Portals to Power: Fabiola Jean-Louis at the Gardner

How dissonant and fantastic to pass through an undersea portal in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on a busy Saturday afternoon—yet somehow appropriate, given the building’s strange history. Commissioned to imitate the architecture of a Venetian palazzo and opened to the public in 1903, the Gardner Museum was conjured by Isabella Stewart Gardner, a wealthy widow and art patron with arresting curatorial ambitions. As stipulated in Mrs. Gardner’s will, each room remains today in the state that she last left it: In every chamber awaits a new adventure in guessing the logic behind her simultaneously inspired and confounding object choices and placements. One room contains a transplanted medieval chapel, complete with altar and stained glass windows; a nearby long hallway features cases filled to the brim with her correspondences with famous writers, artists, and politicians of her time. The galleries are stuffed to capacity with European cultural treasures—I’ve only ever seen this many Christian gilded paintings and wooden icons in the Vatican Museum. There are no object labels to be seen anywhere, and geography and chronology were totally abandoned by Mrs. Gardner, who did as she wanted with the copious paintings, sculptures, textiles, rare books, and furniture she amassed with her late husband’s wealth. As a wayward visual studies scholar and contemporary art curator of Filipinx descent, I find that every visit to the Gardner Museum is an exercise in letting go of expectations; I think it best to simply lean into aesthetic pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and to leave behind questions of ethical provenance or any fidelity to art historical accuracy. Visiting the Gardner has, for me, always been a simultaneously freeing and maddening experience ever slightly tinged by jealousy. I imagine what I could curate if I were as liberated in my time and finances as Isabella Stewart Gardner was.

This long prelude about the Gardner Museum—a history likely well-known to local BAR readers but still novel to those who, like me, are recent transplants to the area—is essential to understanding the absolute disruption, in the very best of ways, that Fabiola Jean-Louis’s solo exhibition “Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom” has made on this storied institution. A recent artist-in-residence at the Gardner, Jean-Louis has energized the three temporary exhibition spaces in the Gardner with her Afro-futurist feminist fabulations that invoke Vodou and its privileged place in Haitian culture and revolutionary movements. The result of the artist’s meticulous research, most of the forty-one works in the exhibition were newly commissioned for this presentation, and punctuate the exterior of the historical building and new extension of the museum with liberatory visions of Blackness that are otherwise absent from Mrs. Gardner’s collections. Made of glass and paper, with shells, crystals, and gold as only some of their many adornments, these paintings and sculptural works encourage viewers toward stillness and slowness, and are an invitation to witness both the history of Black radical movements and the ongoing need for sacred spaces for healing. My encounters with Jean-Louis’s works were powerfully quiet pauses that momentarily silenced the cacophony of white European cultural treasures that fill the rest of the museum. In our current, deeply distressing times, the artist’s offering of reprieve from visual noise and verbal overflow was such a gift—one that I did not even fully realize I was in desperate need of until I was there.

Viewers will likely first encounter Ayiti-Tomè on the facade of the building without realizing it is a public artwork by Jean-Louis. Meaning “from now onwards this land is our land” in Haitian Kreyòl, Ayiti-Tomè features an AI-generated image of a mask-like face printed on a large banner; while an arresting image, its flatness in this rendition gives no hint as to the more wondrous three-dimensional interruptions by Jean-Louis that live within the Gardner’s walls.

Once inside the museum, I went directly toward the Fenway Gallery, a small blue gallery near the centerpiece garden courtyard, only to find a long line snaking out of the room and into the Spanish Cloister and Chinese Loggia. I was initially excited, thinking that eager visitors were here to visit the newly opened “Waters of the Abyss”; I stood amongst the crowd for a while before talking with a security guard, who stated plainly that this line was for the tiny Yellow Room, a permanent gallery adjacent to the Fenway that features Degas, Matisse, and Sargent paintings, a nineteenth-century Chinese stoneware vase, and an eighteenth-century gold Buddha. Even as people had to stand inside the Fenway while waiting to enter the Yellow Room, it was evident they didn’t know what to make of Jean-Louis’s artworks, so contemporary and visually divergent from the rest of the museum’s offerings. They remained waiting for the Degas ballerinas, scrolling on their phones or talking to their companions, somehow oblivious to the sculptures and paintings of Black women’s faces and bodies that were commanding presence in the room.

Leaving the line, I spent time with Jean-Louis’s presentation alongside a small cohort of viewers who also recognized the beauty of this exhibit. I was immediately drawn toward a pair of majestic papier-mâché dresses, Justice of Ezili (2021) and Paradise Lost (2024), flanking the bright blue–painted back wall of this cozy room. While Paradise Lost in its red and gold evokes the violence of Catholicism and its supporting role in the French conquest of Haiti, Justice of Ezili conjures righteous postcolonial vengeance in the gold brooch portrait of Ezili Dantor, a Vodou Iwa (spirit) deeply important to Haitian revolutionaries. A pair of mixed-media self-portraits face each other at opposite ends of the room—one with eyes closed (All That Was and Nevermore, 2024), another with its piercing eyes gazing directly back at you (The Avatar Knows, 2024). In the background of these intricate portraits are tiny figures and scenes drawn from the history of the Haitian Revolution, Vodou ceremonies, and personal events from the artist’s life; one could spend an afternoon in this room alone and never run out of new details to find. While rich in symbology legible only to those familiar with Vodou or other syncretic practices, all of these pieces assert a self-possessed Black femme subjectivity palpable to anyone regardless of their knowledge (or lack thereof) about Haitian history and culture. Interrupting the seamless flow between the Spanish Cloister and the Yellow Room, “Waters of the Abyss” thus inserts an Afro-futurist presence into the Fenway Gallery that symbolically, and perhaps even viscerally, repels Eurocentric whiteness. As a queer woman of color, I felt called to these works, and I can only guess as to why others visiting the museum could not apprehend them.

To see the largest portion of “Waters of the Abyss,” you must leave the historical palazzo to enter the extension building, which architecturally evokes another kind of dominant cultural institution: the white cube. Here, on the second floor Hostetter Gallery, the artist has transformed a sterile space, opening a portal to an undersea or island sovereign kingdom. The pair of Mermaid Portals (2024) in the center of the gallery appear impossibly ornate, with the accretion of shells, crystals, and mirror illuminating the gray pulpy surface on which they grow like barnacles. In this large room filled with sunlight, figures of women and fish, or women-made-fish, assemble and gather; the room feels protective of those who seek shelter here, and the works are brightly contrasted with the small columbarium-like niches in the adjoining room. In this first, smaller sanctum, vessels commemorating ancestors known and unknown have been placed. They feel well-honored by the artist through their thoughtful curation in an enclave hushed save for a mesmerizing score composed for the exhibition. Being in this room was a profoundly peaceful experience, and a stark difference from the main museum’s crowds and its chaotic curatorial ethos.

Taken together, the sheer scale and number of sculptural works made almost entirely out of paper pulp is astounding—each object from small reliquary vessel to life-size figure is quite clearly the product of deeply methodical and meticulous Black femme labor, undertaken while in deep conversation with more-than-human beings. In a video interview available on the Gardner website, Jean-Louis states that “every sculpture is a portal, a call to action for each and every one of us to look into ourselves for strength and liberation,” rather than to look toward others or outsiders to save us; furthermore, she has created these works as a guide to “how to survive this time…how to be a light in a time of darkness.” On this Saturday afternoon, I began to believe again in the adage that art is a balm against despair; I had nearly forgotten it with the difficulty of this present moment, when every community I am part of and care about has been under attack. Melding Vodou spirituality, Haitian revolutionary history, and personal navigations of diasporic identity, Fabiola Jean-Louis’s “Waters of the Abyss” is a visionary exhibition made even more radical by its siting in this iconic palazzo of Eurocentricity. It is the kind of site-specific contemporary art intervention we most need at this time.

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“Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom” is on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 25, 2025.