FAB Grantee Program: NSU Art Museum Presents: Frantz Zéphirin: The Messenger

The Messenger is the inaugural monographic museum exhibition dedicated to artist Frantz Zéphirin (b. 1968, Port-au-Prince, Haiti). While self-taught, Zéphirin was born into a lineage of painters that included his uncle, Antoine Obin, celebrated master of the Cap-Haïtien school. But in rejection of the Northern Haitian tradition of narrative painting grounded in Haitian daily life, Zéphirin created his own miniaturist style of painting, in which political history, Vodou spirituality and intensely decorative renderings of human animals converge. The Messenger presents Zéphirin as a documentarian, recording the histories of both of the mortal realm and cosmic other. He is an Oungan (male Vodou priest) whose images have been created under the instruction of La Sirène, the sea goddess who became his muse and turned him toward a universal iconography that fused human, animal, and divine forms. Since 1988, Zéphirin has painted over two thousand visions of the mermaid, though he claims the paintings made themselves, the brushes and palette having mingled in his mind’s eye. Simultaneous to the celestial visions that line his canvases, Zéphirin’s images are coupled with stories of ancestral and contemporary struggle: depictions of Haitian slavery and emancipation, its uniquely syncretic belief system, depictions of its ecological collapse in 2010 and its enduring battle to withstand devastation at the hands of gang violence. Zéphirin’s paintings collapse temporal and spiritual borders, echoing the Haitian Spiralist movement’s belief in cyclical connection between the living and the dead, the earthly and the cosmic. In works such as The Slave Ship Brooks (2007) (exhibited at the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition, Milk of Dreams) and Les Esprits Indien en face Colonisation (2000) the artist reimagines the transatlantic passage and the struggle for liberation through symbolic encounters between spirits and ancestors. In the aftermath of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, his The Resurrection of the Dead (2007) appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, emblematic of an artist whose vision transforms tragedy into endurance. Through a synthesis of myth and reportage, Zéphirin situates Haiti not at the margins of history, but at its pulsing center, with the artist’s brush as witness and oracle to the diasporic world. This exhibition is curated by Ariella Wolens, Bryant-Taylor Curator at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. Where: NSU Art Museum One East Las Olas Boulevard Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 When: June 7 through October 4, 2026 Cost: $5-$16 Tickets: Ticket prices vary. CLICK HERE to purchase through NSU Art Museum Museum Hours: Tuesday-Saturday: 11am-5pm Sunday: Noon-5pm Monday: Closed Sunny Days/Starry Nights: Free admission and extended hours the first Thursday of every month, 11 am – 7 pm.