Details:
① Artwork:
Home is Where the Heart Is
This painting depicts a view up at the night sky. A brownstone with banana leaves appears at the top of the image with colorful yet contained window lights. At the bottom of the composition, London planetree leaves appear alongside a beaming streetlight. Within this work, the beaming lights depict expansion and exploration while the contained lights depict a safe space and familiarity. Working on this painting made the artist question ideas around home, knowledge of self, cultural ideals and norms—and how those cultural ideals and norms become expansive when we step outside of the environments we occupy.
This work is part of Madjeen Isaac's series of magical realist paintings that hybridize the artist's ancestral homeland of Haiti with her hometown of Brooklyn. This layered composition bustles with kinetic energy and bursts with flora and fauna. The composition features Black and Brown people in scenes of activity, abundance, leisure and commonality.
About her Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, Issac says: “If someone had x-ray vision and looked into the pre-war buildings, they would see all of these Caribbean households.” The borough of Brooklyn, the artist's birthplace, is home to the second-largest community of Haitian-Americans in the United States. This series of paintings can be regarded as a visual diary, capturing an idyllic snapshot of a quickly-gentrifying Flatbush.
Specs:
③ Artist:
Madjeen Isaac’s paintings are magical realist scenes that hybridize the artist’s ancestral homeland of Haiti with her hometown of Brooklyn—a New York City borough which is home to the second largest community of Haitian Americans in the United States. The artist’s layered compositions bustle with kineticism and burst with flora and fauna. Isaac’s work is a visual diary depicting Black and Brown people in scenes of activity, abundance, leisure and communality.
BIO:
Madjeen Isaac was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1996. The artist received an MA in Art + Education & Community Practice from New York University in New York City and a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Issac also attended a Museum Education Practicum at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
A solo exhibition of Isaac’s work, Beyond the Mountains, took place at Sean Horton (Presents) in New York City.
Isaac’s work has been shown in several group exhibitions in New York City. The artist was commissioned by the Haiti Cultural Exchange in collaboration with the New York Department of Transportation to create a mural in Brooklyn, New York.
Isaac lives and works in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.