Portrait of Ilona Smiling, photo: Salvador Cambranes
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions is pleased to announce the winner of the third edition of the Marie-Solanges Apollon programme, focusing on Central America. The programme aims to promote research into transcultural artistic practices, drawing on inspiration from the concepts of the Global South and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic.
Ilona Smiling is a Belizean artist, curator, and exhibition designer, currently serving as the Director of the Museum of Belize and Houses of Culture, as well as the Museum of Belizean Art. She describes the research she will undertake as part of the Marie-Solanges Apollon Fellowship as follows:
“Belize is home to outstanding artists and artworks that have span generations, yet many of their life’s work remains unknown beyond our region. Many Belizean artists have spent their lives developing their artistic skills yet, their artistic practices have not always been comprehensively documented therefore creating a gap in Belize’s art history and research. This is particularly evident when we consider the contributions of Belizean women artists.
During my time as the curator for the Museum of Belize, I was able to review the National Art Collection of over 350 artworks. The information in the collections catalogue only had title, medium, year, and biography. Art-historical scholarship or research on the artists development, style evolution, influences, changing media was minimal to nonexistent.
The result is an art history in which individual works and names may be known while the artistic lives connecting them remain unwritten.
My research starts here and uses the career of an under-researched Belizean female artist, Lola Delgado, as a case study. I was drawn to L. Delgado through the distinctive visual language that recurs across her work, particularly her representations of women in terms of stylized, faceless, female figures.
This project will reconstruct L. Delgado’s formative artistic years, including her earliest encounters with art, influences, early works, and the motivation behind her practice. It will also trace her career development, focusing on themes in her artwork including the emergence of faceless female characters, composition, medium, and how exhibitions, audiences, and the cultural context of Belize shaped her artistic journey.”
The fellowship programme is supported by artist Manuel Mathieu and named after his grandmother, Marie-Solanges Apollon, a Black immigrant woman living in Canada and a true potomitan. This polysemous creole term comes from the Haitian Vodou traditions and refers to a person, often a woman, who is the central pillar of their home, family, and community. The eponymous programme is an hommage to her and to the women whose lives have historically been kept in the shadows.
In response to the persistent under-representation of Central American women and nonbinary artists in art historical narratives, this year’s fellowship is dedicated to advancing research in this field. Six candidates have been invited to apply through a nomination process, in collaboration with Kency Cornejo, the programme’s research advisor for this year’s edition.
Ilona N. Smiling is a Belizean artist, curator, and exhibition designer, currently serving as the Director of the Museum of Belize and Houses of Culture, as well as the Museum of Belizean Art. She played a key role in establishing the Museum of Belizean Art, Belize’s first art museum, which was created under her leadership to make Belizean art and history more accessible and inclusive while celebrating Belize’s artistic heritage. With an MFA in Cultural Creative Industries & Art Management from Taipei National University of the Arts, Ilona Smiling has curated and designed impactful exhibitions, including The Future is Female Artist Series, promoting female artistry in Belize; Belize: A Collective Exposition (2019), showcasing works from the National Art Collection; and the recent Maya: Creating Civilization exhibit, which connects ancient Maya heritage with modern Belize. Through her leadership, Ilona Smiling is reshaping Belize’s cultural spaces by fostering accessibility, inclusivity, and deeper community engagement with history and art.
Applications were examined by a selection committee composed of:
Kency Cornejo is an art historian of contemporary art and activism in the Americas. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research and teaching specializations include art and visual culture of Central America and its diasporas, creative expressions within anti-colonial and anti-racist social movements, and decolonial aesthetics and methodologies in art. Her book,Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America (Duke University Press, 2024), explores three decades of art and decoloniality in the region and has earned the 2025 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize.
Françoise Vergès is an author, independent curator, decolonial feminist activist and Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Centre for the Study of Race and Racialization, UCL. She publishes on the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, the decolonization of museums and the arts, decolonial feminism and the racial capitalocene. Her latest publication is L’économie de la mort. Pour une politique des besoins vitaux (2026).
Marie-Ann Yemsi is a contemporary art consultant and independent curator. She develops multidisciplinary projects at the intersection of visual arts, performance, dance, music, sand writing. Her research and exhibitions focus on collaborative artistic practices and experimental forms, particularly those developed by women artists from the different perspectives of the global South, highlighting themes of memory, history, gender, and identity in relation to the political, social, and ecological issues of today’s world.
As well as Nina Volz and Carolina Hernández Muñoz for AWARE.
