Xayvier Haughton
Xayvier Haughton is a Jamaican-born visual artist whose work explores Afrikan consciousness, spirituality, and the enduring presence of African cultural legacies within Caribbean identity. Raised in Spanish Town, St. Catherine, Jamaica, Haughton merges traditional and contemporary techniques to create powerful altarpieces and installations that reflect a creolized spiritual and aesthetic language.
Haughton holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York (2022) and earned his BFA from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (2019). His work has been recognized and featured in Hyperallergic magazine (March 11, 2017) and in the publication A Brief History of Western Art by Omari Ra.
He has exhibited widely, including at the Jamaica Biennial (2014, 2017), the National Visual Arts Exhibition hosted by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC), and in notable group shows such as Dark Matter at The CAGE Gallery, Spring/Break Art Show (2022), Eri Museum (2022), and the Fowler Kellogg Gallery at Pratt House (2023). In 2023, he was awarded a New York Council for the Arts Grant.
His recent residencies include Sculpture Space (2024) and Triangle Arts (2025), where he continues to expand his research into Blackness, ritual, and creolized space through installation and painting.
Xayvier Haughton is currently a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute Schooof Art in Brooklyn, New York.
Artworks
Project rendering for Sentinel of Passage, 2026
Sentinel of Passage is a monumental sculptural figure that stands at the threshold between departure and becoming, embodying the intertwined histories of body, architecture, ritual, and diasporic memory. Armored yet contemplative, the solitary form faces a distant city, positioned not as conqueror but as witness to an enduring presence shaped by migration, labor, and cultural inheritance. Constructed from steel, reclaimed wood, and concrete, the hybrid structure merges human anatomy with the language of scaffolding and built environments, suggesting protection as both burden and care. Engraved surfaces and embedded fragments draw from Caribbean craft traditions and urban construction histories, holding multiple temporalities within a single body. By turning away from the viewer, the figure resists authority and invites quiet companionship, encouraging audiences to share its horizon and reflect on what is carried across time and place. Through scale, restraint, and material memory, the sculpture proposes monumentality as empathy rather than triumph.