his new exhibition, organized by the Territorial Council of Saint Barthélemy, Art Saint Barth and Parley for the Oceans, brings together a selection of world-renowned contemporary artists to raise awareness about the climate crisis and highlight the beauty, fragility and threats specific to the oceans The Wall House Museum shows together the video work of the American artist Doug Aitken on his Underwater Pavilions as well as a set of works produced in support of the action of Parley for the ocean by artists such as Nigel Cooke, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Katharina Roose, Jeppe Hein, Jenny Holzer, Julio Le Parc, Vik Muniz, Ed Ruscha, Kenny Scharf or Rosemarie Trockel. The Underwater Pavilions, which consist of three independent submerged sculptures, will be visible in the bay of Saint Jean. By combining the languages ​​of contemporary architecture, land art and oceanographic research, this installation allows the various issues related to the protection of the local and global environment to dialogue, inviting the viewer to become familiar with the ecosystem of the island. We all depend on the oceans for our survival. Unfortunately, today, human activity has damaged every corner of this fragile whole.

It has taken almost a year to bring together all the material needed for this new exhibition: many documents that had never been seen, people who had never talked about their memories of the construction of this famous villa called locally Villa Rockefeller. From its birth to its impact upon the island, the population and its economy, from an architectural point of view to a technical one the building of this specific house needed a full study. In 1957 when David Rockefeller (1915-2017) buys the Colombier land he represents the apex of America’s wealth, the embodiment of a certain kind of industrial and financial capitalism. Heir to a family known for its economical capacities and political influence, educated in the best schools, he is a modern man, busy, but surprisingly down to earth in its interactions, who falls in love with Saint Barthélemy and its inhabitants. From this moment on he will take upon himself to shelter them both from real estate speculation and the development of a hotel industry that would in his view spoil this last Eden, as it has done on other islands in the Carribbean with the explosion of air travel in the 1950’s. Nelson Aldrich (1911-1975), the architect of the house is also a resolutely modern man. Cousin to David Rockefeller from his maternal side, the two men know each other well and share a mutual respect. Nelson Aldrich is also born in a very affluent family, maybe less rich than his cousin but quite prestigious too. His grand father was for thirty years senator of Rhode Island, a pillar of the Senate Finance Committee; his father was one the most prominent architect of the New England gentry. Nelson, for his luck, will go through the Harvard School of Design at one of its most perfect moments as it sheltered some of Europe best minds from the rise of World War II, and will follow the curriculum of both Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, two of the most influential architects of the 20th century. The villa they imagine together is a remarkable example of modernist architecture, the so-called International Style, which is quite rare in the region. But it is not a by-the-book transposition of austere rules written somewhere in Europe. On the opposite it is a balanced project mixing the local (the stone walls) with the modern (the concrete) that creates a living homage to the island it is built on. With these two men it is architectural modernity that suddenly comes forth in Saint Barthélemy. Ten years prior De Haenen had for the very first time landed his plane on the Saint Jean flatlands and opened the Eden Rock hotel shortly after. The island was opening again to the rest of the world and was about to start writing a new chapter to its long history.

This exhibition presents for the first time 40 exceptional photographs taken by Hélène Roger-Viollet during her visit to Saint-Barthélemy in 1958. Composed of portraits, landscapes and views of buildings, this exclusive selection is a living and moving testimony to an authentic island at the beginning of its opening to tourism that inevitably transformed it. Renowned photographer and eldest daughter of Henri Roger, engineer and amateur photographer, Hélène Roger-Viollet grew up with the photographic experiences of her father, trained in journalism and created the Roger-Viollet Photographic Agency in 1938 with her husband Jean Fischer. Her travels around the world are a pretext to complete, document and enrich the existing archives. Her photos of Saint Barthélemy had remained unknown to this day.

Cradle of humanity, the African continent deploys over more than 30 million square kilometers a myriad of landscapes, peoples and cultures linked together by an often mysterious history. Codes that escape us, aesthetics that challenge us and sometimes disturb us should not however be obstacles to our desire to understand and appreciate an art long said to be "primitive" which is however the fruit of thousands of years of evolution, maturation, and whose stages unfortunately remain hidden from us. This new exhibition aims to lift a corner of the veil that prevents us from knowing this tradition… … but tradition is not everything. And it would be a shame, now that African art has firmly taken its place in art museums, and no longer just anthropology museums, not to open our eyes to the extraordinary wealth and success of its contemporary representatives. Resolutely modern, looking at the future and the rest of the world, today's African artists have made a name for themselves among the representatives of their time. Thanks to the exceptional loan of Mr Marc Leo Félix, collector and expert in ancient African art and with the collaboration of Destinee Ross-Sutton, a New York curator who has the confidence of the elite of today's African artists, the Collectivity of Saint Barthélemy is pleased to present: +4000 Years of African Art