Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition volume published for the eponymous show that ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2023, stands as a major contribution to the contemporary scholarship on the work of Haitian artists. Other examples over the past several decades published in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions include Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (2022), Haïti: deux siècles de création artistique (2014), Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012), In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haiti (2012), and the disciplinary cornerstone of this era of scholarship, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995). Each of these texts positions their included work as examples that destabilize totalizing visions of “Haitian art” held by a previous generation’s worth of histories of Haitian art. While The Work of Radiance shares with these efforts an interdisciplinary combination of art history, cultural studies, and anthropology, the volume’s status as the first monograph devoted solely to the work of a Haitian woman artist provides a much-needed intervention in the field. By moving away from a semi-comprehensive group-show format, the contributors distill a diverse range of art practices in Haiti into a more focused examination of one artist’s contributions and how her practice fits into deeper narratives of visual arts production in the country, as well as within the African diaspora.

As with other publications devoted to the work of Haitian visual artists, the interdisciplinary approach of The Work of Radiance becomes necessary when considering Constant’s multidimensional practice as a mixed-media textile artist and its roots in the sacred material culture of Haitian Vodou. Each of the volume’s contributors provides a focused analytical framework to discuss Constant and her work. Editors Katherine Smith and Jerry Philogene, who also contributed essays and cocurated the exhibition, include a breadth of authors in the book whose perspectives offer deep considerations to the significance of their subject. In the first chapter, Gina Athena Ulysse, a Haitian American professor of feminist studies, platforms Constant’s own words through direct quotes from conversations and interviews to engage with sociopolitical and historical issues central to the lived experiences of Haitians at home and in the diaspora. In the second chapter, Smith, an accomplished scholar and curator of Haitian sacred arts, articulates how Vodou lwa (gods, spirits, saints, or angels), speak to aspects of gender and labor, life and death, in the artist’s own life and artistic practice, but also within a larger Haitian cultural and historical context. For the third chapter, Patrick A. Polk, the senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts at the Fowler who has written and curated extensively on the textile-based medium of drapo (flags) that Constant has revolutionized, excavates the historical, transcultural pathways of Constant’s visual motifs. He identifies many 18th- and 19th-century visual sources that circulated within Haiti and the transatlantic world, which informed and responded to the republic’s colonial, revolutionary, and postindependence eras, including motifs derived from Freemasonry and Catholicism, showing Constant’s acuity in activating historical complexities within her body of work. For her contribution to the fourth chapter, Jerry Philogene situates Constant’s work among other artists of the African diaspora who “beseech us to remember their broader transnational, political, and spiritual significance and offer new paradigms for understanding the effective and affective power of images that create a future filled with Black life” (116). By connecting themes in Constant’s work to the work of other contemporary artists in the African diaspora, such as Belkis Ayón (Cuba), Kerry James Marshall (USA), and Ebony G.  Patterson (Jamaica), Philogene pierces potential assumptions about Haiti’s cultural exclusivity and “uniqueness” when it comes to the visual arts. Finally, in the fifth and final chapter, Emilie C. Boone, a scholar specializing in photography and visual culture in the African diaspora, connects formal and conceptual qualities in both photography and Constant’s multimedia work, especially the use and deployment of light. Each author’s contribution illustrates a wide range of questions and implications for readers and audiences to consider when encountering Constant’s work. The editors deftly balance an approach that considers a vast network of interpretive possibilities while never losing sight of Constant’s own personal and individual accomplishments as an artist.

Central to the significance of Constant’s work are her transformations within the medium of drapo. Traditionally, these banners have been integral ceremonial elements in Haitian Vodou practice. While the form has undergone many transformations (mostly to suit the needs of practitioners, but also in response to demands from a collector’s market that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s), typical drapo are lavishly embellished with beads, sequins, and other mixed media incorporating specific images, symbols, and motifs associated with the lwa. In their ceremonial context, they effectively act as conduits to invite and evoke the presence and participation of the lwa. Indeed, Constant consistently depicts figural and symbolic representations of the Vodou pantheon in a variety of contexts that are far more ornate and richly narrative than their strictly Vodou antecedents. As Constant has pushed the dimensions of her work to a near-monumental scale, and the immense amount of material she incorporates (the resulting weight of which prevents portability), her innovations on more “traditional” visual aspects of the flags have challenged the categorization of her work to the point where she associates her creations with larger-format media such as tapestry or painting. Constant herself acknowledges the categorical shift her work demands, remarking, “As you can see, they are not in the dimensions of flags [drapo] anymore. They are so big; they deserve another name because they are not flags” (55). While neither she nor the other contributors to the publication propose a new name for her medium, there seems to be no set agreement regarding categorical verbiage. Some avoid “drapo” altogether to describe her work, while others retain the outmoded designation of “Vodou flags,” which tends to reduce the interpretive possibilities her innovations invite within the more limited realm of sacred arts. While this is a relatively minor critique, it points to the challenges that still face scholars and curators when attempting to break interpretive molds of an earlier era when addressing the work of Haitian visual artists.

Both the monumental size of Constant’s works and the dynamic play of light on their surfaces can only truly be grasped in situ, yet the artist’s virtuosic technique is superbly captured in the book’s photography. The editors took great care to include close-up shots of the surface of the works to capture the luminescent resplendence of materials referenced in the book’s title. Furthermore, these images allow the reader to apprehend the meticulous, labor-intensive technique where beads and sequins of varying sizes, shapes, and colors are hand-sewn over preparatory drawings made on textile substrates. Of the several remarkable innovations that Constant has brought to the medium, the tambour (drum) stitch is one that allows for such densely layered scenes in her work. As we are reminded in several of the essays, Constant learned this technique as a young woman in Haiti employed in a wedding dress factory, one of many foreign-owned light manufacturing operations that proliferated in the country at the time. After she quit over low pay and bad working conditions, she transferred this skill to making drapo (which was traditionally produced by men) gradually increasing the size and complexity of her works to transcend the specificities of that medium. Such biographical details speak not only to Constant’s accomplishments as an individual artist (and a woman) but also situate her within the larger, modern, socioeconomic, and political context of Haiti as a country at the margins of globalized industrial forces. Furthermore, this speaks to the effectiveness that a monographic approach can have in illustrating much broader concepts and themes at work on a transnational level, which each essay writer in the volume tackles from various angles.

Much of the text in Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance alludes to the challenges to the organization of the exhibition posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the assassination of the then-president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse. The resulting increase in violence and instability in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, further stalled the production and shipment of the work, since Constant’s atelier, which employs a relatively large number of studio assistants, was located nearby. In light of these difficulties, the exhibition’s successful implementation is an incredible achievement and the result of a truly collaborative effort between the artist and organizers. While political and social turmoil continues in Haiti, publications and exhibitions like The Work of Radiance serve as crucial evidence of the cultural achievements of Haitians, declarations of agency and humanity that rise above the headlines of destitution and hardship that have lingered around understandings of their country for so long.