St. Vincent and Grenadines Fine Artist
Robert Joyette is a multidisciplinary fine artist from the island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, whose work channels the spirit of resistance, ancestral memory, and cultural reclamation. A graduate of the esteemed Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, Robert’s practice spans painting, mixed media, and visual storytelling—rooted deeply in Caribbean identity and global Black Indigenous struggle.
With bold color, raw emotion, and layered symbolism, Robert's art confronts the injustices faced by native and brown peoples around the world. His work holds space for grief, resilience, and spiritual power—bridging the past with the present. Whether depicting colonial violence or sacred ancestral visions, each piece stands as a powerful testament to survival and sovereignty.
Robert is best known for his unflinching portrayal of historical erasure, cultural genocide, and the enduring strength of his people. His art is not only visually striking but soulfully charged—a call to remember who we are and where we come from.
Through exhibitions, public art, and collaborative projects, Robert Joyette continues to amplify silenced voices and elevate the global conversation on decolonization and identity. He paints not for the gallery, but for the people—for those who have been unseen for far too long.
Rise Collection | Livity Tree Art
Robert Joyette’s Rise Collection emerges from the tremors of history—both literal and metaphorical. It is a testament to Haiti, the first free Black republic, a nation born from revolution yet burdened by centuries of oppression.
When earthquakes shattered Haiti in 2010 and again in 2021, the world saw devastation, but Robert’s art looks deeper—into the resilience of a people who have been tested by more than natural disasters. His brush speaks of the unnatural earthquakes Haiti has endured: colonial exploitation, economic sanctions, political destabilization, and systemic oppression designed to keep the first liberated Black nation in chains long after slavery was abolished.
The Rise Collection does not paint despair—it paints defiance. In each stroke, there is the spirit of the ancestors who fought for freedom in 1804, the unbroken will of the people who continue to survive against the weight of empire, and the vision of a future where Haiti’s brilliance cannot be buried beneath rubble or propaganda.
Through this collection, Robert calls us to rise as Haiti has risen again and again—scarred but unbroken, shaken but not silenced. His art transforms struggle into strength, honoring Haiti as both a mirror of Black Indigenous resilience and a symbol of resistance that speaks to oppressed peoples everywhere.
🔗 Learn more about hidden histories and the ongoing struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples at Livity.blog.
Black Native Collection | Livity Tree Art
Robert Joyette's work is rooted in remembrance and resistance. His brush does not just paint—it resurrects. Through bold lines and striking cultural symbolism, Robert brings forward the silenced history of Black Natives and Aboriginal Indigenous peoples, both in the Americas and the Caribbean, whose stories were systematically erased under colonial rule.
One of the darkest chapters in this erasure was the 1924 Racial Integrity Act in Virginia. Under this law, Native peoples of darker complexion were stripped of their identity and forcibly reclassified as "Negro" on official records. This bureaucratic violence severed bloodlines, erased tribal recognition, and fueled a broader campaign of Black Native genocide—the systematic destruction of Indigenous communities who stood at the crossroads of African and Native ancestry.
In the Caribbean, the genocide was even more thorough and deliberate. The Taíno, Arawak, Lucayan, Carib, and Kalinago peoples—the Aboriginal Indigenous nations of the islands—faced calculated extermination through enslavement, forced labor in gold mines, introduced diseases, and outright massacre. Within decades of Columbus's arrival, populations that numbered in the millions were declared "extinct" by colonial administrators who benefited from that narrative. Those who survived were often mixed with African peoples—creating new communities of Black Indigenous identity—only to face continued erasure as colonizers refused to recognize Indigenous survival in any form that didn't fit their convenient myth of total extinction.
The colonial powers employed a strategy of divide and conquer: separating African from Indigenous peoples, denying mixed-heritage communities their full ancestry, and using racial classification systems to legally erase Indigenous identity. In the Caribbean, this meant that Taíno and Kalinago descendants who bore African ancestry were reclassified, their Indigenous heritage denied on official documents, their land claims invalidated, their cultural practices criminalized or appropriated. The message was clear: to be Black meant you could not be Indigenous; to be Indigenous meant you must appear a certain way, speak certain languages, practice certain traditions—all on the colonizer's terms.
Robert's art refuses that silence. His work confronts the colonial violence that labeled, divided, and erased, and instead reclaims the living truth: that Black Natives and Aboriginal Indigenous peoples have always existed, have survived, have persisted. His Caribbean-focused pieces honor the Taíno spirals still carved in caves, the Arawak cosmology that survives in hidden practices, the Kalinago resistance that continues in Dominica and St. Vincent, and the countless descendants throughout the islands who carry Indigenous DNA that genetic studies now confirm, despite centuries of being told they were extinct.
By capturing these stories in color and form, Robert calls us to witness, to remember, and to resist. His work challenges the genocide denial that still claims Caribbean Indigenous peoples disappeared completely. He paints the Aboriginal ancestors who were never gone, only forced underground. His art is a visual act of survival, a declaration that the ancestors are still here—in the faces of Caribbean people, in the spiral petroglyphs that outlasted empires, in the cultural practices that adapted but never died, in the bloodlines that mixed but never ended—speaking through art, demanding recognition, refusing erasure.
🔗 For a deeper exploration into this history and the truth of Black Native genocide, visit Livity.blog.
Votive Venus | Livity Tree Art
Robert Joyette’s Votive Venus is a radiant tribute to the Aboriginal Caribbean woman—the keeper of memory, resilience, and sacred continuity.
In this work, Venus is not the Greco-Roman goddess idealized through a colonial lens, but reimagined through the strength and beauty of the Carib and Kalinago women whose bloodlines endured genocide, enslavement, and forced assimilation. These women carried culture in their bodies, language in their songs, and resistance in their silence when history tried to erase them.
The title Votive Venus invokes the ancient practice of offering votive figures as prayers or dedications to the divine. Robert transforms this concept into an act of remembrance: a votive to the Aboriginal Caribbean woman, whose survival itself is a form of worship, a sacred offering to future generations.
Through luminous tones and form, the painting speaks to the resilience of women who endured the violence of colonization, the systemic erasure of Black Natives across the Americas, and the ongoing struggles of identity in the Caribbean diaspora. Yet in her stance, there is not defeat but dignity. She is the original goddess of these lands, rooted in earth and sea, standing as testimony that Indigenous beauty and spirit cannot be erased.
The Votive Venus is not only art—it is prayer, resistance, and ancestral homage. It asks us to honor the women who were the first mothers of the Caribbean and to continue their legacy of strength, sovereignty, and survival.
Tribal Hybrid
Marks That Refuse Separation
"Tribal Hybrid" is an abstract composition where tribal markings converge, overlap, and merge—lines and symbols from Indigenous Caribbean and African traditions bleeding into one another, creating patterns that belong wholly to both and exclusively to neither. The piece refuses the colonial demand for separation, for neat categorization, for bloodlines that stay within prescribed boundaries.
The markings evoke Carib petroglyphs—spirals, geometric patterns, the angular representations of cemíes and cosmic forces carved into Caribbean cave walls. Simultaneously, they echo African tribal marks—the adinkra symbols of the Akan, the nsibidi script of Nigeria, the scarification patterns that marked identity, lineage, and spiritual protection across West and Central African cultures. But rather than presenting these traditions side by side in careful separation, "Tribal Hybrid" allows them to intermingle, to create new geometries where Indigenous spiral meets African symbol, where cave carving aesthetic merges with body marking tradition.
This abstraction mirrors the reality of Black Indigenous identity—not a clean division of "half this, half that," but a complex interweaving where influences become inseparable, where you cannot extract one heritage from the other without destroying the whole. The markings flow across the canvas like languages mixing into creole, like DNA strands intertwining, like the actual lived experience of carrying multiple ancestries in one body.
Colonial systems demanded legibility—they needed to look at a person and know exactly where to place them in the racial hierarchy. But "Tribal Hybrid" offers no such clarity. The marks are intentionally ambiguous, deliberately intertwined. Is that a Carib spiral or an African adinkra? Is that geometric pattern Indigenous or African? The answer is yes—both, always both, refusing to be parsed into separate, colonially acceptable categories. The abstraction becomes resistance: these marks will not separate themselves for your administrative convenience, will not organize themselves according to your racial classification system, will not make themselves legible to the colonial gaze that seeks to divide and diminish.
"Tribal Hybrid" in abstract form becomes the visual equivalent of Black Indigenous existence itself—complex, intertwined, irreducible, and ultimately illegible to systems designed to keep these identities apart.