How I Made This: Raquel Philippe (CFA’26)
MFA Painting major Raquel Philippe paints childhood memories of home—both her own, and those of her Haitian parents.
How I Made This: Raquel Philippe (CFA’26)
MFA Painting major Raquel Philippe paints childhood memories of home—both her own, and those of her Haitian parents.
This article was originally published in BU Today on May 13, 2025. By Sophie Yarin. Photos by Cydney Scott
How I Made This is a series from BU Today that explores how Boston University students create their works of art—be it a musical composition, a fiber sculpture, a short story, a painting, and beyond.
EXCERPT
Raquel Philippe paints memories of home. In some of her brightly hued oil paintings, the viewer is dragged through an electrified collage of skylines, subway cars, pedestrians, fire escapes, and overflowing trash cans. In other canvases, home is a melange of white sand beaches, juicy leaves, and sweltering heat. Each piece is suffused with a nostalgia that seems to stem from an intimate experience—sour-faced toddlers in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, a child on her father’s shoulders walking by the seashore, sandaled feet on a wooden dance floor, a child and her mother in matching long coats smiling on the sidewalk.
“I grew up in Rockland County, New York,” Philippe (CFA’26) explains. It’s a suburban area, she adds, not far from New York City. “But my parents’ home was Haiti—specifically Port-au-Prince. Their memories of growing up were different from mine, but I still really connect to their childhood stories.”
To reconcile these dual images of home, Philippe explores, on canvas, themes of youth, identity, family, and belonging. But as a student in Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts MFA painting program, she’s beginning to feel ready for change. Her work has started to lean more on foundational elements like color and shape, veering away from representation and requiring more observation from the viewer.