WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute's newest exhibition "Invisible Empires" will run through Sept. 22 in the galleries of the Lunder Center at Stone Hill. 

 

Artist Kathia St. Hilaire uses mixed mediums, including printmaking, painting, collage, and weaving, to explore the lost Haitian history and culture she has heard as tales told by her parents and investigates how imperialism persists today in subtler forms. 

 

In her work, St. Hilaire uses various materials, including "beauty products," such as skin lighteners, industrial metal, fabric, and tires. She brings to life the lost history while drawing inspiration from Haitian vodou flags. 

 

St. Hilaire is informed from her experiences growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida and being raised by parents who immigrated to the United States from Haiti. 

 

Her work depicts historical moments, including the Haitian revolution, French colonialism, foreign interventions in the Caribbean, and the banana massacre in , and brings to life forgotten historical figures, including Rosalvo Bobo, Benoît Batraville, and Charlemagne Péralte, and integrates them with legends of Haiti's leaders. 

 

The stories that St. Hilaire tells are personal, "familial about the diasporic communities in which she was raised," and national "about the first free black Republican world, Haiti, and they are international pertaining to the "wider region, the Caribbean, Latin America, areas in which the United States has taken a great interest in, to put it lightly in historical terms," curator Robert Wiesenberger said. 

 

The way she narrates these stories together and depicts the effect they have on the present is an "unbelievable craft," he said.