Arts Thread

David Legrand (b. 1995) is a Haitian-American artist who earned his BFA in Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2023, where he was honored with the Faculty Medal of Art. He graduated with his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, supported by the prestigious Society of Presidential Fellows scholarship. His art practice is interested in how rest, in its simplest form, is a biological necessity. However, for Black communities, rest has historically been weaponized as a site of struggle, a luxury denied through systems of racial capitalism, anti-Black violence, and colonial labor exploitation. His current practice positions rest as a radical act of resistance and reclamation within the context of Black artmaking, drawing on frameworks from Black feminist theory and critical race studies. By interrogating the politics of rest—its denial, reimagining, and aesthetic possibilities—this body of work positions rest as not merely a personal indulgence but a collective, liberatory praxis that destabilizes Western notions of productivity and labor.