A time for collective healing, with artist Madjeen Isaac

BROOKLYN – About this time in fall 2023, artist Madjeen Isaac was getting ready to start an exciting studio residency at Smack Mellon when she received an unexpected health diagnosis.

Gobsmacked, the 28-year-old painter and sculptor, turned to her art and her family for comfort and support as she sought treatment and began the recovery process. Isaac captures the year in her exhibit — “Come as you are, This is our battle too.”

“That’s what my brother told me when they found out,” said Isaac, the first-born in a family of three siblings, explaining the inspiration for the show’s title. 

“This time last year, I was personally grieving,” Isaac said during an interview at the exhibit. “But now, it feels like we are collectively grieving, given the current times. We’re more equipped than we realize, and it just calls on leaning onto our communities for help.” 

Part of that support comes in the form of art. For Isaac — whose work explores ideas of home, community and belonging — the contribution comes through “hybridizing worlds,” as she calls it, to reflect shared diasporic experiences.

In her first solo exhibit, Isaac aims to bring her ideals of community, communalism and lakou, a tradition of communal living with a strong extended family, traditionally joined by a courtyard. She tries to recreate that sense of coming together in a shared space, in hopes it’ll lead to conversations that can bring healing.

The works themselves blend elements of Isaac’s Haitian and American experiences, knowledge of the culture, and the landscapes of both worlds onto canvas and sculptures. The juxtaposition of red brick pre-war buildings from her childhood in Flatbush and lush tropical plants from her visits to Haiti in years past as a community garden-style depiction somehow make sense.

This is no small feat.

Often, some Haitian American artists’ attempts at blending scenes from both worlds can be so bold or cluttered, they can come off as unrecognizable and border on the garish, to be frank. 

Perhaps because Isaac is trained in fine art — she holds a  BFA from The Fashion Institute of Technology and an MA in Art education and community from New York University and is a recent recipient of BRIClab’s Contemporary Art Residence Program — her work centers one or two key elements in each piece in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the eye. 

Isaac’s choices of elements and objects to portray are careful, some might say “authentic.” Her flags that hang overhead, for one, are made from a variety of clothes or objects familiar in a Haitian American household. Burlap sacks, school uniform plaid, plastic grocery bags — they’re all so familiar.

In a show of her works’ universal resonance, Smack Mellon decided to present her pieces while she was completing the residency program. Vera Steinberg, curator and director of exhibitions, said Isaac hit her stride over the past year by touching on a subject matter that is both personal and has a communal feel to it. The location and gardens made people feel like they were at home, Steinberg said.

During the show’s opening, Isaac’s mom, a nurse, brought her colleagues to see her daughter’s work. The questions from the group about all the different pieces, the effort she put in and the various elements highlighted the type of conversations Isaac is hoping to cultivate through her art. 

Two days after the election, visitor John S. Berman wandered into the gallery to view the exhibit.

“It captures this idea of ’how do you build community, how do you create it, what does it mean, what is it about,” Berman, who writes about art, said. 

“It’s very affirming work, at a time when so many of us are struggling with the way this country is moving with such overt xenophobia and racism that was often hidden, but is now outwardly supported.”

“This work contradicts it, which is so moving and what we need right now,” Berman added.

The show is open through Sunday, November 17 at Smack Mellon in Dumbo. 

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A time for collective healing, with artist Madjeen Isaac was first posted on November 15, 2024 at 1:38 pm.