La Vaughn Belle

La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Borrowing from elements of architecture, history and archaeology Belle creates narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. Belle explores the material culture of coloniality and her work presents counter visualities and narratives. Working in a variety of disciplines her practice includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the RoyalCopenhagen. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba),the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK). Herart is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark. She is the co-creator of I Am QueenMary, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted theDanish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of theAfrican people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC and Le Monde. Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from Columbia University inNY. She was a finalist for the She Built NYC project to develop a monument tomemorialize the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and for the Inequality in Bronze project in Philadelphia to redesign one of the first monuments to an enslaved woman at the Stenton historic house museum. As a 2018-2020 fellow at the SocialJustice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women at ColumbiaUniversity she researched the ‘citizenless’ Virgin Islanders in the HarlemRenaissance. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled How toSurvive Colonial Nostalgia. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

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