“I painted this collection for us,” Guy Stanley Philoche told me inside his Harlem studio, conviction in his eyes and empathy in his voice. “It’s important for us to see ourselves celebrated—to receive our flowers while we’re here.”

Philoche’s story begins in Haiti. He came to the United States at five, speaking no English but fluent in images. “Art was my language,” he said. “I learned English watching G.I. Joe and The Smurfs.”

His parents, like many Haitian immigrants, prioritized security over risk. “My mom was a maid, my dad built helicopters,” he said. “They wanted a lawyer or a doctor. When I told them I wanted to go to art school, my mother said, ‘I scrub enough toilets so you never have to.’ They refused to pay for me to go paint.”

He left home at 17 with a scholarship to Paier

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