Spotlight Artist

Princeton Cangé

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo

Untitled (Altarpiece)

Colorful painting of figures with wings, two fighting below, symbolic animals and plants surrounding them.

gouache and ink on paper

The Last Shall be First

Colorful painting of a chaotic battle scene by the sea under a blue sky with clouds.

gouache, ink, and graphite on paper

The European Mission

Soldiers in blue uniforms marching under stormy skies with beams of light shining down.

gouache and ink on paper

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement

 I pull from Haitian history and vodou cosmology, Christian religious iconography, and contemporary life to create richly colored narrative paintings, drawings, and prints. Pulling from the rich tapestry of Haiti’s cultural heritage, I intertwine fact and fiction to allow room for speculation, contemplation, anger, and desire.

My practice delves into the spaces where mythology, history, and contemporary American life merge, creating opportunities to imagine what liberation, escape, surrender, and even doom might look like for Black people—and by extension, for humanity and our shared ecosystem.

The Haitian Revolution, one of the most significant and under understood events in global history, informs much of my work. C.L.R. James’s “The Black Jacobins” provides a foundation for examining the broader implications of Black liberation movements, while the history and practice of vodou expand my understanding of syncretism and creolization not only as modes of survival and evolution, but also as ways of making.

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