ARTISTS TO KNOW: LAURENA FINÉUS
Photography: Avery Savage; Creative Direction & Production: Bianca Jean-Pierre & Avery Savage
For our third feature in The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we step inside the world of Haitian-Canadian artist Laurena Finéus. As she prepared for the opening preview, we caught rare behind the scenes moments while she put the finishing touches on Together, We Could Have Made Mountains, her first textile installation that weaves Haitian migrant stories into a landscape of dreams, sacrifices, and shared histories. Alongside the installation, her paintings incorporate soil, mica, and natural pigments, transforming each piece into both a vessel for memory and a living archive of migration.
In our conversation, Laurena reflects on migration as resistance in the face of racial violence, the coumbite tradition of coming together in mutual support, and how working with textile and ceramic beads became a ritual of care, preservation, and possibility. She speaks to the balance between rupture and refuge, grief and futurity, and the grounding practices that keep her rooted while navigating institutional spaces.
Below is an intimate look at how Laurena’s materials, process, and community collaborations converge into work that resists erasure, honors ancestral archives, and dreams toward liberatory futures.
Laurena Finéus interviewed by Bianca Jean-Pierre and photographed by Avery Savage for SHEER.
Bianca Jean-Pierre: Your work often collapses time, memory, and space to reimagine Black geographies and migratory histories. What drew you to this way of storytelling, and how has your understanding of ‘place’ evolved across Ottawa, Toronto, and now Brooklyn?
Laurena Finéus: Our immigrant experiences are rarely linear. They come layered, arriving all at once through memory, emotion, and the body. Considering it is impossible to separate each of these facets of our experience, I knew my practice did not need to operate any differently. Haitian painting makes pictorial frames that overflow with rich textures, colors, and symbols, each element meant to be read at once. As an artist and visual storyteller, I must hold space for that simultaneity and uplift the continuity of our traditions in my works.
Naturally, Places began to emerge along my journey, each one signaling a new need and drawing me closer to the unsettling prose of what new beginnings really meant: endless paperwork, shifting friendships, evolving communities, and precarious resettling – again and again. A friend once told me that each destination waits for us with its own treasure, hidden until we’re ready to receive it.
Roaming the streets of Brooklyn, I often find myself thrown back into memories of Toronto. Small glimpses like a scent, a sound or a sight can become portals. These fleeting moments invite me to reflect more deeply on the idea of return, especially as a child of diaspora who has yet to walk the ancestral grounds that shaped me. These sensory ruptures, both intimate and disorienting, are at the heart of my immigrant experience.
Bianca: Together, we could have made mountains is such a powerful title. What were the emotional and historical through-lines that led you to create this textile and painting installation, your first textile work ever exhibited, as part of Open Call: Portals?
Laurena: I have been building a social practice for a few years now through my ongoing initiative of Nou La (We are here / We have arrived). The project began during my residency at Haiti Cultural Exchange in the summer of 2023, where I collaborated with trauma therapist Phadia Jean-Pierre to create a series of wellness workshops for the Haitian migrant community in Brooklyn. We had the opportunity to partner with several organizations in Crown Heights, including Haitian Americans United for Progress and Diaspora Community Services.
Thus, while first developing the sessions with Phadia, we understood that healing must activate the senses. Smell, touch, and sound became central pillars in our facilitation style. We emphasized joy and play often absent in the language of survival and allowed art to be a site for momentary relief. Naturally, this led me toward beading and working with textiles, two mediums already rich in repetition, intimacy, and rituals of care that anchor so many Haitian households.
These gestures are not just aesthetic; they are cultural memory made tactile. It was important for me to move at the pace of trust and to truly engage with the communities that called me in. This took time. Building relationships over the past two years meant listening first, responding later.
But when the Open Call team at The Shed believed in the mission and supported the proposal for Together We Could Have Made Mountains, it felt like the right moment to grow the work beyond my HCX residency.
In Haitian farming traditions, communal labor is called coumbite, a collective gathering where people come together to work side by side in a spirit of mutual aid. The coumbite became a part of our workshops: shared craft and shared breath. That acted as a joyful act of making that nourished our spirit while acknowledging our histories. Though this may have been the first textile piece of mine to be formally exhibited, textile has long been an active thread in my community practice.
This project was born from love, but also from our inherited silence and the invisible weights our communities carry. Through hundreds of hours of shared time, the workshops offered gentle, sacred space for reflection, inviting participants to engage in a “creative harvesting of seeds.” The project title was a direct response to the Haitian proverb “Dèyè mòn gen mòn” (“Beyond mountains there are mountains”), which reminds us that in times of adversity, we must keep climbing, even when we know there is more ahead.
“I have been building a social practice for a few years now through my ongoing initiative of Nou La (We are here / We have arrived). The project began during my residency at Haiti Cultural Exchange in the summer of 2023, where I collaborated with trauma therapist Phadia Jean-Pierre to create a series of wellness workshops for the Haitian migrant community in Brooklyn.”
Bianca: There’s a delicate tension in your work between rupture and refuge, between the pain of migration and the promise of Black futurity. How do you hold space for both as you move through your creative process?
Laurena: Geographically, Haiti is positioned on a vast rupture there’s no denying the formations born from the cracks of the earth. The tectonic plates and the moving island that is Ayiti is constantly shifting, evolving, deflating, and rebuilding all at once. The growth of its mountains, juxtaposed with the erosion caused by severe deforestation, mirrors the push, and pull of survival migrants experience. The inevitable migration of land, like that of people, pushed by pressure and currents, shows us a perfect example of this tension.
Reading Failles by Jan J. Dominique was pivotal for me in holding space for these contradictions in my process. The book is a fragmented memoir, reflecting on personal loss in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. But more than that, it meditates on the emotional and political aftershocks of being born into a lineage and landscape shaped by trauma. Dominique doesn’t attempt to resolve the ‘’rupture’’, she writes through it. That refusal to offer easy resolution gave me permission to explore how we might find refuge within the breaks rather than beyond them. It directly inspired the Failles triptych paintings in the exhibition, which tries to embody that unsettled refuge that lives inside our fault lines with the story of Canaan in Haiti.
Ayiti has long functioned in a state of precarity, balancing the contradictions of being the first Black republic. It is a land that has ignited liberation movements, nurtured black poets, and revolutionaries across the globe, yet is relentlessly punished for its ‘’audacity’. I often return to the geography of Ayiti, a place burdened with what the world calls failure: tectonic failures, political failures, historical betrayals, and erasures of collective memory. At different moments, these ruptures read as curses, but I’ve come to see them as records. They mark the cost of survival, but also a radical insistence on life. Within the disorder, there is still vision. Still tenderness. Still future.
Migrants are the future not only because they carry stories of displacement, but also because they carry the capacity to dream beyond the wreckage. In my creative process, I hold space for both grief and imagination, collapse, and continuity. One cannot exist without the other. To move forward, we must learn to live inside the break.
“The project title was a direct response to the Haitian proverb “Dèyè mòn gen mòn” (“Beyond mountains there are mountains”), which reminds us that in times of adversity, we must keep climbing, even when we know there is more ahead.”
Bianca: Your visual language is rooted in both fiction and archival research, from Guantanamo Bay to the Dajabon River. Can you walk us through how you translate these references into your painting practice, especially your use of natural materials like soil, mica, and staining techniques?
Laurena: In working with images, found texts, and testimonies, I’ve come to realize how deeply Haiti has suffered from fractured historical documentation. It’s often been denied the sacredness of its own archives. The carelessness to which I have seen some of our history handled at the hands of others has pained me many times over. Through my painting practice, I aim to revitalize those same archives, treating them as precious rather than static or object to fetish. Fiction becomes a mode of mythmaking, a way of restoring the power of truths of these archives long buried or distorted need to have their voices be enacted. Haitian writers and artists have always held a vision of Ayiti beyond colonial framing, and it’s by listening to their voices that I find guidance in forming mine.
In terms of materials, soil and mica allow me to bring the outside world into direct conversation with the imagined inner worlds of each painting. These natural elements are carriers of memory. For example, soil adds a grit and weight to the canvas, referencing the physical crossings etched into land. Mica reflects light like the glare and dew of water. The figures that appear in my work often dissolve into salt, sand, or smoke, echoes of ancestors.
Staining with ink and water became a kind of surrender practice to the medium—inviting rivers, borders, and bloodlines to emerge through this technique. The Dajabon River, Guantanamo Bay or the Darién Gap, these are not just places but psychic threshold for many. In that space of trust, fiction, material, and spirit meet the painting becomes a vessel for guidance.
Image courtesy of Javier Griffey/ The Shed
“Ayiti has long functioned in a state of precarity, balancing the contradictions of being the first Black republic. It is a land that has ignited liberation movements, nurtured black poets, and revolutionaries across the globe, yet is relentlessly punished for its ‘’audacity’. ”
Bianca: You speak about the Haitian migrant imagination and Réalisme merveilleux as tools for reclaiming truth beyond Western frameworks. What does it mean for you to create work that resists the dominant archive?
Laurena: There have been many cycles of migration throughout Haitian history, most of which stem directly from external interruptions military occupations, exploitative trade, and political destabilization alike. This forced errantry has shaped our migrant imagination, which is not just a poetic concept but a man-made historical condition. I ask: what happens to historical truth when only preserved, validated, or disseminated through Western systems of remembrance? What is lost when our archives do not reflect our lived cosmologies?
Ayiti has often been turned into a cautionary tale: its agency as narrator stripped, its complexity flattened, and its voice reduced to a single tragic arc. But I return to the idea that the chaos Haiti has endured is also a kind of knowledge. It is precisely this tension between myth and memory that makes it an ever-contending subject in my work.
To create work that resists the dominant archive is to reclaim the right to imagine ourselves otherwise. Réalisme merveilleux gives me a mode where the spiritual, political, and poetic coexist. It allows me to tell stories not bound by the logic of the Western document, but grounded in the ancestral, and the still-unwritten truths that live on in us.
Bianca: Your work traces the movement of Haitian migrants through geographies of loss, resilience, and refusal. In light of the current migrant crisis, especially the racialized violence faced by Haitian migrants at the hands of ICE and other state forces, how are you processing this moment both as an artist and a member of the diaspora?
Laurena: It has been incredibly difficult to witness, day by day, the worsening treatment of the migrant community and Haitians across the diaspora. I find myself mourning not just individual lives lost, but also a deeper, collective grief, the grief of witnessing a growing blatant disregard for human life. The Haitian Creole word morne speaks to this condition. While it first refers to mountains, it also conjures for me mourning and heaviness. It’s a word shaped by landscape and loss. In Haitian literature, morne becomes a space of memory and transformation. Mourning, in this sense, becomes cyclical intertwined with the natural world, inseparable from living. But amid this, being in community has offered me a quiet kind of resistance, a space where I can process grief alongside others. I’ve also stepped away from the more extractive aspects of the art world, learning instead to protect my energy and move toward what truly nourishes me and my community. This includes care work, mutual learning, and fostering the kind of imagination that opens new possibilities of thought, in myself and in others.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “Do we know the terms of our different migrations?”, a question that continues to haunt and guide me. What are the conditions that made our movements necessary, and what stories have been silenced along the way? Gumbs reminds us that survival often happens above ground, but real life (ancestral, intuitive, radical) takes place underground, by fire. That fire, for me, is what fuels the work in a time when many forces are trying to hurt us. In this light, each piece becomes a refusal to forget, and a small offering toward the futures we’re still brave enough to dream into being.
“Beading circles, rooted in Indigenous traditions and practiced for over 8,000 years before European contact, are not just craft-making spaces but vital places for storytelling, teaching, healing, and transmission. Variations of this practice exist across cultures, offering a model of connectivity that transcends time and geography.”
Bianca: How has working in textiles as a new frontier for you expanded your relationship to material, memory, and community? Especially since you’ve been hosting workshops which I love.
Laurena: Working with textiles has deeply expanded my relationship to material and memory. Jute holds so much meaning across cultures. It’s commonly used as erosion control, a biodegradable material meant to protect the land across seasons and weather conditions. This felt especially important: that the material itself is about preservation and slowing decay. Participants considered the weight of sacrifice that migration often demands and imagined how collective action might offer new paths forward. Furthermore, they were invited to move at their own rhythm and follow their intuition. In the spirit of the Coumbite, they needed to trust one another to carry their creations forward, just as they would carry someone else’s. Together, we wove our stories, bead by bead, into something larger than ourselves. This time working intimately with the youth of Flanbwayan really brought this project to life.
I handcrafted over 500 ceramic beads inspired by seeds endemic to the island of Hispaniola including Pwa Kongo, Lwil Masketri, Korosol, Planten, and others. These beads acted as vessels for possibility and futures. Beading, in this context, became a ritual of seeding and planting hopes while harvesting collective dreams. Community, whether formed by diaspora, migrants, allies, or dear friends, was at the heart of the process. The act of beading created a space for self-actualization. These circles are embedded within a larger history. Beading circles, rooted in Indigenous traditions and practiced for over 8,000 years before European contact, are not just craft-making spaces but vital places for storytelling, teaching, healing, and transmission. Variations of this practice exist across cultures, offering a model of connectivity that transcends time and geography.
“Migrants are the future not only because they carry stories of displacement, but also because they carry the capacity to dream beyond the wreckage. In my creative process, I hold space for both grief and imagination, collapse, and continuity. One cannot exist without the other. To move forward, we must learn to live inside the break.”
Bianca: As a Haitian-Canadian artist navigating NYC’s art world, what does it look like for you to stay grounded emotionally, spiritually, and artistically while moving through institutional spaces?
Laurena: In navigating this city, I have learned that I should always move at my own pace, in my own time. The city may have its relentless rhythm, and ‘’urgencies’’, but I have my own pulse. I honor that balance and make sure to never exceed what is given to me; energy is a two-way street that must be respected.
To stay grounded, I take deliberate time to nourish myself, body, and soul, with rest and food. I keep myself informed and share resources within my immediate circle, showing up for my community with presence and care.
Artistically, I hold regular check-ins with fellow artists, stay curious about the cycles and currents of this industry, and trust my body’s wisdom and gut instincts. Spiritually, I tend to simply pray. I ask my guardians daily for guidance. They hold me steady as I navigate these institutional spaces, reminding me of my roots and my dreams.
Bianca: What’s something you’re learning or unlearning about yourself in this current chapter of your practice?
Laurena: My body has carried heavy burdens in the early years of my career, but now I honor it with gentleness. I am discovering the necessity of strict boundaries like separating the studio from my private life and nurturing both with care. I am learning to trust my body’s signals when it’s had enough, and it needs to pause. Not everything must be done by me alone in my work for it to be seen as impactful. Sometimes, matching the immediacy of a feeling and sharing the weight with other collaborators, even if it means sacrificing a polished result, is its own kind of victory.
There is profound nourishment in facilitation; teaching and guiding others. It feeds my soul in ways that my own practice sometimes cannot. Thus, why I have enjoyed surrounding myself with my students, their energy, and fresh perspectives, brings me unexpected joy and renewal weekly. This chapter teaches me that creation is not just in solitude, but in shared growth and rest.
