Marcel Wah
Marcel Wah
Long before I thought of myself as an entrepreneur, I wanted to be an artist. Painting taught me how to look. To notice things. To question what I was seeing. To take an idea that existed only in my imagination and struggle with it until something appeared that hadn't existed before.
Years later, I would discover that building a company wasn't entirely different. The materials changed. The creative impulse didn't.
Welcome to the other side of my life.
I studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where I earned my BFA, and later at California College of the Arts, where I completed my MFA. For years, art wasn't simply something I made. It was the world I inhabited.
I painted. I represented other artists. I founded a gallery and publishing company. I organized exhibitions. I worked with galleries, collectors and curators. Eventually, I founded an international art fair.
Entrepreneurship gradually consumed more of my time, but I never stopped seeing the world through the eyes of an artist. Perhaps I simply began creating different things.
Photography became another way of looking. I've carried a camera through places that fascinated me, places I love, places undergoing extraordinary change, and places I simply wanted to remember. The photographs aren't a comprehensive record of everywhere I've been. They're fragments of what caught my eye.
It is the country where I was born. It is also a country I've spent much of my adult life trying to understand. My relationship with Haiti has found its way into my art, my photography, my businesses, my community work and many of the things I've built.
11th Department. The Haitian Diaspora Leadership Summit. EkoAyiti. Kite Wars. Very different projects, all connected somehow to the same place.
I don't pretend to have simple answers about Haiti. But I haven't been able to stop caring about what happens there either.
I'm less interested in checking countries off a list than understanding what makes a place different. How people live. What they eat. What they build. What they're proud of. What problems they're trying to solve. And occasionally, what opportunities everyone else seems to be overlooking.
A trip can become a friendship. A friendship can become an idea. And sometimes an idea becomes a company.
I've never really separated creativity from the rest of my life.
For a long time, I thought there was Marcel the artist and Marcel the entrepreneur. I'm not sure I believe that anymore.
Painting begins with an empty surface. Entrepreneurship begins with an empty space where something might exist.
Both require imagination. Both require experimentation. Both involve failure. Both require knowing when something isn't working — and occasionally destroying what you've already made so you can begin again.
And both can produce something that didn't exist before.
Maybe I've been doing the same thing all along. Creating.
This is my life. And it's great.
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