What do people carry with them when they leave one home for another?
That question sits at the center of “Morel Doucet: The Things We Carry,” opening Sept. 24 at the Lowe Art Museum, where the Miami-based Haitian artist brings together ceramics, portraits, botanical forms, photographs and found objects to explore migration, memory, climate change and the idea of home.
Drawing from his Haitian heritage and his upbringing in Miami, Doucet has built a practice around the things people and places retain even as neighborhoods change around them: plants, family histories, rituals, objects and inherited knowledge. The Lowe describes the exhibition as rooted in the material culture of the Caribbean diaspora and in what is carried “across oceans and generations.”
The opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the museum on the University of Miami campus.
A childhood snail that never left him
Doucet’s relationship with clay began years before exhibitions and museum collections.
At Lake View Elementary School in Miami, a teacher asked students to make an animal that reflected something about themselves. Doucet chose a snail, an animal that had fascinated him since childhood.
“As a child, I had an innate curiosity with snails,” he later recalled, describing how he would let them crawl across his palm.
The small white clay snail survived.
It still sits on the mantel in his father’s home in Haiti.
Doucet went on to study at New World School of the Arts, where he received the Distinguished Dean’s Award for Ceramics, and then at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in ceramics, a minor in creative writing and a concentration in illustration.
Teaching soon became another part of the work. After college, he joined Pérez Art Museum Miami as a teaching artist, working with students and helping build museum-education programs. He later moved into education and programming at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Archiving neighborhoods before they disappear
Much of Doucet’s recent work has focused on Miami neighborhoods where environmental risk and development pressure overlap.
In his “Water Grieves in the Six Shades of Death” series, Doucet gathered plants and other natural material from Little Haiti, Overtown, Allapattah and Liberty City, using them in works that examine what he calls climate gentrification — the pressure placed on historically Black and working-class neighborhoods as higher-elevation land becomes more desirable and housing costs rise.
For Doucet, the vegetation itself becomes a kind of record.
“The land harbors their cultural history, legacies, and shared nostalgia,” he has written of those neighborhoods, describing tropical foliage and front-yard gardens as markers of the people who have lived there.
That impulse carries directly into “The Things We Carry.” The exhibition uses vessels, botanical forms and ordinary objects not simply as decoration but as evidence of continuity — material reminders of what survives migration, displacement and generational change.
The show is curated by Melissa Diaz, according to Doucet’s exhibition résumé.
From local classrooms to international exhibitions
Doucet’s work has traveled considerably beyond Miami.
His exhibition history includes the Havana Biennial, work shown in Venice during the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and the Design Museum of Chicago’s 2023 exhibition “At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis.”
Closer to home, he and artist Stephen Arboite presented “After the Rain Comes Light: Portraits of Resilience” at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2021. The collaborative exhibition drew on the people, plants and neighborhoods of North Miami and grew out of a public call for residents to submit portraits.
A work by the pair, “Of the Water and Spirit,” is now in MOCA North Miami’s permanent collection. Doucet’s own résumé also lists work in the collections of Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Tweed Museum of Art, among others.
His work has also drawn coverage from publications including The New York Times, Hyperallergic and Vogue Mexico, and a television segment about him received a regional Emmy nomination in 2019.
Now the work comes to the Lowe, founded in 1950 and recognized as South Florida’s first art museum.
If you go…
The opening reception for “Morel Doucet: The Things We Carry” runs from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24, at the Lowe Art Museum, 1301 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables.
The exhibition is presented in partnership with the City of Coral Gables and supported by the city, Miami-Dade County cultural agencies, the State of Florida Division of Arts and Culture and other museum supporters.
