This iteration of Studio Salon celebrates Crossing the Horizon, Volume 8 of Caribbean art journal FORGOTTEN LANDS, with a day of programming at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Guest-edited by Dejá Aaliyah Belardo, Volume 08 reframes the horizon not as a border but as a threshold—a place where memory drifts, ancestral knowledge surfaces, and the Caribbean opens as a realm of possibility. Throughout the day, that idea takes shape through a keynote by Belardo, dialogues between artists and writers working across the Caribbean and its diaspora, an immersive sound activation, and a closing DJ set. 



2:00–3:15 pm
Dialogue I: Memory, History, and the Haitian Imagination

Writer Edwidge Danticat, scholar Dantaé Garee Elliott, and artist Manuel Mathieu discuss their practices of engaging memory, migration, history, and the afterlives of colonialism and political violence across Haiti and its diaspora.

RSVP Required



4:00–5:00 pm
Sonic Activation: Rest Within the Wake

Multidisciplinary artist James Allister Sprang offers an immersive listening environment exploring Black interiority, diaspora, and collective reflection. This program invites audiences to experience listening as both creative and communal practice.

RSVP Required



5:00–6:15pm
Dialogue II: Crossing the Horizon

Dejá Aaliyah Belardo, guest editor of FORGOTTEN LANDS Volume 08: Crossing the Horizon, joins artist Firelei Báez and writer and curator Gervais Marsh to discuss the horizon as a site of movement, imagination, belonging, and artistic possibility across the Caribbean and its global diasporas.

RSVP Required



6:30–8:00 pm
Closing DJ Set

Shie Moreno closes the evening with a celebratory DJ set for gathering and movement.

RSVP Required

Firelei Báez draws upon African diasporic histories, reimagining them to explore new possibilities for the future. Báez received an MFA from Hunter College, a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Since 2024, Báez has been the subject of her first major U.S. survey, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Des Moines Art Center, before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it remains on view through May 2026. Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), curated by Cecilia Alemani, and the inaugural installation of the ICA Watershed in Boston (2021). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), Rotterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Báez has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. She is the recipient of several major awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2020), the Artes Mundi Prize (2021), the Philip Guston Rome Prize (2021), and the Cooper Union President’s Citation (2022). Her work is held in prominent public and private collections worldwide, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dejá Aaliyah Belardo (b. St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands) is a curator and multimedia artist and the guest editor of FORGOTTEN LANDS Vol 08. Associate Curator of Visual Art and Civic Programs at The Shed, she has previously held roles at Pace Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has participated in the Museum Professionals Seminar and Arts Leadership Praxis at Studio Museum in Harlem.

She is interested in the intersection of art and politics. Belardo's goal as a curator is to support boundary pushing artists as they establish themselves in the art historical canon, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Her curatorial practice centers contemporary practices of the Caribbean and the Black diasporas of the Americas.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, winner of the American Book Award; The Dew Breaker; Claire of the Sea Light; and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for Criticism. She has also written seven books for children and young adults, the travel narrative After the Dance, and two essay collections, Create Dangerously and We’re Alone. Her most recent novel, Dèy, released in August 2026, has been longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and currently serves as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Dantaé Garee Elliott, Ph.D., is a visiting professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her dissertation, “Barrel Poetics,” examines barrel culture within the Caribbean diaspora and the barrel’s representation in contemporary Caribbean art. She served as Co-Director of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Summer Seminar for the Curatorial Fellowship class in 2022. She is the Senior Editorial Assistant for Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is also a featured artist in Volume 04 of Forgotten Lands. Elliott was the Spring 2023 Mellon Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU and co-curated the first solo exhibition in New York of Vincentian photographer Nadia Huggins, Coral & Ash, at the KJCC, New York University. She is a 2024-2025 doctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities and a Dean’s Dissertation fellow at NYU.

Dr. Gervais Marsh is a curator, writer, scholar and teacher from Kingston, Jamaica, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the difficulties of reconciliation while grappling with forms of structural harm. An Associate Curator at Creative Time, they are guided by a desire to foster critical dialogue through public art and programming, exhibition making, and essays. With a grounding in Black Feminism, they believe that knowledge is created collectively and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty. They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and are an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Manuel Mathieu is a multidisciplinary artist known for his work exploring themes of historical violence, erasure, and the physicality of visual culture, nature, and symbolism, informed by his Haitian heritage and his Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. His work encompasses painting, sculpture, mosaic, installation, video, and olfactory art.

In recent years, he has had solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, PHI (Montreal), The Power Plant (Toronto), the Longlati Foundation (Beijing), the K11 Art Foundation (Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenyang), and at the De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea, UK). Mathieu recently received the Best Short Film Award at the 2023 International Festival of Films on Art for his film Pendulum, which was subsequently presented as a solo exhibition at the Toronto Biennale, the Pérez Art Museum (Miami), the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina), as well as the 61st Biennale di Venezia. He exhibited in galleries and art fairs across North America, Europe and Asia.

Ivan "Shie" Moreno is an Afro-Cuban visual artist, musician, DJ and experimental filmmaker. He's also the founder of Clave Y Cuba, a cultural incubator dedicated to preserving and sharing Afro-Cuban musical traditions. Born in Havana and raised between Miami and Los Angeles, his multidisciplinary practice bridges painting, sound, performance, and film, infused with the energy of Afro-Cuban traditions and contemporary art. Trained mainly through oral transmission, apprenticeship, and community-based knowledge systems rooted in Afro-Cuban culture, Ivan serves as a culture-bearer and steward of spiritual and sonic traditions rarely represented in institutional spaces. His work draws from his daily practices, ranging from sacred drumming and Egungun rites to painting and singing rumba, and transforms them into immersive, contemporary experiences that honor the lineage and resilience of the diaspora.

James Allister Sprang is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and technologist working across spatial sound, photography, installation, and performance. He creates environments exploring memory, resilience, rest, and Black interiority—work that exists in galleries, black boxes, and the space between the ears.

Sprang received his BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked with spatial sound since 2019, treating space as an instrument and developing new approaches to collective listening. His work has been presented or supported by Baryshnikov Arts, The Kitchen, ICA Maine, Lincoln Center, the Knight Foundation, United States for Artists, the Mellon Foundation, and the Concertgebouw among many others.

Sprang lives in Philadelphia and is the founder of Felt Void, an initiative that celebrates spatial sound as a contemporary art form.