This is the first program in the Fragile Beauty: Art of the Ocean exhibition lecture series. 

Join artist Morel Doucet and gallerist Myrtis Bedolla in an engaging and insightful conversation moderated by Wilfried Zeisler, chief curator and deputy director of Hillwood.

This conversation will explore Doucet’s artistic practices and inspiration behind his work, including his pieces The Christening of Land and Water and Olokun, both on display in Fragile Beauty: Art of the Ocean, as well as Bedolla’s career as a curator, art consultant, and founder and owner of Galerie Myrtis, and her specialization in works created by 20th and 21st century African American artists. 

There will be time for a Q&A session at the end of the program.

Image courtesy of Morel Doucet and Galerie Myrtis.

HYBRID PROGRAM 

This lecture will be presented in the theater in the Ellen MacNeille Charles Visitor Center and will be livestreamed via Zoom. Visitors can submit questions for the speaker from any location. 

IN-PERSON TIMELINE

5:30–6:30 p.m. | Explore Hillwood 

• Enjoy Hillwood’s mansion, gardens, and greenhouse, and exhibition, Fragile Beauty: Art of the Ocean, on view in the Adirondack building
• Find the perfect memento from your visit at the museum shop 

6:00–6:30 p.m. | Members-only wine and cheese reception. Join today!

6:30–7:30 p.m. | Conversation in Ellen MacNeille Charles Visitor Center Theater.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Morel Doucet (Born 1990) is a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist and art educator who hails from Haiti. His work utilizes ceramics, illustrations, and prints to discuss the impact of climate gentrification, migration, and displacement affecting Black communities in the African diaspora. Through a contemporary reconfiguration of the Black experience, his work catalogs a powerful record of environmental decay at the intersection of economic inequality, pollution, and policy-making. 

Doucet's Emmy-nominated work has been featured and reviewed in numerous publications, including Vogue Mexico, The New York Times, Oxford University Press, Hyperallergic, PBS, WhiteHot Magazine, Hypebeast, and Ebony Magazine. He graduated from the New World School of the Arts with the Distinguished Dean’s Award for Ceramics. From there, he continued his education at the Maryland Institute College of Art, receiving his BFA in Ceramics with a minor in creative writing and a concentration in illustration. Doucet's work is held in collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Tweed Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Plymouth Box Museum, Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Microsoft, Facebook, and Royal Caribbean. 

Doucet has exhibited extensively in national and international institutions, including the Design Museum of Chicago (2023), the Venice Biennale (2022), the Havana Biennial (2019), the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, Miami, FL (2019); the National Council on Education for Ceramic Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2021), the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture (2023), São Tomé et Príncipe, Haitian Heritage Museum, Miami, FL (2019), and Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL (2020). As an Art Educator, he is interested in immersing young audiences in personalized courses that instigate curiosity, sensory perception, and visual literacy. 

Photography credit: Andy Flores.

Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art, focusing on primary and secondary works created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant. She provides professional curatorial services, lectures, and educational programming to corporate, civic, and arts organizations. Bedolla established Galerie Myrtis in 2006 to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression. 

As a curator, Bedolla made her first international debut in 2019 during the 13th Havana Biennial in Havana, Cuba. Bedolla and Ana Joa co-curated Building Bridges II: The Politics of Love, Identity, and Race, which featured works by African American and Afro-Cuban artists. Explored was the convergence of perspectives through works that addressed experiences lived under contradicting political systems. 

For Bedolla’s second international appearance, she curated The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined for the 59th Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, in 2022. The exhibit, hosted by Personal Structures, pays tribute to the resiliency, creativity, and spirituality that have historically sustained Black people. In 2023, the exhibition traveled to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland’s African American History and Culture and the James E. Lewis Museum of Art (JELMA) in Baltimore, Maryland. 

In September 2022, Bedolla collaborated with Christie’s NY to bring diversity and equity to the art world. The relationship is highlighted in the NY Times article Christie’s and a Baltimore Gallery to Sell Work by Black Artists by Robin Pogrebin and Artnet News editorial A Black-Owned Baltimore Gallery Aims to Change the Game by Partnering Directly with Christie’s by Vittoria Benzine. In June 2020, Bedolla gained national press in the New York Times article Black Gallerists Press Forward Despite a Market That Holds Them Back, by Robin Pogrebin and the self-authored article Why My Blackness is not a Threat to your Whiteness for Cultured Magazine in July 2020. Past coverage also includes being voted Best Gallery by the Baltimore Sun in 2017; Black Art in the Spotlight, Baltimore Magazine, September 2018; Living with Art: Myrtis Bedolla Builds a Home and Gallery in Old Goucher, BMORE Art, Issue 3; Women in the Arts, which honored women at the helm of the Baltimore art scene, Baltimore Style Magazine, October 2013. 

Photo is courtesy of Myrtis Bedolla.