An Introduction to Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions from the Creole & Maroon Caribbean & Amazonia

Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research announces An Introduction to Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions from the Creole and Maroon Caribbean and Amazonia: Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane and Haiti: 2001-Now, on view at the Alain Locke Gallery of African & African American Art, from September 28, 2026, to June 5, 2027. Curated by Claire Tancons, curator, scholar, and founding director of EXTEMPORA, at the invitation of Cécile Fromont, Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Faculty Director of the Alain Locke Gallery, Van Lévé brings together for the first time a transhistorical and transgenerational perspective on the last twenty-five years of artistic production from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, and Haiti, from France’s landmark recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity in 2001 to today.

Organized from a uniquely Caribbean perspective, Van Lévé asks how contemporary Caribbean—and Amazonian-French artists both at home, in mainland France, and abroad, manage the strictures of French national identity while bringing a new sense of agency to the multistranded intellectual, historical, and artistic legacies they stand to disseminate on their own terms? What can the visions they form from the embers of an old colonial model, and the blazes of a new imperial order tell us about political sovereignty and artistic autonomy when Caribbean geopolitics have been largely upended? 

Looking toward the future that the works in this exhibition gesture toward, Tancons asks: "Might the sovereign visions projected by the artists of Van Lévé traversed by the tensions between the breeze of the trade winds and the gusts of hurricanes, where postcard beauty, natural catastrophe, and political agony can build up a storm, delineate the contours of Caribbean futurity?". 

Van Lévé answers by elaborating upon art historical lineages, enduring regional artistic transmission, and collective  visions of self-determination. It features the work of contemporary artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Franky Amété, Raphaël Barontini, Minia Biabiany, Jean-Marc Bullet, Ernest Breleur, Gaëlle Choisne, Ronald Cyrille, Kenny Dunkan, Arthur Francietta, Gwladys Gambie, David Gumbs, Clémence Lollia Hilaire, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Louisa Marajo, Tessa Mars, Manuel Mathieu, Jimmy Robert, Cédrine Scheidig, and Hervé Télémaque as well as rarely seen historical Caribbean- and Amazonian- French objects borrowed from Harvard Art Museums, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and Hamilton College. The exhibition design is signed by Gia Wolff Studio. Van Lévé also marks the premiere of a sonic meditation on Caribbean futurity by Michael Roch and Jordan Beal. Tancons conceives the exhibition as an introduction to a wider curatorial and editorial project supported by the Ford Foundation. 

On September 29, at the Hutchins Center, Professor Fromont will moderate a panel featuring Tancons in conversation with Professor Tao Leigh Goffe (Hunter College of the City University of New York) and Professor Oliver Wunsch (Boston College).

This exhibition is supported by the Alain Locke Gallery; EXTEMPORA; Villa Albertine;  the Trampoline Association; Direction des Affaires Culturelles, Région Martinique; Direction des Affaires Culturelles, Région Guadeloupe.

About Claire Tancons
Claire Tancons is a curator and scholar invested in discursive and curatorial investigations of the postcolonial, inflected by a diasporic historical consciousness. She has been a curator in and of contemporary art biennials and festivals, from Prospect.1 New Orleans and Gwangju Biennale 08 among others, to Sharjah Biennial 14 and, more recently, Nuit Blanche (2024) Her adjacent focus on civic rituals, public ceremonial culture and carnival, recently anthologized in the Routledge Companion to Performance Art (2026), has unfolded in projects ranging from En Mas’ Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (2012 Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award, with Krista Thompson) to Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (under the direction of Anselm Franke et al, 2022). Tancons has received grants from the Prince Claus Fund, the Warhol Foundation, Creative Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Born and raised in Guadeloupe, she currently resides in Paris.