This portable altar to Vodou lwa Erzuli (also sometimes spelled Ezili or Erzulie) Freda was hand-crafted by Mambo (Priestess) Julie, as an adaptation of a traditional Vodou altar. In the religion of Haitian Vodou, altars are frequently dedicated to specific lwa (analogous to Catholic saints, these are venerated spirits that serve as intermediaries between God and mortals). Each lwa has specific traditional offerings that correspond to his or her tastes and respective backstory. Erzuli Freda is the lwa most commonly associated with love, beauty, romance, femininity, wealth, and the finer things in life; her altars are frequently decorated with the colors white and pink. She favors offerings such as champagne, lace, and certain perfumes, and her altars frequently reflect this as well. Many initiates will also tell you that Erzulie Freda has a certain type of purity that combines the virginal with the idealistic. Although she craves and appreciates tasteful offerings, she is deeply invested in an ideal concept beauty that is beyond this world.
Usually located in homes and Temples, traditional Vodou altars are relatively large and sedentary by nature. This portable altar reflects a new technique of worship – something durable that can be taken ‘on the go,’ as modern-day practitioners of this religion may live a more mobile, and perhaps more frenetic, lifestyle than their predecessors. The desire to carry physical signifiers of intangible energies or ideas close to our hearts is far from new, but these altars represent an innovative kind of folk art that is at once aesthetically pleasing, concerned with praxis, and manages to capture more esoteric or abstract concepts that ground the viewer (or, in this case, the practitioner).
As Mambo (Priestess) Sallie Ann Glassman, who studied visual art at Columbia University in her youth, writes: “Altars establish a kind of imagistic language. Vodou altars were created by people who were largely illiterate. The pictures, bottles, statues, pakets – all the objects on each altar – were words that came together to express meaning. The language of an altar must be internally coherent. The various images and symbols should not contradict or antagonize one another. [In this way,] an altar should communicate your feelings to Spirit.”
Artist’s statement on the piece: It is hard for me to write about Freda. She is with me, yet she frightens me. It took me a long time to make her altar. Nothing was ever right or good enough as I made it. I obviously used her colors and set chilled champagne, golden hair tools and an assortment of perfumes bottles on the little inset altar. Those things of beauty and stateliness that she demands….. it’s almost as if she wants all the riches of the world, yet even those leave her feeling unsatisfied.
Mambo Julie is a dynamic priestess of the Vodou tradition, an initiate daughter of New Orleans Mambo Sallie Ann Glassman, and granddaughter of the world-famous sequin flagmaker Edgard Jean-Louis, one of Haiti’s most well-known and respected sequin artists. She owns , a small business that specializes in traditional conjure rootwork, located in Missouri.
