Tessa Mars is the 2017 Davidoff Art Initiative awardee. She is a painter whose on-going body of work explores identity, first through the lens of language and gender and more recently by questioning geography and history. She is interested in how Haitian history, customs and rituals inform our identity as a people and how we express it collectively and individually. Her work investigates notions of patriotism, sovereignty and confronts them to the reality of Haitian daily life. It raises questions about how the legacy of Haiti’s revolutionary past shapes our society, about the transmission and loss of memory, about strategies individuals come up with to reconcile past and present. It also raises questions about womanhood, freedom and the fight for it.
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