Mèt, the supreme God of the Haitian Vodou religion, looking down upon the scene. Mystical and omniscient, Constant’s evocation of Gran Mèt is a reminder to the viewer that the terrestrial plane is ever connected to something greater and more powerful.

* The most spectacular Haitian art form is the sequin-covered Drapo Vodou or “Voodoo Flag”. Vodou banners derive directly from the practice of the Vodou religion, a syncretism of traditional African religions brought to Haiti by slaves, with the Catholicism of their former masters. The banners are traditionally the work of practicing vodou priests and their followers. They are displayed in the vodou sanctuaries and are carried at the commencement of a ceremony. The flags are made of shiny silk fabrics to which have been sewn a brilliant mosaic of sequins and beads. A full-size banner typically contains 18,000 to 20,000 sequins.  The densely beaded flags of many of today’s finest artists may take far longer to complete.

** Bois Caïman was the site of the first major meeting of enslaved blacks during which the first major slave insurrection of the Haitian Revolution was planned. Before the Bois Caïman ceremony, Vodou rituals were seen as an event of social gathering where enslaved Africans had the ability to organize. These meetings and opportunities to organize were considered harmless by white slave owners, therefore, they were permitted. It is also argued that Vodou created a more homogeneous black culture in Haiti.

Photo: Myrlande Constant, Ceromine Bois Caiman, Date unkown, Beads and sequins on fabric, 52 x 82 inches, © Myrlande Constant, Courtesy the artist and Fort Gansevoort

Info: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 28/2-26/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com/