Some of the best art in Brooklyn this week isn’t in a museum and doesn’t cost anything. Haiti Cultural Exchange is presenting the Lakou NOU Culminating Expo Showcase, a free week-long exhibition of work by four Haitian artists-in-residence, on view June 21 through June 28 at 1120 Washington Avenue in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.
The work was made differently from a standard gallery show. The Lakou NOU residency has its artists build their projects with community members rather than alone in a studio, so the pieces carry the histories and inner lives of Brooklyn neighborhoods that rarely make it onto a wall. The organizers call this placekeeping: care, family, and a community’s relationship to the places it calls home.
The four projects are rooted in specific neighborhoods. Bo Dautruche’s “anvan ou bliye // before it’s too late” is a community altar exploring death and grief in East Flatbush. Georgie Exinord’s “Take A Seat” is an interactive memory installation about remembrance in Flatbush. Cici Osais made textile works in collaboration with community members in the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust gardens in Crown Heights. And Zarita Zevallos built an installation about spirituality, labor, and community responsibility through participant-made photographs documenting Canarsie. Together they cover a Haitian Brooklyn that spans half the borough.
The expo is co-presented with Kafou Gallery, a recently opened Haitian-owned and operated gallery founded by Lakou NOU alum Stephanie Pierre. That puts the show inside a Haitian arts community building its own spaces and pipelines in Brooklyn.
If you want to see community-made art for free, go. The showcase event is June 21, with a chance to meet the artists and experience the interactive projects, and the exhibition runs through June 28 at 1120 Washington Avenue. The event is about the neighborhoods it’s shown in, made with the people who live there.
Featured image: Courtesy haiticulturalx.org
