Bounty

January 28 – February 28, 2026

BOUNTY explores the evolving relationship between people and natural resources through cycles of extraction and regeneration. Through practices spanning geographies and generations, BOUNTY bears witness to an eco-human continuum shaped by modes of engagement that range from stewardship to exhaustion.

The exhibition is inspired in part by the regenerative work of Grown in Haiti, a reforestation organization based in the mountains of Jacmel. Founded on land once depleted by oil rigging and monocropping, the project has restored soil health and water access to cultivate and distribute more than 20,000 trees representing over 2,000 fruit-bearing species historically native to Haiti. This connection is further shaped by curator Sadaf Padder’s long-standing involvement with the organization as a volunteer since 2019.

BOUNTY is also informed by Sargent’s Daughters owner and director Allegra LaViola’s family collection, inherited from her late father, Alex Pagel, whose deep engagement with Haitian art laid the foundation for the exhibition. Works by Georges Liautaud, Janvier Louis-Juste, and Damien Paul—created in the mid-1950s and fashioned from discarded steel oil drums—exemplify the tradition of Haitian metal sculpture, transforming industrial remnants into intricate reliefs and sculptural forms depicting daily life and sacred iconography. These works anchor the exhibition in a lineage of respect and inheritance.

Extending outward from Haiti, the exhibition brings together artists working across the Caribbean, African, and Asian diasporas who reflect on related histories of human interventions that have altered ecological systems. Material inquiries engage reclaimed or natural substances shaped by depletion and reuse, reanimating matter and species marked by exploitation. Abstract investigations hold scarcity and excess in visual tension. Speculative imaginaries envision futures populated by hybrid beings and reconfigured ecosystems, where coexistence and balance guide new forms of life. Together, these practices articulate regeneration as an active and imaginative process.

Even within compromised systems, regeneration persists. In 1839, Haitian poet and storyteller Ignace Nau envisioned Haiti as a site of ecological rebirth alongside political emancipation, anticipating restoration as both environmental and cultural renewal. In a lyrical tribute to a newly liberated homeland and founding father Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Nau writes:

“The voice of our forests will become sound again,
And our rivers will flow out in torrents,
And our lakes will roll more transparent streams…”

These lines register an early recognition that colonial conquest and chattel slavery inflicted violence upon land as well as people, fracturing ecosystems and disrupting the flourishing of Haiti’s flora and non-human kin. As the world’s first free Black republic, Haiti emerged from a revolution that bound human liberation to the devastation of its environment, rendering ecological destruction inseparable from histories of racialized violence and human suffering. In imagining national restoration, Nau thus understood regeneration not merely as political recovery but as the return of ecological balance, in which the repair of land and the healing of a formerly enslaved people were deeply entangled.

That vision continues to resonate. On a mountaintop in Haiti, jackfruit, soursop, sugarcane, plantains, mango, and breadfruit flourish, drawing nourishment from restored soil and flowing water. These harvests sustain surrounding communities in a bio-diverse system shaped by mutual reliance shaped through collective responsibility. Across oceans, in studios from Brooklyn to Washington, DC, to Mumbai, artists work in conversation with this living rhythm, translating the pressures and possibilities of the present ecological moment. BOUNTY holds open a space where regeneration is felt as a living and evolving practice carried between land and body, memory and matter.