La Vaughn Belle: For the Love of Fragile Things — La Vaughn Belle

The Pace University Art Gallery presents For the Love of Fragile Things, the first solo exhibition in New York City by acclaimed artist La Vaughn Belle. The exhibition opens Friday, September 18, 2026 with a free public reception from 5:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.

Featuring a large-scale painting installation developed during Belle’s seven-week residency at Pace, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a monumental exploration of the horizon. Belle describes the horizon as a threshold between “sky/ocean, death/life, known/unknown, land/sea, arrival/departure, you/me, we/them, possibility/foreclosure.”

Based in the Virgin Islands, Belle’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, performance, writing, video, and public interventions. Her exhibition at Pace focuses on painting, bringing her longstanding engagement with fragments, silence, and the material legacies of coloniality into a new body of work. The residency and exhibition are part of Pace University’s Mellon Foundation-funded project, Islands, Archipelagos, and Cultural Ecologies, an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together the study of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Marshall Islands, and New York City’s 42 islands.

Reflecting on the Virgin Islands context from which she works, Belle says, “I make work about fragile things, like memory and history and what it means to be human in spaces like the one I was born into: an island space, a Black space, a colonized space. A space teeming with the beauty of tropical splendor and soaked in the violence of colonial ruin.”

The US Virgin Islands are one of five US territories that are rarely represented on national maps and often overlooked in public discourse, but as Erica Johnson, PhD, professor of English and a principal investigator on the Mellon Foundation grant, “Belle puts the U.S. Virgin Islands on the map, both figuratively and literally.” Central to Belle’s practice is an investigation of the overlapping colonial histories of the Virgin Islands, tracing both the enduring impacts of Danish imperialism and the islands’ subsequent purchase by the United States in 1917.

“One of the most powerful aspects of a residency is the way it allows an artist to bring one place into conversation with another,” observes Sarah Cunningham, MFA, associate clinical professor of art and gallery director. “As Belle created this work in New York, she carried with her the intersecting histories, memories, and horizons of the Virgin Islands, creating connections between the islands we inhabit and inviting viewers to see them in relation to one another.”

La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. Her work asks how history is made, who gets to author it, and whose memory it serves. Working across painting, installation, photography, video, public intervention, and writing, she creates layered narratives from the fragments that colonial histories leave in their wake: contested archives, altered landscapes, ruins, rituals, and silences. Her recent work looks toward the horizon, the shoreline, storm systems, and geological processes as ways of thinking through Caribbean life beyond the limits of the colonial archive.

Belle has presented major solo exhibitions at the National Nordic Museum, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Carlos Museum. Her work has been featured in the Smithsonian Design Triennial and the Havana Biennial and is held in collections including the National Gallery of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and the Weltkulturen Museum.

She is the co-creator of I Am Queen Mary, the groundbreaking artist-led monument confronting Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the resistance of Africans in the former Danish West Indies. She is also the creator of The House That Freedom(s) Built, an ongoing project that uses architecture, land, and material culture to examine histories and practices of freedom.

Belle holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, and an MA and BA from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, the BBC and Artforum, and has been the subject of extensive scholarship in books and academic journals. Belle has received a grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, a Project of Distinction Award from the Danish Arts Council, and a fellowship at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women. She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO). Belle lives and works in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.