Fabiola Jean-Louis on the Art of Black Liberation

Fabiola Jean-Louis was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti on September 10th, 1978 and moved as a child to Brooklyn, NY, where she’s currently based. She studied at the School of Fashion Industries in New York and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh; she now works in a variety of media—including sculpture, photography, ceramic, and film. Her Afro Surrealist work frequently explores spirituality, history, and the expansive complexities of Blackness. 
 

Jean-Louis has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) inNew York City, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her work has been exhibited at DuSable Museum of African American History, the Gardner Museum, and Andrew Freedman Home. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned a paper sculpture for a two year exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. It debuted on November 5th, 2021—making her the first Haitian, female artist to show in the prestigious institution, which also exhibited her remarkable paper dress sculpture Justice of Ezili through late 2024. Jean-Louis exhibited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum most recently in fall 2023 with Fabiola Jean-Louis: Rewriting History.

Arielle Gray is a journalist, writer, and artist currently based in Boston. She is a reporter at WBUR, Boston's NPR station, where she covers Black and brown communities through the lens of art and culture. Her audio journalism and creative practice examine the spaces that thrive beneath the humus of Western hegemony—she believes this is where we find possibility and creation. Her writing has appeared in NPR, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Boston Art Review, VICE, and ZORA Magazine and her artwork has been featured in the Boston Globe and Boston Art Review. She is the co-founder of Print Ain't Dead, a Black book space and text-based art collective in Boston. In 2022, Arielle conceived and executed the Future Archive Project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a community audio and photography exhibition highlighting Black LGBTQIA+ individuals in the Boston area. In 2021, she co-curated Combahee's Radical Call, a multi-modal exhibit exploring Black feminism in Boston at the Boston Center for the Arts. She is a 2020 Create Well Fund awardee and a 2021 A4A artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Luminary artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where she explored the possibilities of audio in storytelling.