The Messenger is the inaugural monographic museum exhibition dedicated to artist Frantz Zéphirin (b. 1968, Port-au-Prince, Haiti). While self-taught, Zéphirin was born into a lineage of painters that included his uncle, Antoine Obin, celebrated master of the Cap-Haïtien school. But in rejection of the Northern Haitian tradition of narrative painting grounded in Haitian daily life, Zéphirin created his own miniaturist style of painting, in which political history, Vodou spirituality and intensely decorative renderings of human animals converge.

The Messenger presents Zéphirin as a documentarian, recording the histories of both of the mortal realm and cosmic other. He is an Oungan (male Vodou priest) whose images have been created under the instruction of La Sirène, the sea goddess who became his muse and turned him toward a universal iconography that fused human, animal, and divine forms. Since 1988, Zéphirin has painted over two thousand visions of the mermaid, though he claims the paintings made themselves, the brushes and palette having mingled in his mind’s eye.

Simultaneous to the celestial visions that line his canvases, Zéphirin’s images are coupled with stories of ancestral and contemporary struggle: depictions of Haitian slavery and emancipation, its uniquely syncretic belief system, depictions of its ecological collapse in 2010 and its enduring battle to withstand devastation at the hands of gang violence.