Winter/Spring 2025 Exhibitions
Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom
Fabiola Jean-Louis
February 27 - May 25, 2025
Multi-disciplinary Fabiola Jean-Louis’s captivating exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum invites visitors on a journey through the ancient and eternal, earthly and divine, personal and political. On view from February 27 – May 25, 2025, Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom by Fabiola Jean-Louis features a large amount of original commissions from the Haitian artist, crafted from the stunningly intricate marriage of paper pulp, mineral stones, shells, metals, glass, and more. Invoking the sanctity of Vodou and its role in Haitian liberation, these works will transform the Museum’s three rotating exhibition spaces, Hostetter Gallery; Fenway Gallery; and the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, into a map of personal histories, a site of communion, and a spiritual portal.
Image Credit
Fabiola Jean-Louis (Haitian 1978 - ), All That Was and Nevermore, 2024, Papier-mâché, paint on paper, crystals, resin enamel, sequins, beads, and mixed media decorations, 157.5 x 113 x 8.9 cm (62 x 44 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.) ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
About the Artist
Courtesy of the artist. © Fabiola Jean-Louis
Fabiola Jean-Louis was born in Port Au Prince, Haiti on September 10th, 1978 and moved as a child to Brooklyn, NY, where she’s currently based. She studied at the School of Fashion Industries in New York and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh; she now works in a variety of media—including sculpture, photography, ceramic, and film. Her Afro Surrealist work frequently explores spirituality, history, and the expansive complexities of Blackness.
Jean-Louis has been awarded residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) inNew York City, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her work has been exhibited at DuSable Museum of African American History, the Gardner Museum, and Andrew Freedman Home. In 2021, The Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned a paper sculpture for a two year exhibition, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. It debuted on November 5th, 2021—making her the first Haitian, female artist to show in the prestigious institution, which also exhibited her remarkable paper dress sculpture Justice of Ezili through late 2024. Jean-Louis exhibited at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum most recently in fall 2023 with Fabiola Jean-Louis: Rewriting History.
The Exhibition’s Journey
Chapter One
The odyssey begins outside the Museum, on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, with a revolutionary declaration, “Ayiti-Tomè.” Meaning “from now onwards this land is our land” in Fon, a language spoken by African enslaved people who won independence from France in the Haitian Revolution, the public art installation Ayiti-Tomè, 2025 is composed of Jean-Louis’s photographs of Haiti merged with early versions of sculptures from Waters of the Abyss. It is a proclamation of the diverse diasporic culture of Haiti.
Fabiola Jean-Louis: Ayiti-Tomè, 2025 [rendering] © Fabiola Jean-Louis.
Chapter Two
Inside the Museum, the journey continues, the personal and the political colliding. In the Fenway Gallery, Jean-Louis looks to her own history as it intersects with that of her homeland, as well as her evolving relationship with Catholicism and Vodou, syncretistic religion that combines West African, indigenous Caribbean, and Christian worldviews and rituals.Through paintings and two life-sized paper dresses, personal vignettes of marriage, motherhood, and trauma are interwoven with time-travel to both colonial and revolutionary eras in Haiti.
Chapter Three
The exhibition’s journey reaches its apex in the Hostetter Gallery, transfigured into the ruins of a sacred site hosting divine beings and spiritual symbols from Vodou tradition. The rallying cry of Ayiti-Tomè is felt here, among funerary urns, mirrors, paintings, and massive sculptures of mermaids, each a portal—to the self, to holiness, to understanding. In the central altar space, a towering, gleaming Lwa, or angel spirit, offers a sword. Jean-Louis asks: What lies at the heart of Black freedom? How are liberation and spirituality intertwined? In this chapel ruin the ancestors feel close as Jean-Louis provides a bridge to the wisdom of the past and the infinite possibilities of the future.
Fabiola Jean-Louis introduces Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom
Exhibition Related Programs
February 25, 2025, 6:30 pm - 9 pm
Friends of Fenway Court Patron Preview - Members Only
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 11 am - 5 pm
Member Preview Day - Members Only
Wednesday, February 26, 2026, 6:30 pm - 9 pm
Member Opening Celebration - Members Only
Saturday, March 1, 2025, 9 - 10 am
Member Exhibition Insight Tour - Members Only
Saturday, March 15, 2025, 9 - 10 am
Member Exhibition Insight Tour - Members Only
March 19, 2025, 12 - 1 pm
Virtual Member Moment - Members Only
Saturday, May 10, 2025, 9 - 10 am
Member Exhibition Insight Tour - Members Only
Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom is supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, the Barr Foundation, Wagner Foundation and the Barbara Lee Program Fund.
The Artist-in-Residence program is supported in part by Lizbeth and George Krupp and directed by Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art. Funding is also provided for site-specific installations of new work on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade on Evans Way.
The Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
