Haitian artists in the spotlightCreative voices connected to the Caribbean island nation are slowly getting the recognition they deserve
By Rob Goyanes
There is a saying in Haitian Creole that goes: Chak zarenyen gen 1,000 pitit fi; chak pitit yo gen yon sèl manman (Each spider has 1,000 daughters; each spider has just one mother). The adage could definitely be applied to Haiti’s artistic voices, which are diverse yet united by a common legacy rooted in the country’s history and syncretic traditions. A number of current exhibitions throughout the US are helping shed light on Modern and contemporary artists connected to the island nation, many of whom have developed totally distinct styles that blend everyday realism, politics, and mythology.
Twentieth-century painters such as Hector Hyppolite, Rigaud Benoit, and Jean Wilner – currently on view in the exhibition ‘Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC – developed a Modernist aesthetic that blended everyday life, fantasy, biblical tales, and political struggle. Hyppolite, who was cryptically proclaimed the ‘guardian of a secret’ by André Breton, painted with brushes, his fingers, and chicken feathers; his work The Congo Queen (1946) depicts Erzulie Dantor, the deity responsible for protecting women and children. Jean Wilner’s Arrest of Toussaint L’Ouverture, June 7, 1802 (1971), which depicts a historical moment featuring Haiti’s most important revolutionary general, is an uncanny, brilliantly toned work. The general’s sword is defiantly raised, a vase of flowers is knocked to the floor, and a seafoam wall backgrounds an eerie calm for the rushing French soldiers. Indeed, Haiti’s complex history has had an important impact on its creative output.
In the 20th century, the country’s society was ravaged by the father-and-son dictator regime of the Duvaliers and their Tonton Makout death squad. After François Duvalier (Papa Doc) assumed power in 1957, artist Hervé Télémaque fled Haiti and settled in New York, where he fell under the spell of Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Fed up with the racism of the US, he relocated to Paris in 1961. Influenced by everyday objects, comic strips, and his psychoanalysis sessions, Télémaque developed a compelling vocabulary, drawn from Haitian Vodou as well as consumer material culture. Haitian Vodou should not be confused with the often reductive depictions of ‘voodoo’ across Western media and pop culture. In the psychedelic cosmology of Haitian Vodou, Lwa are the spirit intermediaries between humans and the supreme divinity known as Gran Mèt. Lwa include tricksters, mermaids, three-testicled bulls, warriors, and healers; some estimate they number over a thousand. Haitian Vodou is not only a spiritual system. It helps make meaning of power at every scale, from the home to the state, and serves as one of the soils that Haitian artists work within.
In 1980, during the rule of Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc), Haitians fled en masse to the US, and to South Florida in particular, where they experienced mass deportations and racism. Viter Juste, a Haitian-born community leader and activist in Miami, advocated for the establishment of a ‘little Port-au-Prince,’ and the neighborhood Little Haiti was born. Currently the site of climate gentrification, the neighborhood – much of it adorned in colorful murals by Serge Toussaint – is anchored by the Little Haiti Cultural Complex, an architectural gem of A-frames and gingerbread detailing. The center is hosting the outdoor exhibition ‘Haiti in the Heartland’, a collection of reproductions by Haitian masters such as Benoit and Paul Lalibert. Haitian-American artists, some of whom grew up in Little Haiti, are receiving increasing institutional and commercial recognition.
Born in Massachusetts, Naudline Pierre has created her own feminine mythology, mostly in painting but also in wrought-iron gates and panels. Pierre’s characters, informed by the stories she heard while growing up in a religious household to Haitian immigrant parents, are a mix of spritely and devilish, angel-winged and scaly. The female figures dance and flit about and tenderly hold each other among explosive flames and sunbursts or amid cool melancholic blues and greens – all mystical spaces, where the clouds and stars are characters unto themselves.
On PAMMTV, the digital art platform for the Pérez Art Museum Miami, audiences can discover several video works by artists from the Haitian diaspora. Monica Sorelle’s Reeds/Wozo: Movement Study I (2022), shows two women – both spotlit in a dark room, their respective locations and time periods in Haiti and Miami obscured – performing domestic labor and spiraling their hips as a voice recounts the role of women in the Haitian revolution. Another video work, iBrooks (2022) by Edny Jean Joseph, transforms an 18th-century engraving of a slave ship’s floorplan into binary code, the lime-green zeros and ones drawing a direct line from the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade to the racism of the digital age.
In Port-au-Prince itself, one of Haiti’s most pivotal institutions for Modern and contemporary art is El-Saieh Gallery. The gallery was founded in the mid 1950s by Issa El-Saieh, a bandleader who merged jazz, rara, and Afro-Cuban sounds. Today it is run by his family, including his grandson Tomm El-Saieh, whose entrancingly patterned paintings, soon on view at Luhring Augustine’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, pull from the history of abstract painting, Vodou’s psychological states, and percussion. He also organized ‘Ayiti Toma II’, a show of Haitian artists at Luhring Augustine in New York, on view through January 11, 2025.
‘Ayiti Toma II’ articulates the importance of family in Haitian art history. Philomé Obin and his younger brother Sénèque, who both exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale, have developed their own school of painting. Philomé’s figurative work includes social scenes with dense narratives, including carnival ceremonies in front of shuttered healthcare offices. His painting Crucifixion de Charlemagne Peralte pour la Liberte (1964) references a photograph taken by US troops following their 1919 execution of Péralte, a revolutionary who fought US occupation, and which was used for psychological warfare. Viktor El-Saieh, Tomm’s younger brother, merges Haitian mythologies, sci-fi-like settings, glowing palettes, and Modernist grids, painting figures like Fet Chaloska, the carnival character with terrifying teeth inspired by the brutal head of Haiti’s national police in the early 1900s.
During Art Basel’s show in Miami Beach, local gallery Central Fine will host a parallel exhibition to Luhring Augustine’s, titled ‘Ayiti Toma III’. On view will be works by Maksaens Denis, whose practice includes documentary footage of daily life in Haiti digitally manipulated into colorful fractals, overlaid with sculptural, three-dimensional frames made from cut metal that appear like abstract and figurative altarpieces. A sculpture by the renowned Georges Liautaud – a playful, shadow-world mermaid, also made from cut metal – will be shown too. Born in 1899 in Croix-des-Bouquets, Liautaud repaired train tracks for the sugar industry and made crosses for a cemetery. His flat-plane sculptures include abstract representations of cats and Vodou spirits, and such reuse of mechanical material became a staple of Haitian art. Softer materials will also be shown: Collaged quilts by Mark Fleuridor are populated by figures who, instead of facial features, contain cosmic flower motifs.
The diversity of Haitian life and culture is severely under-discussed in the US and the West generally. From Frankétienne, the Nobel Prize-nominated novelist and painter of boldly intricate monochromatic figures, to Myrlande Constant, whose brilliant drapo Vodou banners are made with thousands of colorful beads with the help of her family, Haitian artists have rarely gotten the recognition they deserve, though things are starting to change. As the incoming US administration considers revoking Haitian immigrants’ temporary protected status – currently held by over 200,000 people – lessons can be gleaned from those who established an ingenious artistic and cultural identity despite colonial repression, climate crises, political turmoil, and violence. Haitian artworks are not merely a balm for bad times, they can help chart a way forward, in this realm and others, especially at a moment when ingenuity, strength, and imagination are sorely needed.
Credits and captions
‘Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti’
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Until March 5, 2025
Art Basel Miami Beach will take place from December 6 to 8, 2024. Learn more here.
Rob Goyanes is a writer and editor from Miami, Florida. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, Frieze, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.
Caption for header image: Naudline Pierre, The Only Way Out Is In (detail), 2024. Photograph by Dan Bradica. Courtesy of the artist.
Published on November 15, 2024.
