Tuesday, March 31, 2026, 6:30 p.m.

EFA Gallery is pleased to present a panel discussion as part of our current exhibition, Watson Mere: The Forces (March 18, 2026 – April 1, 2026), curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone. Watson Mere joins Grenadian artist Billy Gérard Frank, Haitian priest and artist Gwan Bwa, artist and healer Makini Armand, and curator Jesse Firestone in a conversation examining the unstable boundary between art object and ritual object. Together, they will explore how Caribbean spiritual practices and artistic movements, often born from resistance, challenge Western frameworks of authorship, spectatorship, and circulation.

The French once described Haiti as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” a colonial nickname born of the island’s immense agricultural wealth and natural beauty. Yet pearls are formed through irritation. Likewise, contemporary Haitian culture has emerged through histories of domination and extraction, giving rise to complex spiritual, political, and artistic forces across Haiti and the wider Caribbean. It is rumored that the Haitian Revolution itself began with the invocation of Vodou spirits. What was once admired as pure beauty became, at once, an irritant to oppressors and a glimmer of liberation to others.

Taking this paradox as a point of departure, A Giant Amongst Monsters considers the immense power embedded within Caribbean artistic and spiritual practices in the face of social and political destruction.

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Free and open to the public.
RSVP encouraged.