Henry Taylor. 
Where Thoughts Provoke, Getting Deep in Shallow Water, 2015; acrylic on canvas; 36 × 36 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

Henry Taylor and I were introduced by our mutual friend and collector, AC Hudgins, at a MoMA PS1 function in 2012. When we met I was about to depart on my first trip to Haiti to do my photographic work. The following year I asked Henry to accompany me to Port-au-Prince. That trip was a key moment in our friendship as well as in our artistic practices—the influence of Haiti can be seen in both of our bodies of work. It also gave us insight into each other’s process and the methods that aren’t necessarily visible in the final paintings or photographs.

I’ve sat for portraits for Henry in various locations, including the Hudgins’s homes in Harlem and Sag Harbor; Henry’s studio in Los Angeles; and my apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Henry no longer needs to ask me to sit for him; I now ask him to paint (document) me, because, as a photographer, it is fascinating to experience up close an artist’s process that is quite different 
than mine.

Our dialogues have been mutually inspiring and have informed my focus and my photographs in subtle ways. What comes out of Henry’s mouth in conversation is completely unpredictable, and it is our meandering exchanges that keep the friendship alive and fresh.

Read the full article here.

Antoine Obin. Philome Obin et son Fils, Antoine, 1977; oil on board. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

The selections from the Smith collection are vital examples of the self-conscious representation of Haitian spiritual subject matter through a vernacular, representational, and intentionally simplistic style led by Philomé Obin in the city of Cap-Haitien (eighty-five miles north of the more commercial Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince). Obin worked to represent the daily life, secular experiences, and religious traditions of Haiti that scrape against the commercial initiatives and explosion of the Haitian art markets during the middle of the 20th century. The stark organization of composition within Obin’s style becomes more embellished in the hands of the second generation of artists at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, who experiment with the flattened figures, great exaggerations of scale, and a shared desire to represent the more isolated northern city. Works play with Western traditions of perspective; Volvick Almonor’s Le Bal (1976) constructs a scene that dramatizes encounters between dancing couples and destabilizes the physical and spatio-temporal boundaries between inside/outside, public/private, culture/nature that often structure non-Western cultures with strong connections of ancient forms of worship and ritual practice, specifically Haitian Voudou. These traits are further expanded in Préfète Duffaut’s extraordinary work Imaginary Landscape (1979), a painted box of lush, melting vegetation and picturesque views of sea and Haitian countryside, in perfect harmony with humankind, spread in infinite continuity across the surface: an imagined utopia far from the real conditions of Haiti.

Prefete Duffaut. Imaginary Landscape, 1979; oil on cedar wood. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

And yet, as I meandered through the galleries, the weighted presence of Haiti’s history seemed to howl at me over the distracting, tropical colors of the gallery walls, and contradicted the pervasive paternalistic language used by the LSU Museum to describe these works (and subsequently, the artists who created them). Works that reference the sea are described not by their engagement with the trauma that the Middle Passage journey inscribed in the national consciousness of the Haitian people, but the “whimsical and intrinsic spiritual culture of Vodun in Haiti”; colors and forms are interpreted as innately vibrant and scripted, unearthing “existing patterns that exist within the magical … landscape of Haiti”; while “vibrant colors … serve as a way to seduce the viewer” and “embrace the playfulness and joyous spirituality of the Haitian experience.”[3] The viewer is asked to revel in the joyous “rhythms” of Haitian imagery and the life-affirming, playful, magical attributes of Haiti—and thus reproduce the essentialist, racist rhetoric and projections that often accompany diasporic Black artists and art. Such a view demands that this art be forever suspended in the intensity of the present, viewed as permanent life-affirming celebratory acts that transcend the depraved conditions that structure Haitian life, and even mirror first-world projections and fantasies about Haitian people and their culture.[4] With these contradictions in mind, I asked questions about the museum’s perspective on this collection of art.

Volvick Almonor. Le Bal, 1976; oil on panel. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the LSU Museum of Art.

As the only republic founded on a successful slave revolt, Haiti’s history has struggled to achieve its rightful place of significance within histories of colonial imperialism, revolution, and the nation–state despite its tremendous symbolic importance to the ongoing history of Black emancipation and social justice across the world. While the surface of the exhibition seeks to make connections between the hybridity of ethnicities and communal cultural practices of New Orleans, and the spectacular public performances of these practices as they are enacted in the city’s Mardi Gras festivities, the historical specificity of Haiti is abstracted, even disavowed in this exhibition.

As an arts institution located in a city that is continually confronting its fraught history with slavery, segregation under Jim Crow, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the mass incarceration of African Americans within its prison system today, I had hoped to see LSU’s museum honor its role as an academic institution by unpacking the true relationship between New Orleans and Haiti: the traumatic catastrophe of colonialism across the African diaspora. While the introduction of Haitian cultural production to Louisiana audiences is undoubtedly important, it seems that LSU’s museum missed an important opportunity to create a wider conversation about race, identity, and the history of Black achievement. The absence of this conversation is too large to ignore.

The Carnival, the City, and the Sea is on view at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, through March 20, 2016.

[1] Thank you to Dr. Sarah Clunis for sharking her great knowledge of this collection of work, her tireless advocacy for its presentation to the Baton Rouge public, and her answers to all of my questions and reservations.

[2] E. John Bullard, Director Emeritus of the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, had this to say about the history of the Perry E. H. Smith collection of Haitian Art: “In 1979 NOMA presented a major exhibition of Haitian art organized by the Brooklyn Museum. One of the principal lenders was Perry E. H. Smith, who attended the opening in New Orleans. A relief aid coordinator for an international welfare agency, Perry was stationed in Haiti in the late 1960s and early ’70s. While there, he began to collect dynamic and colorful Haitian paintings and sculpture, a native school of basically self-taught artists that emerged in the 1940s. Since his work kept Perry moving around the world, he had no place to display or store his collection, so he offered to place it on long-term loan to NOMA. Over the years he has generously given the entire collection to the Museum, nearly one hundred paintings and sculptures.” Accessed at: https://noma100.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/great-collectorsgreat-donors-the-making-of-the-new-orleans-museum-of-art-1910-2010/

[3] See the promotional description published by the LSU Museum of Art for the exhibition The Carnival, the City, and the Sea, which can be accessed here: http://www.lsumoa.org/content/carnival-city-and-sea

[4] Ibid.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska. Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Polish Pavilion, 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures. Photo by Sara Sagui. Courtesy of la Biennale di Venezia.

C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska’s Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Halka/Haiti: 18º 48’ 05” N 72º 23’ 01” W, considers the mythology surrounding the origins of this small but distinct community of Polish descent in the contexts of post-Communist Poland and post-dictatorship Haiti. Believed to be descendents of Polish soldiers recruited by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Pologne of Cazale have, for Poles, come to represent Polish resistance to despotism. The story of Poles in Haiti begins with the occupation of the independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the joint seizures of territory by Russian, Prussian, and Habsburg forces between 1772 and 1795. Seeking to liberate themselves from their occupiers, some Polish partisans joined up with Napoleon’s army, whom they viewed as the enemy of their enemies. By 1802, a cohort of Poles had been sent to Haiti to help squash the nascent revolution led by Toussaint l’Ouverture. Some of these Polish fighters are believed to have switched sides, either fighting alongside the Haitian rebels or absconding to the remote mountain region known today as Cazale. Two hundred years later, Polish Haitians are credited with resisting the Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and lauded in Poland as evidence that the Polish national spirit is anti-authoritarian in any form. The pavilion, and the book published to accompany it, seek to problematize any such simple understanding.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska. Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Musicians from St. Trinity Philharmonic Orchestra, Port-Au-Prince, with conductor Grzegorz Wierus. Courtesy of the Artists and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. Photo: Joanna Malinowska.

The work on view is the result of a massive production. Although the musicians were Haitian, they were not local, and the singers and film crew were imported from Poland, requiring housing, feeding, and minding. Curator Magdalena Moskalewicz likens the undertaking to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), a Romantic epic in which the titular antihero, played by Klaus Kinski, derails his ambitions of economic imperialism in Peru in order to pursue the mad dream of building an opera house deep in the jungle. Opera represents the “civilizing” influence of the West and is ultimately a futile goal, although it motivates Fitzcarraldo to exploit the indigenous community around him to spectacular effect. In Poland, operas such as Moniuszko’s have a similar connotation. Halka, Moskalewicz writes, is not an innovative opera but a conservative one: adopted as a national symbol by a country struggling to validate itself under occupation by stronger Western European powers, preserved as a parable of class struggle during the Communist period, and rejected by contemporary Poles seeking a more modern identity. Yet what Moniuszko does in Halka—integrating Western European structures with Polish folk motifs, and using a woman’s stolen honor as a metaphor for the exploitation of the working class—is textbook Modernism. A century later, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera would apply similar tactics, if with more avant-garde intentions.

C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska. Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W, 2015. Soloists from the Poznań Opera House during performance in Cazale. Courtesy of the Artists and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art. Photo: Damas Porcena (Dams).

Halka in Haiti, meanwhile, is an artifact of a distant past presented to a community to which it is only weakly connected. It is difficult to determine whether the artists’ intent is to provoke a dormant sense of nationalism among La Pologne, or whether it is to demonstrate to Poles who celebrate their countrymen’s part in the Haitian Revolution that there is little real commonality they can claim. Moskalewicz points out that the Polish nationalist narrative of Cazale—Polish partisans switched sides and aided the revolution, becoming heroes—erases the agency of the black Haitians who initiated and won their fight for independence. For Poles, having been on the receiving end of imperialism for over 200 years, this narrative holds undeniable appeal, even more so because contemporary Poland has been reshaped by past oppression into a homogenous ethnic and religious community. However it is interpreted, Halka/Haiti complicates Poland’s understanding of itself as a noble victim of colonial oppression.

Halka/Haiti: 18º 48’ 05” N 72º 23’ 01” W is on view in the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale through November 22, 2015.

KATSU ISHIDA, BUDDA, mixed media on handmade paper, 2011 72 x 60cm

At Aqua Art Miami, Japanese artist Katsu Ishida‘s primarily black and white drawings on paper were filled with tiny faces, reminding me of writhing souls in hell piled up on each other. Ishida told me that he makes all his paper and brushes himself, and the forms are dictated by the materials; he sees faces in the paper.

Richard Nesley, Untitled.

Later in the day at the same fair, Haitian art collectors Spiralis Ventures presented works associated with the Center for Art in Port-au-Prince, the only art school in Haiti, and the Saint Soleil style. Richard Nesley’s river-like intertwined humans conjure up spirits, connected with animals in a mesh of existence. Richard is the son of Antilhome, one of the leading Saint Soleil painters.  Jean-Daniel Lafont, ambassador of Spiralis Ventures, explains this painting as a mother tree or mother nature, saying: “The multiple spirits that inhabit earth both on the inside and the outside are shown moving up an down and around the sacred ‘Poto Mitan’ or sacred trunk three. This is where the spirit rest peacefully.”

David Douard, City Sickness, 2012
Ground, metal, motor, straw, toys, rope, plaster, wood, paint, 270 x 100 x 100 cm.

As I continued to think about figuration in contemporary art, two kinetic artists caught my eye in the main convention center. Lacking citizens in a miniature world, David Douard‘s City Sickness show the relics of the human ecosystem and an underworld with ladders to climb the social strata. Squeaking as the object spins, positioned high above the viewer, the piece resembles a game or playground ride.

Jon Kessler, photo by Celie Dailey.

John Kessler‘s strange machines utilized skinny, pale children in a way that addressed concerns about our mediated world its relationship to the human body. His bubble-blowing machine housed a stagnating youngster in a box that is only seen after moving around the sculpture.

Nelson Leirner, photo by Celie Dailey.

A collection of figurines from Nelson Leirner paired husbands and wives of all sorts on a layered platform. Upon closer glance, the male/female dichotomy was not so clear, with angels, soldiers, and apostles pairing up. It reminds me of the kind of games that girls play when imaging their future roles with dolls, but also the fight scenarios that little boys situate.

And finally, I spotted these elegant fine line drawings of hair, mostly views of the back of the head. Shortly after viewing, I found that the work belongs to a beautiful tall person whose gender pronoun preference I would like to have asked. Instead, I asked “why no faces?” to Jono Vaughan. And, I received a reply that these works are about the ambiguity of identity. According to Vaughan, the works allow the viewer to impose their own concept of identity on the art. A highlight of Vaughan’s bio printed in the Art Pages program guide (called “The Triumph of Medocrity”) tells of a previous performance project where Vaughan “invited members of the public to become clones of the artist through hair cutting and makeup application”. An artist, especially in our reflective post-modern world, must deal with identity presentation, heightened by facebook and internet anonymity. It feels nice to stand face-to-face with Vaughan and hear the quality and sincerity of voice.

Edouard Duval-Carrié, Le monde actuel, ou Erzulie interceptée (The World at Present, or Ezili Intercepted), 1996, Bass Museum of Art

With the recent events developing in Haiti, the complicated history between the country and the United States has quickly surfaced. A group of American Baptists attempted to transport Haitian children out off the country without proper documentation causing an international media storm and a recent article from UK Guardian journalist Seumas Milne’s which questioned the U.S. Military’s motivation in “[commandeering] Port-au-Prince’s airport…[turning] away flights bringing medical equipment and emergency supplies from organizations…in order to give priority to landing troops.” This latent disregard seems to also be seeping into the discussion of the country’s history of art as well. In the earthquake’s aftermath, it is difficult to argue the importance of salvaging this artistic history while the reality of the devastation and number of lives lost continues to reveal itself. Yet, the recent foray of two U.S. media publications into this realm, and the aforementioned events, has led me to believe that the need for this discussion has come to us sooner rather than later.  It is the apparent unfamiliarity with Haitian culture, in this case, its art, that is most problematic and results in its artists and history to undergo further marginalization. By using its artistic history as a window into its national identity, hopefully, Haiti can be defined as more than one of the world’s poorest countries.

On January 24^th, the Los Angeles Times reported the destruction of the Centre d’Art, a historical art center founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944, which helped to launch Haitian artists onto the international art scene. There are two major problems with the article that need to be discussed further. The first is the usage of the term “primitive.” This label was used to define Haitian artists by the founders of the Centre d’Art (two Americans and a Frenchman) as a way to market said artists within the international scene. The trend in the art world during this time was to find the next great “primitive” artist, an influence of Dada and Surrealist artistic movements that sought to reclaim an innocence felt to have been lost with the industrialization of Europe. Haitian artists who were willing to be perceived through this European/American hegemonic gaze could find a place within the international art market.

Centre d'Art damage (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times / January 23, 2009)

However, there is a long tradition of Haiti’s creolized academic tradition of which a formal, figurative style in Haitian painting can be traced back to. Philomé Obin (1892 – 1986) had been painting thirty years before the center opened and is still considered one of the most influential artists on Haitian art today. His work stands as an example of the school of memorializing well-known events within Haiti’s revolutionary history, frequently referencing Haitian heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Charlemagne Péralte. Obin championed the school of nationalist art in Haiti and his influence can still be seen today in works by internationally known artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié. To continue to refer to these artists and their works as “primitive” in this day and age without any context, as did the Los Angeles Times journalist Tracy Wilkinson, is, well, just plain lazy.

The second problematic area of the Los Angeles Times article, and in which we can also refer to the New Yorker’s January 25^th cover, is the continued use of the world “voodoo” when referring to the Haitian religion of vodou (also known as vaudou). The cover featured the painting The Resurrection of the Dead from contemporary Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin (a grand-nephew of Obin). The painting depicts imagery of vodou guide (“gods”), as they guard the passage between life and death. Both publications use the term “voodoo”, a Western construct laden with racial prejudice, with no further explanation of its immense role within Haitian art history or the formation of its national identity. Vodou is a combination of West African and Roman Catholic religions, comprised of deities, or lwas, which through worship, help practitioners get closer to the supreme god, Bondeyé. In her article Vodou, Nationalism, and Performance: The Staging of Folklore in Mid-Twentieth Century Haiti, Kate Ramsey discusses the role of the religion in the formation of the indigènisme movement, a conceptual rallying point for revolution against the U.S. occupation of 1915, rooted in ethnic and cultural identity. The religion was criminalized and those who observed its ceremonies were persecuted, forcing vodou to go underground and evolve into a locale of resistance for Haitians. During this time, vodou would become exoticized by American/European artists searching to connect to the “other”, such as choreographer Katherine Dunham and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, best known for Divine Horseman: the Living Gods of Haiti, a film documenting vodou ceremonial rituals and practitioners.

Frantz Zephirin, The Resurrection of the Dead (2007), On the cover of the January 25, 2010 of "New Yorker" magazine

Once vodou became legal in 1946, the Centre d’Art encouraged its artists to incorporate religious imagery within their artwork, as it was perceived as purely authentic (read “primitive”). Haitian artists who made the conscientious decision to allow themselves to be labeled as “other,” were able to achieve success within the international market. A prime example is the artist Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), who through acceptance of the role projected onto him, exhibited in Paris and New York frequently and could claim patrons such as André Breton (father of the Surrealist movement) and American author Truman Capote. In his 2000 lecture, Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of voodoo and western cultural anxieties, presented at the October Gallery in London, John Cussans discusses the “voodoo construct” and its four different distinctions: the voodoo doll; the zombie; the voodoo witch doctor; and voodoo possession. Through these continued representations, Cussans argues, vodou has been continually objectified and suppressed by U.S./European culture and its continued need to ethnographically “authenticate,” (or define through a Western gaze), what they don’t understand. Cussans concluded, “It is this tendency to return voodoo to vodou that must be reversed if we are to resist the compassionate continuation of vodou’s suppression effected by the misguided will to authenticity.” In other words, any concept of voodoo must be abandoned when approaching the Haitian religion; otherwise, we are doing nothing more than participating in the continued misrepresentation. This is the problem with the U.S. media publications. So ingrained in the American psyche has this misrepresentation become, these journalists didn’t even think to research the religion.

Hector Hypplite (1894-1948), La dauration l'amour (The Adoration of Love), 1946-48, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Centre d’Art and local galleries have reported the loss of many artworks contained in their collective walls, not to mention a number of represented artists. The recent tragedy has made Haiti the world’s disaster darling and it has been tremendous how people from all over the world have responded to the country’s need for help. Yet, we need to take a collective breath and become aware that we are treading on complicated ground.  The lack of reference to any real historical, artistic or political context from both publications highlights the challenging areas that arise whenever a Western power has offered aid to Haiti. We cannot sustain meaning as a global community if we keep repeating the historic mistakes of colonization. As we go forward, we need to raise our awareness to include the entire story, not fixing Haitians and their history in a marginalized space, putting aside our preconceived notions in order to truly help Haiti. If not, I guarantee, we will have another revolution on our hands.