Rejin Leys or Through the Eyes of a Mixed-Media Artist

Rejin Leys (born Regine Leys) is a mixed-media artist like no other. Born in New York, the Brooklyn College graduate honed her creative skills while a child through obsessive drawing. These days psychologists are coming out with stories of how childhood creativity can often be blotted out as a result of discouraging teachers and naysayers who stomp on young dreams. Fortunately, Rejin Leys was not one of those casualties.

She went on to study at the prestigious Parsons School of Design, and for years she worked collectively with other artists through organizations like Coast-to-Coast, National Women Artists of Color and Kouran (a collective of Contemporary Haitian Artists in NY), in addition to gaining hands-on experience and technical art skills at local studios and organizations through internships.

The labors of the artist paid off. Several of her drawings, prints, and artist books have had their
exhibitions in museums and galleries internationally. Prestigious publications and cultural annotators like Small Axe, Boutures, The North Star Fund’s Annual Report, and the Bread & Roses Cultural Project Social Justice Calendar have also taken note, publishing her work. One of the crowning achievements of Leys’ career has been a Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, one of the highly-sought awards by artists of all mediums.

The art of Rejin Leys is very complex. Simple pencil strokes that tell epic, Tolstoy-length stories. In “Emerging Superpowers (The Final Encounter)”, one of her most compelling pieces, a giant chicken stands in the center, flanked by stars and a ladybugs. When it comes to animal personality attributions, the chicken has always been attributed the qualities of cowardice the way the lion has always been viewed as brave. Is Leys turning prophetic? Her way of saying the last will be the first, and the first the last? That unexpected changes are in store for the world?

We got to know the mixed-media artist…read on!

You’re a mixed-media artist.
Mixed media means that I don’t use just one technique. A drawing might have several materials and processes, depending on what I think it needs. I might start out drawing with pencil or ink, then print from a carved block on top of that, or glue on some patterned paper or a photocopied image. It depends on what I think that drawing or that image needs, and in that way it is less like the process of making a painting (using only paint) and more like cooking something that requires a variety of ingredients.

We’d love to know more about your “100 Drawings Series”.
“100 Drawings” is a project I began in January of 2011. While looking through my archives at images and ideas I had worked with over the years, I realized that I was less interested in the specific meanings things had for me before, and more interested in the way some forms were more flexible, more mutable than others. The more ambiguous or generic the forms were, the more easily they could be reapplied elsewhere to tell new stories.

By creating new combinations of images, references emerged that I may not have thought about before or planned. In this way, the drawings became a way to explore the connections between different ideas like evolution, alternative universes, allocation of resources and energy, power structures. Also they highlight how our daily lives are affected by these big-picture issues.

Anybody in particular who has inspired you?
Clarissa Sligh, a photographer and multi-media artist who I worked with in the 1990s, and Juan Sanchez, whose work and wisdom taught me that my art didn’t have to be separate from my social consciousness.

Some would say that you eschew traditional Haitian art.
I don’t eschew anything! I have a lot of respect for traditional Haitian art and artists, I just don’t happen to work that way myself. My work reflects that I was raised and trained in the US, influenced by my Haitian background but also by the teachers I worked with in school, everything I’ve ever looked at or thought about, and everything I’ve read or that has happened in the world since then. It would be very inauthentic, even dishonest of me to ignore all of that and try to make traditional paintings, which reflect a very specific place and time.

What would you say has been the proudest moment of your career?
In 1999 there was a Diaspora Conference held in Port-au-Prince by the Ministry of Haitians Living Abroad. I was invited to mount a solo exhibition at the Ateliers J.R. Jerome, which was given a lot of support and publicity. While there for the event I was hosted by the wonderful Mireille Jerome, director of the gallery, who introduced me to a number of local artists and scheduled events for me to participate in. I was also interviewed for newspapers and TV. They treated me so well that I was reluctant to come back to New York!

Since it wasn’t possible for me to stay in Haiti, when I returned home I decided to find ways to stay engaged with the cultural community in Haiti. Most recently, my friend and fellow artist V. Cybil Charlier and I organized a project called Art/Quake. Along with 8 other NY area artists, we each contributed an edition of prints to a portfolio, which is now being sold to benefit artists who were affected by the earthquake. We’ve exhibited the portfolio twice, most recently in Brooklyn, and have organized a number of cultural events as part of the project.

I plan to continue to work on projects like this which allow me to build and strengthen my ties to the cultural community in Haiti, and also to the Haitian community in NY.