Guadeloupe-born painter Kelly Sinnapah Mary builds her portraits out of dense, living greenery, placing figures within thickets of leaves and blooms that feel at once protective and overwhelming. The works belong to a series called The Book of Violette, named after the artist's grandmother, and they treat family memory as something that grows, tangles and endures rather than something fixed in the past.

A recurring figure, Sanbras, moves through the paintings as a kind of stand-in for the artist herself, appearing again and again amid the foliage. The repetition gives the series the quality of a family album rewritten as myth: the same presence returning in different guises, surrounded by plants that carry their own associations with home, the Caribbean landscape and the generations that came before.

The paintings are arriving at a turning point in Sinnapah Mary's career. Her first solo museum exhibition, Between earth and sea, opens in February 2027 and will be presented in two venues: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where it runs from February 7 to June 14, 2027, and Americas Society in New York, where it runs from April 14 to July 31, 2027.

The two-part presentation gives the work a fitting frame. One venue sits in a former colonial mill town in Connecticut, the other in a New York institution devoted to art of the Americas, and between them they underline the artist's own position: rooted in Guadeloupe, working across the Atlantic, and telling stories that begin with her grandmother and reach outward to questions of belonging, inheritance and place.