In her oil paintings, she uses bright colors and thick black lines to portray the people and landscapes, sometimes with swift impressionistic strokes, and sometimes with thin, carefully-controlled washes of color.

Many figures’ bodies are covered in scars, which illustrate the oppression of Haitians’ past suffering.

For instance, “Passé Recomposé,” a pun on the French verb tense meaning “recomposed past,” pictures a figure with scars across his chest, standing at a diagonal in water, and a similar figure of solid black looming behind him.

In “Prête pour le Voyage,” or “Ready for the Trip,” a woman is stretched out horizontally in a coffin-like shape. Cauvin said in her gallery talk that slaves were also kept in coffin-sized spaces. She said the bright yellow hue covering the woman’s face was a bad omen, the color of drama, stress and death.

Cauvin also shows suffering more viscerally in other paintings by depicting the organs of her figures as if one could see into their bodies.

In “Prête pour le Voyage,” sickly, brown, coiled intestines and a heart protrude from a woman’s electric blue dress, mixing anatomical correctness and figurative meaning.

Cauvin conveys her views on social issues through symbolic representations.

In one painting, the wooden structures used to confine slaves suspend a naked woman under water. On the surface, another woman swims desperately away from a ship pursuing her.

Cauvin says Haitians have a strange relationship with water, and her paintings allude to water’s symbolism—both life and death, an element of voodoo ceremonies and funerals.

Although Cauvin claims that many Haitians cannot swim, their island is surrounded by water, reminiscient of their origins near the Congo. Water allows them to pass from continent to continent and from life to death.

“Droit de Passage,” or “Rite of Passage,” depicts society’s treatment of women, depicting a dark rape scene set in the water of a mangrove forest. According to Cauvin, women often “pay with their bodies.”

Although Cauvin is concerned with important historical and cultural issues, her attitude toward Haiti is nuanced and at times even tinged with humor.

When asked why the woman in the coffin and many of the people in her paintings have long, red fingernails, Cauvin giggles, “That’s what I see when I go back to Haiti.”

—“Crossroads” is on display until August 30 at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

—Staff writer Isabelle B. Bolton can be reached at ibolton@fas.harvard.edu