Laurena Finéus

Laurena Finéus is a Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers painting while also incorporating textile installation, performance, education, and socially engaged art. Through densely layered, imagined landscapes, she examines Black geographies, maroon thought, migration, statelessness, land, and what she describes as emotional fugitivity. Her compositions frequently move between figuration and abstraction, bringing human bodies, tropical vegetation, mountains, waterways, architectural fragments, and historical references together within spaces shaped by memory, displacement, and transformation.  Finéus’s work is grounded in Haitian history and the wider political conditions of the Caribbean and Black Atlantic. Drawing upon family narratives, migratory histories, and the writing of Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, she considers how histories are produced, silenced, fictionalized, and recovered Finéus earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in communication from the University of Ottawa in 2020 and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2024. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, The Shed, Hudson River Museum, Wallach Art Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, Jenkins Johnson, Art Mûr, and Fridman Gallery. In 2026, Fridman Gallery presented Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kòlè, her first New York solo exhibition, in which layered paintings addressed anger, environmental instability, rebellion, faith, and the Maroon spirit.  Her work is held in public and corporate collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa Art Collection, Google, and Manulife Global. Finéus has received the Saunderson Prize, the Helen Frankenthaler Fund award, an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, and the Ottawa Arts Council’s IBPOC Emerging Artist Award. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.