Watson Mere is an award-winning visual and performance artist whose work has been exhibited since 2016. His practice has been presented in galleries, museums, and prominent venues including the Barclays Center (Brooklyn, NY), Venice Art Gallery (Venice, Italy), The Oculus at the World Trade Center (New York, NY), Gracie Mansion Conservatory (New York, NY), Norman Rea Gallery (York, United Kingdom), and The Africa Center (Harlem, NY).

Mere is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Haiti Cultural Exchange, the 2025 El Greco – Premio de las Bellas Artes Fine Arts Award from ICM Gestora Cultural, and the 2022 Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program. In 2018, he received a Citation of Honor in the Arts from the District Attorney of Kings County.

His work and practice have been featured in publications and media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Esquire, Artsy, NPR, News 12 New York, Philly Magazine, Broadway World, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Nylon, C-Suite Quarterly, among others.

Mere holds a B.A. in Business Administration (2011) and a Master of Business Administration M.B.A. (2015) from Florida A&M University. Born and raised in Belle Glade, Florida, to Haitian immigrant parents, he currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and maintains a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in Times Square, Manhattan, New York City.

I view my work as portals that reflect the viewer’s own experiences and beliefs, or offer a glimpse into worlds they may have never seen or understood. My aim is to create work that resists passive observation and instead demands engagement, inviting viewers to pause, reflect, and question.

My practice is rooted in the cultural complexities of the African diaspora, with a primary focus on Haitian culture and Haitian Vodou’s place within it. I am driven by a desire to give a visual voice to Haitian Vodou, a spiritual system long shrouded in mysticism, fear, and misinformation. That urge comes from my own early voicelessness. I was unable to speak until the age of five and began making art at two as a way to communicate. That experience sharpened my sense of observation and taught me how to translate emotion into form. Art has always been my first language.

In my latest series, The Forces, I explore fire as both subject and spirit, an enduring force that has shaped Haiti’s past, illuminates its present, and guides its future. Fire acts as a bridge between the physical and metaphysical, carrying visions of Haitian culture, ritual, and spirituality. Each painting becomes a field of flame through which stories of resistance, prayer, and transformation emerge.

The work is also personal. My experience portraying Sango, the Yoruba deity of fire and thunder, in The Fourth Alaafin of Oyo during the 2022 New York Theater Festival deepened my understanding of the spiritual systems that traveled across the Atlantic, particularly Ifá, and their parallels with Haitian Vodou.

Ultimately, The Forces honors fire as both ancestral guide and storyteller, illuminating the continuum that connects Haiti to its African roots and to broader themes of endurance, transformation, and spirit.