Lavar Munroe: Son of the Soil

Son of the Soil is a comprehensive survey featuring over 40 works from the last decade of Lavar Munroe’s practice. Through painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition traces the artist’s evolution from early drawings that blend mythology and magical realism to visceral three-dimensional works confronting trauma, violence, and survival. Munroe’s practice is rooted in Grants Town, the historically significant Over-the-Hill community where he was born and raised—a space settled by liberated Africans and the formerly enslaved, shaped by resistance, and too often hidden from public view.

The exhibition spans several major bodies of work: Specimens (2008-2010), which addresses the erasure of indigenous Caribbean peoples through hybrid creatures; Grants Town Trickster (2012), sculptural works in cardboard that embody resourcefulness and struggle; Shank=Survival (2013), which transforms prison weapons into haunting meditations on institutionalised racism; the Devils series (2016), oversized paintings that map violence and fear; and recent memorial works including And the Dogs Went Silence, collaborative pieces with Munroe’s late father that explore legacy and resurrection.

Munroe’s work resists the romanticised narratives often associated with Caribbean art, instead revealing complex truths about colonialism’s ongoing effects and the devaluation of Black lives. Drawing on West African folklore, Junkanoo traditions, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, and literary sources, he builds a personal universe populated with tricksters, heroes, and monuments of the African diaspora. His materials—cardboard, found objects, sea salt, gold leaf, cut canvas—carry their own histories of commodity, poverty, and cultural expression, creating work that is simultaneously beautiful and unsettling, familiar and uncanny.

About the artist

Lavar Munroe (b. 1982, Nassau, The Bahamas) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation art. He earned his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007 and his MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in 2013. In 2014, he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received the Postdoctoral Award of Research Excellence. Munroe represented The Bahamas at the 2010 Liverpool Biennial with a site-specific drawing project. His work was featured in the 2015 Venice Biennale in the International Art Exhibition All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor. He has been included in Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of The Swamp, the New Orleans triennial curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, and the 12th Dakar Biennial in Senegal, curated by Simon Njami. Munroe has been awarded residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, and Thread: Artist Residency & Cultural Center in Senegal, a project of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Munroe lives and works between Washington, DC, and Nassau, The Bahamas.