La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Through exploring the material culture of coloniality
Belle creates narratives from fragments and silences. Working in a variety of disciplines her practice
includes: painting, installation, photography, writing, video and public interventions. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK) with large solo exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (SC) and the National Nordic Museum (WA). Her art is in the collections of the National Photography Museum and the Vestsjælland Museum in Denmark and the National Gallery of Art and the Virgina Fine Art Museum in the U.S. She is the co-creator of I Am Queen Mary, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. The project was featured in over 100 media outlets around the world including the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, the BBC and Le Monde. Her work has also been written about in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Small Axeand numerous journals and books.
Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and BA from
Columbia University in NY. She was a finalist for the She Built NYC project to develop a monument to
memorialize the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and for the Inequality in Bronze project in Philadelphia to
redesign one of the first monuments to an enslaved woman at the Stenton historic house museum. As a
2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women at Columbia
University she researched the citizenless Virgin Islanders in the Harlem Renaissance. She is a founding
member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO). Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.