From Haiti to Vermont
South Burlington Library, Burlington, VT • southburlingtonlibrary.org • Through April 2025
Most artists are motivated by an inner drive to create but few are as productive as Vermont artist Pievy Polyte. Starting in December 2024 and extending through the end of April 2025, Polyte’s colorful, often joyful paintings of his Haitian homeland’s lush landscape and hard-working people are on view in three separate but overlapping exhibitions.
Polyte is a natural born collaborator, and his exhibitions are in venues supported by local businesses and organizations. A month after he installed his eyepopping paintings on the walls of the popular, renovated, Maltex mill building turned office complex in Burlington’s trendy South End Arts District, he was hanging a selection of figurative and landscape paintings at The Skinny Pancake, a Burlington waterfront restaurant, and in February the South Burlington Library hosted From Haiti to Vermont, its second solo exhibition of the prolific painter’s work. His first exhibition at the library in 2024 garnered so much positive attention that the University of Vermont acquired two large scale paintings from this show. Stylistically, Polyte employs the flattening of forms and compressed perspective of folk art, yet he injects a more sophisticated acknowledgement of cubism’s influence in his compositions. His landscapes recall French post-impressionist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) in their reduction of natural forms to a system of patterns that dance across the surface adding rhythm and detail.
More than an artist, Polyte is a modern Renaissance man. He is an agronomist, educator, and accomplished chef. Growing-up on a Haitian coffee farm prepared him to become the founder of a coffee cooperative called Peak Macaya, which is a beneficiary of profits from his art sales. He is also planning on forming a U.S.-based non-profit to sell Peak Macaya coffee which may also include a brick and mortar café which presumably would have wall space for future artwork. Deeply inspired by the natural world, Polyte recognizes the importance of engaging Haiti’s children to appreciate the land. To this end, he supports two schools in Haiti that emphasize environmental education. At the opening of his first solo show at the South Burlington Library visitors were treated to an elaborate buffet of Haitian specialty dishes, all prepared by the artist, making this exhibition a treat for the stomach as well as the eyes.
— Cynthia Close