Vladimir Cybil Charlier is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist. She was born in Queens, New York, to Haitian parents and grew up between NYC and Port-au-Prince, an experience that continues to inform her work. She earned a Master's in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Trained as a painter, Cybil has delved into many artistic mediums. Early on, she
started mining various forms of popular art and crafts from the Caribbean in order to rethinking these traditions from a diasporic perspective. Some of these include self-taught painting traditions, textile work, and the African diaspora's spiritual traditions
and sacred art forms.
Over the years, her work has focused on developing a cohesive language to articulate a
diasporic culture. The search for that language has been the thread linking her different
bodies of work, whether mixed-media paintings, prints, or three-dimensional works.
Recent bodies of work include Pantéon, When the Saints Go Marching!, which explores
how the Afro-diaspora developed a visual lexicon to adapt to unfamiliar and unforgiving
conditions. Her Old World/New World painting series piece seemingly disparate cultural
references and textures into modernist compositions. These works weave together
personal histories with markers from the Caribbean and American cultures, generating a
complex narrative for the viewer to decipher. For example, the blue jeans, boots, and
straw hats that are recurrent images in the paintings can be read equally as iconic
cultural markers that belong to American cowboys or as the sacred attributes of Zaka,
the deity of agriculture in Haitian Vodou. The duality and ambiguity leave viewers to
ponder how they construct meaning.
Cybil's artistic practice also encompasses public work. She completed a recent
commission for the Jewish Community Center of Harlem, which is now part of their
permanent collection.
Cybil has been a resident at the Studio Museum in Harlem and, more recently, at
Fountainhead Studios in Miami. Her work has been featured in the 2006 Venice
Biennale and exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio and the Bronx Museum. Cybil
participated in the Biennial del Caribe in the Dominican Republic, the Cuenca Biennial
in Ecuador, and the Panama Biennial in 2003. Her work has been included in Le Grand
Palais in Paris and shows such as Relational Undercurrents at MOLA, Bordering the
Imaginary at BRIC House, Caribbean Crossroad at the Perez Museum in Miami, and a
solo exhibit at Five Myles Plus Space and the Garner Arts Center. She was the
featured artist in the 2023 Spring edition of the CAA Journal. A lifelong educator, Cybil
lectures regularly, and recent talks have included the LASA congress in Boston,
Columbia University, Rutgers University, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Notre Dame
University.
Cybil currently resides in Harlem and works from her studio in an old indigo mill.
Interested on Cybil's prints? Sort through her work at our store.
Selected prints by Vladimir Cybil Charlier: