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La Vaughn Belle

@lavaughnbelle

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SOLO EXHIBITION-For the Love of Fragile Things @paceuniversityartgallery till Oct 25
Works available: @pentimentigallery @terngallery

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I have been thinking about the Caribbean as an accumulation of times, of things carried across water, things submerged, things entangling even as they break apart.

I invite you to join me for the opening of For the Love of Fragile Things, my solo exhibition at Pace University Art Gallery.

Friday, September 18, 5–7 PM Pace University Art Gallery 41 Park Row, New York
On view September 18–October 25, 2026
@paceuniversityartgallery
#lavaughnbelle #caribbeanart #soloexhibition taken in Pace University by @lavaughnbelle

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a month ago

🏡 Meet “Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial” participant La Vaughn Belle (@lavaughnbelle), a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the often-forgotten colonial narratives embedded in the architecture and material culture of contemporary society.

For the entryway to the museum, Belle designed “The House That Freedoms Built,” three structures inspired by the shapes of 18th-century houses built by formerly enslaved people who negotiated their freedom and were allowed to settle in Christiansted, Saint Croix.

The architectural embellishment known as fretwork adorning each structure is a nod to homes in the town of Frederiksted. The community was the site of the 1878 Fireburn rebellion, an important labor revolt that resulted in much of the town being destroyed. Residents added these fretwork designs to their houses during Frederiksted’s reconstruction.

🔗 Tap the link in our bio to learn more about Belle’s work, which is on view in “Making Home” at Cooper Hewitt through August 2025. taken in Cooper Hewitt by @lavaughnbelle

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There’s still time to experience La Vaughn Belle’s extraordinary exhibition, For the Love of Fragile Things, on view through October 25. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12:30-4:30 p.m., with extended hours on Thursdays until 7:00 p.m. We will also offer special Sunday hours on October 25, from 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m., for the exhibition’s final day.

“I make work about fragile things, like memory and history and what it means to be human in spaces like the one I was born into: an island space, a Black space, a colonized space,” Belle says. “A space teeming with the beauty of tropical splendor and soaked in the violence of colonial ruin.”

This exhibition and the preceding artist residency are part of Pace University’s Islands, Archipelagos, and Cultural Ecologies project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, which brings together interdisciplinary studies of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, and New York City’s 42 islands.

📸: Adam Reich
@paceuniversity @lavaughnbelle @paceuniversityartgallery @mellongrant.pace @dysoncollege #islands #nycartgallery #contemporarypainting #mellon taken in New York Times Building (41 Park Row) by @lavaughnbelle

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Just two weeks left to see my solo exhibition, For the Love of Fragile Things, at Pace University Art Gallery in New York.

Here’s a glimpse of how some of the works came into being.

On view through October 25, 2026.
Tuesday–Saturday, 12–4:30 pm
Thursdays until 7 pm
Also open by appointment.
@paceuniversityartgallery by @lavaughnbelle

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6 days ago

I’m back in Denmark for the first time in five years. Jeannette and I went to visit the smaller version of I Am Queen Mary, purchased by DIS during our crowdfunding campaign in 2021. It was so nice to see this version of the work together.

I’ve been coming to Denmark physically since 2008. But psychically, I’ve been coming here my whole life, through the history, the buildings, the landscape, and the fragments left behind in the Virgin Islands. Even the silence and absence feel like spaces I navigated long before I knew what they were.

What I find most powerful about I Am Queen Mary is that we took the silences and fragments we inherited and gave them new forms that hold both what we inherited and what we are still imagining.

More to come!

@iamqueenmaryofficial @jeannetteehlers by @lavaughnbelle

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7 days ago

I often lead with my intellect and my creativity. Being back home in St. Croix after almost three months in New York reminds me how much of my work, how much of myself, begins with my body’s relationship to this place.

I’m back in the place that grounds me and grounds so much of what I make. I woke up and looked out at the ocean, got ready to meet a friend for a beach walk.

My body just feels so good here. And sometimes I like to remind myself that I get to lead with that too. 😏 by @lavaughnbelle

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🔔 La Vaughn Belle’s artist residency and solo exhibition “For the Love of Fragile Things” at Pace University Art Gallery. Congratulations, La Vaughn Belle! 👏👏👏

📍 Pace University Art Gallery
One Pace Plaza
41 Park Row, 1st Floor
New York, NY 10038

🗓 On view until October 24

🕛 Pace University Art Gallery Hours
Monday: Closed
Tuesday–Saturday: 12:30–4 PM
Thursday: 12:30–7 PM

La Vaughn Belle was invited to participate in an artist residency at Pace University Art Gallery, during which she created a large-scale painting installation. Following the residency, Pace University Art Gallery presented a solo exhibition of her work titled “For the Love of Fragile Things.” Both the residency and exhibition were part of Pace University’s Mellon Foundation-funded project, Islands, Archipelagos, and Cultural Ecologies, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the connections among the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, and New York City’s 42 islands.

Images I - II - Between the Storm and Horizon (one world surfaces through another), 47.5 × 30 × 5.5 inches / 120 × 76 × 14 cm, acrylic on Plexiglas with cedar base, 2026.
Images III - IV - Mapping a Ceaseless Becoming (when fragments gather), 64.5 × 44 inches / 163 × 112 cm, acrylic, ink, colored pencil, collage, cuts, and burns on paper mounted on canvas, 2026. taken in Pace University by @lavaughnbelle

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13 days ago

Story time. ❤️

This was waiting for me when I got home to St. Croix. I am still taking it in. So deeply humbled, and so looking forward to reading it. Thank you Rikke @eggeberg by @lavaughnbelle

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ARTIST TALK NEXT WEEK

We are pleased to invite you to the artist talk Fragments and Silences with Virgin Islands-based artist La Vaughn Belle

Wednesday, 7 October 2026

17:00 – 18:30

2112
Holbergsgade 20
Copenhagen

How do we remember histories that have been erased, fragmented, or deliberately forgotten? In this artist talk, La Vaughn Belle discusses her artistic practice and her two works in Beyond Tropaganda: Trading Post (2015) and Storm (2020–22). Working across installation, photography, painting, video, writing, and public interventions, Belle explores how images, objects, and landscapes hold multiple temporalities, bringing fragments of history, memory, and lived experience into new relationships.

Following Belle’s presentation, she will be joined in conversation by the curators of Beyond Tropaganda, art historian Mathias Danbolt and artist Jeannette Ehlers, to discuss how art can challenge colonial histories and shape public memory. The conversation will also offer an update on Belle and Ehlers’ ongoing collaborative project, I Am Queen Mary (2018–), the landmark monument in Copenhagen commemorating resistance to Danish colonialism in the former Danish West Indies.

Beyond Tropaganda is developed in direct dialogue with Mathias Danbolt’s newly published book Tropaganda: Kunst, kolonialisme og kampe om historien and brings together a group of artists whose practices critically engage with the legacies of colonialism connecting Denmark, Kalaallit Nunaat, the US Virgin Islands, Ghana, and wider colonial geographies.

The exhibition’s performance and talks programme is generously supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.

The exhibition is on view through 17 October 2026.

We hope to see you!

Portrait of La Vaughn Belle by Stephanie Chalana Brown
Installation view by Sofus Graae by @lavaughnbelle

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16 days ago

If you’re in Copenhagen, don’t miss out!

Beyond Tropaganda at 2112 (@2112art_ ) curated by Mathias Danbolt and Jeannette Ehlers, brings together the original concepts for I Am Queen Mary for the first time: La Vaughn Belle’s Trading Post (articulated hierarchies and visible displacement) (2015) and Jeannette Ehlers’ Whip It Good (KAS) (2014).

Trading Post consists of coral stones from the ruins of colonial-era buildings in Christiansted, St. Croix. Harvested from the sea snd worked by enslaved Africans, the stones became part of the foundations of so-called Danish colonial buildings. By bringing them to the surface, Belle exposes the labour and exploitation embedded in the colonial architecture.

Whip It Good documents a performative intervention in the Royal Cast Collection. Seated in a peacock chair and holding a whip, Ehlers references Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, confronting the white sculptural canon and the colonial narratives it upholds. Michelangelo’s David,prominently displayed outside the collection, became a point of departure for imagining a Black woman of resistance confronting this canon, an idea that would later inform I Am Queen Mary.

In 2018, these two artistic ideas converged in I Am Queen Mary, a public monument commemorating the Fireburn labour uprising on St. Croix in 1878.

From coral shaped by enslaved labour to a Black woman confronting the colonial archive, I Am Queen Mary brings these histories into relation.

Beyond Tropaganda brings together artists with backgrounds in the Caribbean, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Ghana and Denmark. Through different artistic practices, the artists challenge the idea of colonial history as a “fascinating” chapter that can safely be consumed from a distance.

The exhibition takes its starting point in Mathias Danbolt’s book Tropaganda: Kunst, kolonialisme og kampe om historien (2025), centred on the concept of tropaganda — tropical propaganda.
The show runs through October 17.

📸Sofus Graa, Amdi Brøner, Lars Egelund, David Stjernholm by @lavaughnbelle

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21 days ago

🧣 Available exclusively at The Rollins Museum of Art!

Featuring La Vaughn Belle’s artwork ✨ Storm, this limited-edition silk scarf is the perfect accessory for every art lover.

Explore works from Belle’s ✨ Swarm series now in 🖼️ To Imagine a Home at The Rollins Museum of Art, and experience her installation ✨ The House That Freedoms Built on the Rollins College campus.

🎁 Stop by the Museum Shop and take a little piece of Belle’s work home with you!

Photos of The House That Freedoms Built by Scott Cook Photography and Elliot Kiernicki

#wearableart #rollinsmuseumofart #rma #lavaughnbelle taken in Rollins Museum of Art by @lavaughnbelle

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22 days ago

Please join us on Thursday, September 23 at 12:15 p.m. for an artist talk and video screening with La Vaughn Belle in the Bianco Room, located on the 3rd floor of 15 Beekman Street.

Pace ID holders are welcome to attend on a drop-in basis.

Members of the public are also invited and must register in advance using the event link in the gallery bio by 10:00 a.m. on the day of the event. Public attendees should arrive at the front desk by 12:00 noon to allow time for security check-in.

We look forward to seeing you there. by @lavaughnbelle

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