Vladimir Cybil Charlier
New York, NY
Mirroring her personal trajectory, Vladimir Cybil Charlier’s work engages the complex cultural dynamics linking The Caribbean and The United States and how these are manifested within the physical space her art practice inhabits. Born in New York City of Haitian parents. Cybil attended school in Haiti spending her summers in New York, a ‘reverse’ immigration trip that still continually informs her practice.
Residing in New York since 1986, she earned a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1993 and that same year attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1997.
Cybil has participated at the Biennial del Caribe in the Dominican Republic, the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador, the Panama Biennial and the 2006 Venice Biennial. Recent shows include The Grand Palais, in Paris. Relational Undercurrents at MOLA, Bordering the Imaginary at BRIC House, Caribbean Crossroad at the Perez Museum, in Miami.
What happens to a dream Deferred
Serigraph over giclée
My practice consists of two–dimensional mixed media pieces and site-specific installations. The work engages both the Caribbean and American cultural landscape both in its content and materiality. I like to marry the language of painting and drawing with elements that reference traditional arts and crafts.
I have repeatedly engaged and woven the iconography of African-derived religions with personal, historical, and colonial narratives.
I want to open a space where personal and collective memories can be revisited as places of cultural resistance and resilience but also as a door to the universality of my and the viewer's experience.
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