Myrlande Constant

(Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1968 - )

Haitian

Myrlande Charles Constant is a pioneering Haitian textile artist whose works reflect the country’s distinctive history and culture through the syncretic religion of Vodou, which is itself a mixture of West African religion, Central African Religion, and Catholicism. The Haitian writer Évelyne Trouillot has observed: “Diving into Myrlande Constant’s shimmering and amazing world, I found fragments of my country. Haiti’s sequins of life, Haiti’s changing pearls, brightly colored Haiti, Haiti’s mosaics of pain and struggles. Multiple, complex, and irrepressible Haiti… There is an epic and majestic dimension to Myrlande Constant’s flags, not only because of their gigantic size, but also due to the complex gaze they offer us on ourselves.” 

 

Constant was born on June 18, 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to Jeanne Constant and Jean Alfred Sanon. She was raised by her mother, a seamstress who worked in a factory that made wedding dresses and beaded appliqué. From a young age, Constant helped her mother with small beaded piecework that she would bring home from work. When she was 14, she began working in the same factory, with her mother. She quit this job six years later, shortly before the factory closed amid a wage dispute with management. Constant married Wilfred Charles, and together they had five children. 

 

After Constant left her job at the factory, an artist friend encouraged her to try painting as a vocation. She was inspired to try “painting with bead,” as she describes her textile work. Constant began sketching Catholic saints on canvas and then beading the images. These images of saints are commonly recognized to also represent lwa (spirits) of the Afro-Haitian religion Vodou. For example, the first work that Constant sold was a portrait of Saint Patrick, who is recognized in Vodou as the spirit of snakes and ancestral wisdom. Like many Haitians, Constant’s mother was pluralistic in her faith, identifying as Catholic while also serving the lwa. While Constant developed familiarity with Vodou as she grew up, when she began her career as an artist, she sought more formal instruction from her father, a well-known oungan (Vodou priest) in the region of Léogâne. Her father’s instruction is reflected in her detailed depictions of rites, regalia, and myths associated with different lwa. 

 

Constant’s use of beads and the intricately rendered content of her works are innovations to the existing tradition of drapo Vodou (Vodou flags). Vodou flags stem from a longer history of martial banners in the Atlantic world. Formally, many traditional flags resemble Napoleonic standards used in colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Vodou temples commonly have a pair of flags that are used in important ceremonies to greet the lwa. Typically the most extravagant part of a temple’s regalia, flags may be embellished with sequins and embroidery. Since the mid-twentieth century, a handful of workshops in Port-au-Prince have also made flags as commodities for foreign tourist and art markets. 

 

Flag artists typically supervise several apprentices who help execute their designs. Sometimes these apprentices go on to establish their own workshops and create their own artworks. When Constant opened her workshop, she employed former workers from the wedding dress factory. Some of her first employees have since gone on to become established artists working in the same technique. These artists include Roudy Azor, Amina Simeon, Mireille Delice, Evelyn Alcide, and Fils LaFleur. As Katherine Smith and Jerry Philogene put it, “She has not only revolutionized traditional drapo Vodou through her technique and imagery, but also created a place—a gathering space—where young women and men can pursue this art form.” Vodou flags typically feature saints or a vèvè (a symbol representing a lwa) rendered in sequins. However, the technique of beading Constant learned in the factory and then introduced to the flag tradition allowed for greater possibilities of representation. She uses a technique called the “tanbou stitch” (drum stitch) because the fabric that the beads are sewn onto is stretched taut on a frame. Using beads, rather than sequins, allows for greater detail. Early in her career Constant realized that she could use this technique to make flags that conveyed narratives, elaborate rituals, and detailed homages to lwa. As a result, Vittoria Benzine credits Constant as “the first drapo artist who dared to layer beads intricately enough to formulate narratives.” Her beaded works are much heavier and often larger than traditional sequined flags and are therefore not practical for use in ceremonies. Her works are still referred to as drapo or flags, though scholars have occasionally questioned the appropriateness of these terms given their painterly quality, their distinctness from ceremonial forms, and their intended use in non-ceremonial contexts. 

 

As the scenes Constant depicted became more elaborate, she filled larger canvases. By the end of the 1990s, her works were much larger than traditional forms, at times exceeding 5 feet in length. Bitasyon (Familial Land), one of her largest works, is nearly 15 feet in length. It depicts a family’s ancestral homestead as it brings together the living and deceased to give thanks to their ancestral spirits under the canopy of a sacred mapou (silk cotton tree). In Constant’s work, as Trouillot writes, “…nature goes hand in hand with rituals and human activity. Nature reveals itself in an enchanting splendor, a far cry from reality’s often arid images.”

 

Before Constant began her career as an artist, male artists had dominated the commercial flag-making field. She was the first female textile artist to open a workshop and the first to gain international recognition for her work. Constant has spoken publicly about the role of other women in encouraging her work. She acknowledges her mother as her primary artistic and spiritual influence. Most of her earliest collectors and patrons were women. She credits the photographer Maggie Steber, filmmaker Kathleen Kean, and anthropologist and art historian Marilyn Houlberg for supporting her early in her career. Although her work has gained recognition abroad, she has stated publicly that she believes her work has not received greater support in Haiti because she is a woman. Smith and Philogene write that “Though never referring to herself as a ‘feminist artist,’ Constant has reformulated an art form that did not include women and now, as a creative leader of a thriving atelier, provides economic stability, sustenance, and mentorship to a community of artists regardless of gender.”

 

Since the early 1990s, her work has been exhibited in Brazil, France, Jamaica, England, Italy and the United States. In 2012, Constant was commissioned by the UCLA Fowler Museum and the Greene Foundation to complete a piece titled Haiti madi 12 janvye 2010 (Haiti, Tuesday, 12 January 2010). This marked a new direction in her work because it addressed religious themes through the depiction of an historical event. Haiti madi 12 janvye 2010 measures roughly 8 feet by 8 feet and portrays Port-au-Prince and its cemetery immediately after the devastating earthquake that took place on its titular date. 

 

In 2018, Constant's drapo were featured in the groundbreaking Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince exhibit at Pioneer works, in Brooklyn. In December 2019 Constant's work was featured in the Faena Festival in Miami, which coincided with the annual Art Basel Miami art fair. In 2022 Constant was one of two living Haitian artists featured in the Venice Biennale. Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, a solo exhibition devoted to her work at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, opened in March, 2023—the first major retrospective in the United States for a contemporary Haitian female artist.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

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