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The month-long exhibit, presented by SaveArtSpace and curated by Haitian-American curator Yvena Despagne of Art x Ayiti, featured the work of Mel Isidor, a designer, urban planner and mixed-media artist whose practice bridges photography, collage, and ethnographic storytelling.
“This work is about reconnecting—with memory, with place, and with lineage.”
Isidor’s featured piece, part of her “Roots” series, honors her late aunt Yolette and blends archival family photos with original photography. The backdrop, drawn from a road trip through Haiti, captures the country’s central landscape—from Port-au-Prince up along the Artibonite River—offering a layered tribute to both personal memory and national terrain.
In her artist statement, Isidor writes: “This piece is part of my ‘Roots’ series, a collection of mixed media collages on reconnecting with my family and the landscape in Haiti.” The imagery blends original photography with archival family photos to build layered scenes rooted in memory and heritage.
The project served to challenge narrow views of Haitian art as solely folkloric or naïve, instead showcasing a more contemporary expression of Haitian identity through layeredmedia and visual narratives.
Preserving African American Places seeks to understand the implications of place-based injustice and their impact on the preservation of African American cultural heritage, as well as to identify preservation-based strategies for equitable growth and development that respect the historical and present-day realties and conditions of African American Neighborhoods.
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In the summer of 2018, ten students at universities across the United States were selected as AACHAF Research Fellows and were commissioned to research and write essays on neighborhood change and historic preservation in ten study cities.
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