New Additions: Vladimir Cybil Charlier

New Additions is a series of interviews with artists whose work was newly acquired in the Studio Museum's permanent collection. This conversation features artist Vladimir Cybil Charlier in conversation about her work Billie Zulie. You can read or listen to the conversation below. ​ 

Habiba Hopson: 

We actually spoke and met a year ago when your work first entered the collection. In a way, I think that conversation kind of sparked this curiosity of starting this series, which speaks with artists whose works are new additions, so thank you for that conversation. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me today here. I'd love to begin this conversation by discussing your background in visual arts.  

Vladimir Cybil Charlier: 

I think at thirteen I started taking lessons, and I went to Queens College at CUNY and started training as an oil painter. By the third year, I had started incorporating some 3D elements in my work. One painting had a panel that opened up with a latch. Then, I transitioned straight to a master's program at SVA, and by the end of my first semester, I was having some pretty severe allergies to solvents and to oil paint. So, here I was in a master's program and having to reinvent what I did. 

I started experimenting with many materials, and I had a lot of teachers who were very supportive. Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt. Alison Saar, that's where we met, and she became a bit of a mentor for quite a bit, and we found each other in Skowhegan [School of Painting & Sculpture] also the summer after I left [SVA]. I went straight up to Skowhegan, and she was one of the professors there.  

HH: 

That allergy you had almost propelled you, forced you to give [oil painting] up or to think about other mediums and other materials to put into your work. Also, great to hear that Alison Saar was someone that you worked closely with, and I think in many ways your works speak alongside each other. 

I would love to hear a bit about your ties to Haiti and to New York. You were born in Queens, New York, to Haitian parents and then grew up between Port-au-Prince and New York. What about this duality, the United States and the Caribbean, informs your work?  

VCC: 

I may have thought initially about it as a duality, but quickly it became a dialogue really, and it's really in the space in between those two geographic spaces, in the dialogue itself, that the energy and the exchange really reside. If I look at the arc of my career and the different series, whether they're mixed media, installation, sculptures, or painting, my focus has always been how to develop a diasporic language rooted from where I was geographically at the time. 

When I was at the Studio Museum, I created an installation called In Between Waters (Endezo) That idea of in-between-ness really started coalescing then. And I have used that title many times afterward, sometime in Haitian Creole. The idea that in between, the in-between-ness itself has validity and those spaces could be next to each other. 

HH: 

That's beautiful. To me, that spoke to this idea of uniting differences and the beauty that resides within embracing the ways in which one [culture] informs the other rather than thinking of them as separate. My parents are from Zambia, but I was born in the US, and duality insinuates a bit of strife between the two, a bit of struggling to be this or that. But settling within the middle and embracing both sides yields a dialogue. 

VCC: 

I think there's flow. As I was moving my studio a year and a half ago, I found slides of the labels at the Studio Museum in my end-of-program show. I wanted to have trilingual labels, and I went back and forth with the curators for several weeks about introducing two other languages besides English on the labels. I was so adamant that in the end it was accepted, but it was such a victory that when the show was documented, I had the labels documented, because they had become quite significant in terms of letting those different realities cohabit.  

HH: 

Wow. I was actually just looking back at the brochure from your Artist-in-Residence exhibition with June [Clark] and Gregory [Coates]. I'd love it if you were able to walk us through a day in your life as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum, thinking back through that time period and your artistic development and what you were conceiving at that time. How did the residency serve as an incubator of your artistic development?  

VCC: 

I think that “incubator” is the right word because ideas really started crystallizing and were fully explored later. When I came in, I started walking around the neighborhood, and I had not been in Harlem on a regular basis since my childhood. My parents had a theater group that rehearsed in the basement of the French House at Columbia University, so a lot of time was spent in my early childhood zooming from Queens through 125th to the Columbia campus. It took a few weeks to remember that. I started walking around the neighborhood and shooting images of the fire escapes. I was fascinated by the wrought iron design, which reminded me of some of the designs I had seen in the Caribbean, in Haiti. 

I started doing some research and learned that a lot of the blacksmiths had indeed come from the Caribbean, sometimes not willfully, gone to the South or were transported to the South if they didn't migrate on their own accord, and from there made their way north. So, I started incorporating the fire escape design with some historical imagery I had shot in Haiti from my first trip. 

In between developing that series, I also was managing a pretty serious health crisis when I was at the residency. That emerged kind of midway through, and June and I started chatting about collaborating on a piece. The subway maps that were in the subway stopped at 96th Street, so if you were going beyond 96th Street, you needed to make a note ahead of time, because you wouldn't be able to check your location. And forget about the Bronx; that didn’t exist [on the maps] at all. We decided to do an installation that emphasized the upper part of Manhattan and put 125th as Midtown, which is geographically really what it is. 

We created little altars that dealt with our backgrounds. June is from Harlem and saw everything from fire escapes. The question to myself was, "Well, what if the gods landed in Harlem? What would they look like?" So, I created the first three of that whole series. It was Billie Holiday as Erzulie, Malcolm X as Ogun, the god of war, and Miles Davis, which was three little hats, and on each of the hats was “Birth of the Cool,” as the lord of the underworld, Baron Samdi.  

HH: 

Wow. I remember you telling us about this issue of the subway map, which I find so wild, but also indicative of the politics of the city. Who is visible, who's not visible, who's considered part of this city, and who's not? Right? But thinking practically about where Midtown actually is, it's interesting to think about Harlem as the midtown of the city that stretches up to the Bronx and down to Lower Manhattan. Wonderful. I want to talk more about Billie Zulie. We recently photographed the work, and we photographed the box as well. I would love for you to walk us through both the box itself and your process of making it.  

VCC: 

I started with the painting part. I created a little cloth piece, a painting, and it's all diluted acrylics, basically, with markers and beads and sequins. I had been using beads and sequins as cultural markers, a nod to the Vodou flags.  

I have to backtrack a little bit, because that whole series is really based on using images as decoys, and it's a practice that's really an act of resistance and spiritual and cultural survival, because both pre- and post-independence in many of the Caribbean islands and in Haiti and in South America, the enslaved African and their descendants were not allowed to openly practice Afrodiasporic religion, like Vodou, Candomblé, Santería. So, they started using a lot of images of the saints since there's so much decorum. In Haiti, it was Catholicism, so there was an abundance of images of saints and of imagery, as decoys to represent the different deities. 

It's not always the case that the images are saints. Sometimes it's a lay image that, for whatever reason, becomes a stand-in for the deity. One of the ones that I find most fascinating is the poster of Nastassja Kinski where she's lying down naked with the snake around her that you could find in Vodou temples as representing the snake god Damballa, or the image of a snake charmer. So, there are other images that are not a religious base, but the majority of them are. And in this case, I decided to take the practice one step further and to take it back in a way, and to sew the image, the face of Billie Holiday, as the deity of love in her lover's form. 

HH: 

Wow: the use of images from Catholicism as a way to embody spiritual deities. I think this is such an interesting point that I had no idea about, and I was recently researching, through your work, the image of the Black Madonna that's in a church in Poland.  

VCC: 

Dantor. Erzulie Dantor. And for me, it's Frida. I cast Frida as Dantor in the series. 

HH: 

Going through this process of thinking, being in Harlem, thinking through religion and spirituality, what was the decision to include Billie Holiday in this discussion? 

VCC: 

Billie Holiday's songs feel like they fully embody that idea of the forlorn lover. Once I arrive at the archetype, I always double-check myself and do research after. Billie Holiday's songs come from the heart very much, and a very sad heart very often. She had that incredible presence about herself, too.  

I think that it very much speaks about the process of migration and immigration and what happens to cultures and to identity. If you think about the timeline, identity politics really bloom during that period and right after. My granduncle migrated at the turn of the twentieth century and ended up having a salon during the Harlem Renaissance. Whenever people move to a different place, the culture moves in, and so this is really talking about the flow. If you think about what happened in the process of the transatlantic slave [trade], all the belief and knowledge that traveled to the Caribbean, to the Americas, and to Europe, that is exactly what has happened, where culture gets reinvented as a mean of survival, but also it gets updated. 

HH: 

There's so much you said that can dovetail into so many different conversations around migration, around, again, this idea of dialogue rather than duality. This idea of dialogue, embracing the new culture or sentiment, the new energy that's coming into a place, and rather than look at that as separate, how can that be joined in with what energy is already happening in the place that people are migrating to? I would argue the same, that this has happened since the transatlantic slave trade, certain aspects of culture that derive from the continent being infused into practices happening here in the US or in Europe or in the Caribbean.  

So, it's really interesting to think of this work almost as a portal in some sense. I'm actually curious to hear what your thoughts on that idea is […] because I'm also just thinking about the maneuvering of the box, too, and the sculptural element of this work, being something that you can almost carry with you and place as a reminder or as a method of prayer or as a method of remembrance. 

VCC: 

Yeah, it's a personal altar, for sure. I mean, it was displayed in that installation initially, but it's a personal altar. And I use aluminum because it's the metal that is white, it's the moon, it's female energy. So, the material also echoed that divinity [….] But also, this is a process that happened two ways. If we think about the impact that American music has had on world culture, it is very much the same process. 

HH: 

If I'm remembering correctly, you're now working upstate. What are you thinking about in relation to your practice now and what lies ahead?  

VCC: 

While I was preparing the show for Garner [Arts Center], I was also developing a project for the CAA [College Art Journal], which just came out. It's seven pieces of “The Pantéon.”  

HH: 

For folks that perhaps don't know about “The Pantéon,” do you want to share a little bit about this series? 

VCC: 

I have developed a series of twenty-two prints for "The Pantéon,” my longest-running series, which I started during a residency at the Studio Museum, where I cast heroes and she-roes of the African diaspora and of Africa; I have Nelson and Winnie Mandela in there, as the different deities of Afrodiasporic religion. There are two editions as well as a portfolio that contains all twenty-two images. That's called the Diaspora Vodou Survival Kit. It contains a table of contents poster that has the veves, which are the ritual diagrams symbolic of each deity, as well as a limited edition of ceramics of an ason, and it looks like a gourd on the other side, which I like, because the Gourd was one of the constellations that people look [to] when they need to go north. On one side, it's a gourd, and on the other side, it's the ason, which is the ritual rattle.  

The interesting thing about this “Pantéon,” which is so rooted in those practices, is that when you look at how it has developed, it really is based in a communal energy. It starts in a residency, and then I worked with a master printer, and then I go to Skowhegan, and some of it gets developed there. That's the energy you have […] or that you had traditionally, and you still have in Africa, where the family is so important, and you have the idea of the community that supersedes the individual.  

HH: 

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Cybil. That concludes my questions about your practice and the work, but we do have a series of three questions that we ask all interviewees, which begins with, “How do you start your day?"  

VCC: 

I wake up between 6:00 and 7:00, and I go straight to my meditation chair, and I meditate for about twenty minutes, but sometimes I'll go on. Then I'll do an exercise routine. Right now, I'm doing yoga, Pilates, or a dance routine. I have a new kitten in the house, then I have to run down to feed it. I prepare a smoothie, usually, for breakfast that either I have there, or I bring in the car with me, and prepare my lunch and then head to the studio. So, I give myself time. Now, I'm comfortable getting to the studio between 10:30 and 11:00, and usually, I don't come back down until later on. 

HH: 

Sounds similar to my morning. If you suddenly had access to unrestricted funds and resources, no matter the scale, what is a big project or a big idea that you would love to execute if time and resources allowed? 

VCC: 

I've had a [mid-career] residency idea for many years, which has evolved. I would like to have residency in different communities, immigrant communities, that is craft-based, working with the craft traditions of different populations, not from the Caribbean, from Latin America, from Africa, and from the South of the United States, and really have an integrative space not just for fine artists, but also for people from the community who are masters at creating those craft outside of an art context.  

HH: 

This last question is from Jadé Fadojutimi, who was my previous interviewee: what keeps you up at night? 

VCC: 

What keeps me literally up at night is also what I adore, which is my neighborhood. I live right across from a park, and very often, what keeps me up is people hanging out till one, two in the morning blasting music. I know that she probably meant it more metaphorically. 

HH: 

That literally keeps you up at night.  

VCC: 

Literally keeps me up at night. 

HH: 

In the spirit of also what Jadé had given you, can you please share one question that you'd like for me to ask the next artist? 

VCC: 

How do your past and your present interact in your current work? 

This interview has been edited and condensed.