Esther Calixte-Bea’s artistic practice expands through various art forms such as painting, photography, textiles and poetry. Through her work, she challenges Eurocentric beauty standards by addressing the taboo of female body hair. In her visual compositions, body hair is glorified on the bodies of her black female characters and exposed with pride instead of shame. She addresses the topics of identity by inventing a fictional tribe called Fyète Souhou-te. Calixte-Bea builds an imaginative world full of vibrant colours often inspired by nature, her personal life and her cultural background. Navigating through various mediums, she paints female characters with acrylic paint, bringing her characters to life by creating garments, wigs, and accessories that she displays on mannequins in the exhibition space. Calixte-Bea also works with photographic self-portraiture in which she wears her own creations all the while showing her body hair. Through writing and poetry, she tells a story of the tribe, illustrating their lifestyle, community, traditions and loss of identity.
Esther Calixte-Bea is a multidisciplinary artist of Haitian and Ivorian descent, born in 1996 in Longueuil. Calixte-Bea is also a body hair activist known as ‘Queen Esie’. She completed her BFA at Concordia University in Painting and Drawing (2020). She has exhibited her work in several group exhibitions such as “Af-Flux: Biennale Transnational Noire” at Art Mûr (2021) and in Stanley Février’s “MAADI” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022).
