Latest news with #Jean-Louis
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Yahoo
‘Boom! It happened': Red Mustang barrels into Brockton home with family inside
A family in Brockton says they're forced from their home Sunday night after a car broke through their fence, drove over their lawn, and into the side of their home. Juares Jean-Louis lives in the Lafoye Street home off Thatcher Street with his family. He told Boston 25 Sunday that he was outside doing work on the lawn before the collision. 'I go in, relax, sit down, start having some good times with my son, and boom,' Jean-Louis said. 'It happened.' He continued, 'My TV started moving forward, and I saw daylight.' Initially unsure what happened, he rushed outside and found a red Mustang lodged into his chimney. 'Blood all on their face,' Jean-Louis described. 'Just teenagers being reckless, from what I heard.' He and his family jumped into action, calling 911 and offering the two water. Jean-Louis said the driver was seriously hurt but conscious. 'He was screaming, he couldn't feel one of his legs,' said Jean-Louis. Ambulances arrived moments later after the collision around 5 pm Sunday. Brockton Police say the red Mustang traveling down Thatcher Street was trying to pass a car in the wrong lane. That car turned left, and the Mustang veered off the road to avoid a crash. The driver, police say, is facing several citations. They're being treated at the hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. Neighbors reacted to the chaos outside. 'It's really shocking to see the car with all the airbags deployed, and to think somebody got out of that car,' said Hope Corbett, who ran into the blocked-off neighborhood after work Sunday. She continued, 'We've had quite a few kids racing and losing their lives over it. These guys are lucky. They need to slow down and be careful.' Jean-Louis says they had to shut off the power to his home because of the crash. He is also asking the city to look for his dog Koda, who ran away during the chaos. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At the Gardner, Fabiola Jean-Louis summons ancient Vodou spirits
There's something vaguely holy about 'Lwa,' Fabiola Jean-Louis's softly menacing effigy of a Haitian deity posed in a flood of daylight at the Gardner Museum. The handful of steps leading up to its perch are dotted with candles, altar-like; the gothic arch that frames the piece echoes stained glass windows in any Catholic church, anywhere. Spiritual reference matters to Jean-Louis, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But the sword in the figure's hands, offered to the viewer as though a sacred object, tells us the spirits conjured here are of a different sort. 'Lwa' is, in Haitian Creole, a Vodou spirit of both grace and vengeance. On the sword are the words 'PRAN TET,' loosely translated from Haitian Creole to mean 'take heads.' With its gilded robes, radiant crown, and gold-encrusted body, the figure is darkly beautiful — apt, perhaps, given the fractures of its land of origin. It's the centerpiece of 'Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom,' Jean-Louis's first major museum exhibition, just opened at the Gardner. Jean-Louis, who emigrated to Brooklyn as a child with her family and still lives there, was an artist-in-residence here in 2023; the Gardner proposed the exhibition shortly after, and Jean-Louis got to work. The show now occupies all three of the museum's temporary exhibition spaces, including its towering facade commission. Advertisement Left: Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'Govi Vessel Shrine,' (with niche) 2024, and 'Ode to Merab: Study of Ateni Sioni Frescos,' 2023. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Materially, Jean-Louis' work often has the presence of stony devotional objects, exhumed from the sea- bottom and crusted with coral and shell, an accretion of the ages. Their very nature makes it all the more astonishing to learn that she works almost exclusively with papier-mache, delicate and ephemeral; she crafts the weight of an ancient cosmology almost out of thin air. The wraithlike 'Peregrine,' 2024, sprouts flowers from one of its silty wings; poised somewhere between life, death, and resurrection, the piece is a loose self-portrait of Jean-Louis herself. 'Lwa,' made in 2021-22, is an exception to most of the 40-some pieces here; almost all were made in the past year, specifically for this show. The piece does, however, strike a tone. Jean-Louis went to Catholic school in the United States, but as an adult, she became more deeply entranced by her Haitian heritage. Its history carries broad symbolic weight: The first land to be colonized in the Americas, Haiti was also first to abolish slavery, in 1804, after more than a decade of enslaved revolt against the island's French colonists. Advertisement Haiti's particular spirituality, drawn from the various practices of West Africans brought there against their will, coalesced as Vodou. As Jean-Louis tells it, a Vodou ceremony sparked the revolution itself, in 1791, when a conflagration of enslaved people called on the spirits for guidance. In her telling, the spirits compelled them to freedom at any cost, and the revolution was born. Fabiola Jean-Louis's "Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom" will be on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 25. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 'Waters of the Abyss,' then, is inevitably narrative. Through an array of dizzying sculptural pieces, Jean-Louis not only means to capture Haitian history and spirituality, but to craft a deeper myth from the little island-state's outsize status as the first free nation of formerly enslaved peoples. Vodou is at the center of Jean-Louis's particular mythology, which she casts as ancient history: In an anteroom preceding the main gallery, earthy alcoves arrayed in a grid contain spot-lit objects, which evoke notions of a shrine replete with grave goods unearthed from watery tombs. Many are tiny vessels made, in Jean-Louis's imagining, to safeguard the spirits of the departed — ornate urns in dusty clay tones. Others evoke notions of mysteries lost to the ages; one alabaster-hued panel embeds a god-like figure amid crystals and shells, like a devotional to a household god. Fabiola Jean-Louis, "Out of Obsidian" (L) and "Peregrine," both 2024, in "Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom" at the Gardner Museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Mystery, I think, is a key to Jean-Louis's work. She proposes a holistic long-view composed of known fragments, with her imaginative framework as the connective tissue. Nothing is certain, as the country's own fractious story can attest; even now, amid an eruption of gang violence there, Jean-Louis's work is dream-like aspiration of something solid to cling to amid the chaos. Advertisement As much as they might seem like artifacts, her pieces evoke ideas unstuck in the material world. 'An Entry Point to Heaven' is the title of several pieces here, each of them tethered to the unknown depths of the sea. '#3,' with its undulating frame of what might be desiccated seaweed, glitters with rivulets of aquamarine studded with tiny shells; '#2,' beside it, cradles an opaque turquoise pool in its delicate embrace. Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'An Entry Point to Heaven #1,' 2024. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Passageways are important to Jean-Louis, a notion she returns to again and again; a pair of sculptures towers at odd angles in the main gallery, almost like guardians for 'Lwa,' just beyond. Patterning them with shells, she imagines them as undersea sirens, beckoning to the other side. She calls them 'Mermaid Portals,' a loose term for figures that are only semi-human. They're stunning and enigmatic, much like the vision she's crafted for her homeland. In the Vodou faith, spirits of the ancestors — lwa , writ large — dwell in the deep sea, surfacing when called forth by the living for guidance — or vengeance. The abyss is their home; it calls to us all, eventually. Jean-Louis proposes a choice: Where it leads — to the endless deep, or somewhere beyond it — is a matter of faith, or lack thereof. WATERS OF THE ABYSS: AN INTERSECTION OF SPIRIT AND FREEDOM Advertisement Through May 25. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. 617-566-1401, Murray Whyte can be reached at
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Celebrating Black History Month: The story of two Brooklyn sisters who forged a family of firsts
NEW YORK - A peaceful playground in Williamsburg bears the name of Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet. Two miles away, in DUMBO is a park named after Susan Smith McKinney Steward. These are not the only places which bear their names; a school in Fort Greene, and another in Prospect Heights are also named after them. Who were these women who left such a mark on Brooklyn? Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward was the first Black Woman to practice medicine in New York State, graduating as valedictorian and opening a prosperous office in Brooklyn. "She's working as a teacher, and it's her own income that is paying her way through medical school," says Dominique Jean-Louis, Chief Historian at the Brooklyn Public Library's Center for Brooklyn History. Her older sister Sarah Garnet became the first Black female principal of a New York City Public school. "It's easy to understand how they become trailblazers in their field. And also become national and even international symbols of what Black women are capable of," Jean-Louis tells CBS News New York reporter Hannah Kliger. "It has everything to do with the special circumstances of Brooklyn's Black community, and specifically, Weeksville, that is creating such excellence." Jean-Louis says a look at their early life can provide hints at where they took their inspiration. They were born to Sylvanus Smith, a prosperous hog farmer in Brooklyn's Weeksville, one of the first free Black communities in the United States, founded in the 1830s. At its peak, it was a thriving, self-sufficient Black neighborhood full of businesses, churches, and schools. "The world they're growing up in is a world of Black uplift, right, where people are not only trying to do well for themselves, trying to achieve in a world that has obstacles that are specific to Black people, but they're also trying to uplift their neighbors," Jean-Louis explains. Regina Robbins is tour educator at the Weeksville Heritage Center, where several original houses remain along with collections celebrating prominent residents. "People were drawn here not merely by economic necessity, but also by a desire to be a part of a majority Black community, which was essentially unheard of in the United States at that time," she says. Mrs. Garnet and Dr. McKinney Steward went to London in 1911 to present at the Universal Races Congress to promote interracial harmony. Dr. McKinney Steward specialized in childhood disease, co-founded a hospital, and later in life, ventured out West with her second husband, Theophilus Gould Steward, a U.S. Army Buffalo Soldier of the first all-Black Army regiment. Her great-granddaughter is the late actress Ellen Holly, America's first Black soap opera star who died in 2023. "Its very special when someone recognizes your work," Holly said in a 2004 interview recognizing her contribution to the history of TV. Both sisters were also involved in the Women's Suffrage movement and helped create the Equal Suffrage League, which worked to abolish race and gender discrimination in the late 1880s. "Once abolition was achieved, a lot of those allies kind of went away. And you had women standing there asking, 'well, what about us? 'So women like Sarah and Susan took it upon themselves to take up the mantle for Women's Suffrage," Robbins explains. Among the idyllic hills of Brooklyn's historic Green-wood Cemetery are two graves steps away from each other; the resting places of both sisters who desired to educate and heal their community. Have a story idea or tip in Brooklyn? Email Hannah by CLICKING HERE. Trump, Musk take questions at White House Flu deaths outpace COVID deaths in 22 states for first time since pandemic began Trump could meet Putin in Saudi Arabia; Federal worker buyouts resume
CBS News
13-02-2025
- General
- CBS News
The story of two Brooklyn sisters who forged a family of firsts
NEW YORK - A peaceful playground in Williamsburg bears the name of Sarah J. S. Tompkins Garnet. Two miles away, in DUMBO is a park named after Susan Smith McKinney Steward. These are not the only places which bear their names; a school in Fort Greene, and another in Prospect Heights are also named after them. Who were these women who left such a mark on Brooklyn? Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward was the first Black Woman to practice medicine in New York State, graduating as valedictorian and opening a prosperous office in Brooklyn. "She's working as a teacher, and it's her own income that is paying her way through medical school," says Dominique Jean-Louis, Chief Historian at the Brooklyn Public Library's Center for Brooklyn History. Her older sister Sarah Garnet became the first Black female principal of a New York City Public school. "It's easy to understand how they become trailblazers in their field. And also become national and even international symbols of what Black women are capable of," Jean-Louis tells CBS News New York reporter Hannah Kliger. "It has everything to do with the special circumstances of Brooklyn's Black community, and specifically, Weeksville, that is creating such excellence." Jean-Louis says a look at their early life can provide hints at where they took their inspiration. They were born to Sylvanus Smith, a prosperous hog farmer in Brooklyn's Weeksville, one of the first free Black communities in the United States, founded in the 1830s. At its peak, it was a thriving, self-sufficient Black neighborhood full of businesses, churches, and schools. "The world they're growing up in is a world of Black uplift, right, where people are not only trying to do well for themselves, trying to achieve in a world that has obstacles that are specific to Black people, but they're also trying to uplift their neighbors," Jean-Louis explains. Regina Robbins is tour educator at the Weeksville Heritage Center, where several original houses remain along with collections celebrating prominent residents. "People were drawn here not merely by economic necessity, but also by a desire to be a part of a majority Black community, which was essentially unheard of in the United States at that time," she says. Mrs. Garnet and Dr. McKinney Steward went to London in 1911 to present at the Universal Races Congress to promote interracial harmony. Dr. McKinney Steward specialized in childhood disease, co-founded a hospital, and later in life, ventured out West with her second husband, Theophilus Gould Steward, a U.S. Army Buffalo Soldier of the first all-Black Army regiment. Her great-granddaughter is the late actress Ellen Holly, America's first Black soap opera star who died in 2023. "Its very special when someone recognizes your work," Holly said in a 2004 interview recognizing her contribution to the history of TV. Both sisters were also involved in the Women's Suffrage movement and helped create the Equal Suffrage League, which worked to abolish race and gender discrimination in the late 1880s. "Once abolition was achieved, a lot of those allies kind of went away. And you had women standing there asking, 'well, what about us? 'So women like Sarah and Susan took it upon themselves to take up the mantle for Women's Suffrage," Robbins explains. Among the idyllic hills of Brooklyn's historic Green-wood Cemetery are two graves steps away from each other; the resting places of both sisters who desired to educate and heal their community.
