Dipping into a pot of brightly colored sequins, and slowly sewing them onto coarse burlap, Valentin Valris tells stories. Son of master flagmakers Georges Valris and Andrémise Brianvil, he creates the quintessential folk art with the transfer of talent and cultural tradition from one generation to the next. The Valris Port-au-Prince household, filled with striking fabrics and a rainbow of beads, sequins and small baubles, was a vibrant reprieve from the country's backdrop of extreme deprivation and danger.Outside that home today, Haitian gangs control a country once the richest in the Caribbean, more recently the most persistently poor nation in the western hemisphere. Centuries of foreign intervention (the US occupied Haiti for two bloody decades in the 1900s), demolishing natural disasters, and non-stop instability have not robbed the people of a most important tradition.Collecting, cutting and sewing Voodoo or “deity” flags comes from Africa’s Yoruba people brought as slaves to the Caribbean, where flagmaking has continued ever since. Contemporary creators pay tribute to the spirits they believe oversee the living, the forest, the sea, the skies. Materials vary over the years, depending on availability. Today, Haiti’s finest flagmakers use glass beads, sequins, velvet and burlap to address contemporary concerns.Voodoo flagmaking, also known as drapo voodoo, is essentially current in Haitian culture, honoring the Iwa, or spirits while uniting physical and spiritual worlds. In a stunning representation of the United States' failure to respond to one of an impossibly long line of tragic events Haiti has endured, Valris presents a broken heart, with the faces of vulnerable Haitians looking up as a gold plane flies overhead.Biden is the title of this work, a soulful condemnation of the United States for turning away 2021 Haitian earthquake victims based on pandemic restrictions (COVID was still raging). The confluence of a massive earthquake and punishing storms left thousands of Haitian men, women and children dead, while gang assassination of the president and their control over the country left everyone vulnerable. Rather than aiding Haitians fleeing the country, the Biden administration refused over two thousand refugees pressing for entry through Mexico, leaving a great many more to languish in war and weather-torn Haiti. And, as did the earlier Trump administration, the Biden White House sent planeloads of Haitians back to their country, a deportation that Valris captures so clearly.