Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) presents Flare, an exhibition of four recent and ongoing series by DC-based artist Charles Phillippe Jean-Pierre. Drawing on his Haitian heritage and his experiences as an immigrant child growing up on the Southside of Chicago, Jean-Pierre’s work explores how memory, color, and light shape our historical and contemporary imaginations. His multimedia paintings speak to the nexus of political, social, and economic structures and are representative of the synergy, or lack thereof, between societal perceptions and reality. The recent works selected for this exhibition radiate with reverence for the people, places, and objects through which the artist constructs his own worldview.
Jean-Pierre is an adjunct professor at American University and U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Artist. His works are featured the U.S. Embassy in Benin, Malawi, and Niger. He also serves as a guest curator for exhibitions at The Embassy of Haiti. He has been featured in three Smithsonian exhibitions and was a Barack Obama invitee to the White House to speak on the role of the arts in youth justice. In 2021, he was an invited featured artist for the 2021 Atlantic Festival.
His collaborations include: Alvin Ailey, Boys & Girls Club, DC Commission on the Arts, International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank, Minnesota State Arts Board, Something In Water Music Festival, and West Elm, among many others. His works have been featured in The Atlantic, Black Enterprise, BET, Ebony Magazine, NBC, Netflix, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Jean-Pierre public art has been featured in Cape Town, Pretoria South Africa, New York, Chicago, DC, Istanbul, Panama, Port-au-Prince, London, and Paris. Jean-Pierre holds a Master of Arts from Howard University. Jean-Pierre’s atelier & Galerie D’Art is located in Washington, DC.
“I see it as a wonderful opportunity to look across an artist’s practice and find connections between the different ways an artist is making work,” says Tephra ICA Associate Curator Hannah Barco. “Jean-Pierre’s upcoming exhibition is another great example of this, and I am so excited to see how the conversation unfolds around his abstract painting, his mono-print collage portraits, and his new series of photographs of found objects that he has painted black.”
His work will be available for viewing from June 29 to October 15, 2023.
