3/4/2013
Globe and Mail
By JUDITH RITTER
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It’s a steamy night in Miami’s Little Haiti and hundreds of party-goers surround the courtyard stage of the Little Haiti Cultural Center to dance compas, a sexy merengue-offspring, and eat conch and steaming griot (spicy pork). Elderly women decked out in straw hats sit like queens in plastic folding chairs, gossiping while teenagers show off their dance moves. It’s Big Night in Little Haiti, a monthly event that draws huge crowds to this under-the-radar neighbourhood. The band eventually leaves the stage but the party continues. Revellers hit the streets for a rara, a celebratory procession that in Haiti, happens only during Carnival. The crowd parades to sounds of homemade metal horns, bells and ad hoc percussion instruments. “They practically jump off the roofs!” says local artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.
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Little Haiti is part of North America’s immigrant narrative. For decades, Haitian refugees fleeing everything from Papa Doc's Tonton Macoutes to natural disasters flocked to south Florida. In the two square kilometres just north of Miami’s chic Design District and wildly popular Wynwood Art District, Creole is the lingua franca, voodoo is practised, art flourishes and locals dance to the latest tunes from Port-au-Prince. It’s a chance for adventurous visitors to leave chi-chi Miami behind for a couple of hours and explore a different culture. One thing it has in common with the rest of the city? Art. The neighbourhood is becoming “a mecca for young artists,” says Duval-Carrié, a darling of the Art Basel crowd and a long-time resident. Up-and-comers are getting pushed out of the increasingly expensive Wynwood, so Little Haiti is in contention to become the next “gritty art scene,” as one alt-weekly newspaper put it.
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This past weekend saw the launch of the bimonthly Little Haiti Sunday Stroll, highlighting cultural spots, eateries and galleries such as Yo Miami Arts Studio (one of the organizing groups), hipster-run 7th Circuit Studios and Multitudes 54, a gallery featuring art of the Black Diaspora. Providing support was the Little Haiti Cultural Center; completed in 2009, the $26-million space features a 400-seat theatre and 2,475 square feet of gallery space. In December, it partnered with Art Basel for a show of contemporary Caribbean artists. Street art is everywhere, much of it by Little Haiti artist Serge Toussaint, whose vibrant paintings of politicians, basketball players and Haitian celebrities adorn shop facades and walls. The neighbourhood radiates an energizing haphazard quality, with bags of rice stacked in front of a mechanic’s garage, and clunky speakers blasting music outside a grocer. The bustling ambience and compas soundtrack in itself is worth a visit.
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Little Haiti got its name from the late community activist Viter Juste. His son, Miami Herald photographer Carl Juste, grew up and still lives and works in the neighbourhood. “Why would anyone leave here?” he asks as we pass pink, yellow, green houses where people lounge on porches and roosters wander freely. Despite all the talk of gentrification, this is still essentially an immigrant and working-class area. We’re off to his favourite haunt, the hole-in-the wall Chef Creole for an order of fried fish, rice, red beans, plantain and pikliz (hot sauce) – an addictive heart-attack-on-a-plate for less than $10. On the wall are photos of regulars and celebrities such as musicians Erykah Badu and Wyclef Jean who’ve also stopped by for a taste of Haiti.
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The epicentre of the Haitian soul in North America is Notre Dame d’Haiti, a church with storied stained glass and murals; one features “boat people” escaping to Florida under the watchful eye of Virgin Mary. Juste recommends attending a service to hear the lively Creole hymns. “Go to the church, a botanica and the bookstore and you’ll know a lot about Haitians,” seconds Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat. “Bookstores are like churches,” she adds. Her favourite spot for reading material here is Libreri Mapou, full of books, newspapers and magazines in Creole and French. Posters for dance performances and poetry readings cover the walls. It’s a hub for writers and artists, and a hot spot for political debate. And what about that botanica? In the back of Tipa Tipa Botanica you’ll find Mammie Toyee in a blue headwrap and flowing skirt surrounded by jars of dried herbs, incense and candles. Her business card claims: “Mammie is from Haiti and very powerful!” Indeed, she has a kind of refined yet spooky charisma that leaves you wondering whether her prescriptions for love and money just might be more effective than what your shrink offers.
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Little Haiti isn’t the easiest neighbourhood to navigate, so take a map or a tour (try miamiculturaltours.com), and be sure to give yourself enough time to feel its richness. For the best experience, visit on a weekend and plan your trip around Big Night. However you choose, just get there before the tacky postcards and Little Haiti key chains arrive. “I came to Miami because there was a Little Haiti,” artist Edward Duval Carrie responds with incredulity when I ask why he lives here and not a spiffier one more suited to an artist with shows around the world. “This is the only place in the world that has the name ‘Haiti’ in it other than … well, Haiti. That’s pretty special.”
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The JW Marriott Marquis is only 8 kilometres away from Little Haiti and the concierge will help plan your excursion into the neighbourhood. Not your usual South Beach boutique hotel, but this place is a one-and-only with a NBA-approved basketball arena in a city obsessed with the Miami Heat. 255 Biscayne Boulevard Way; 888-717-8850; www.JWMarriottMarquisMiami.com
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WHERE TO EAT
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Chef Créole Here, Haitian comfort food comes in huge portions and don’t miss the sought after goat’s head stew on Sundays. Chef Ken Sejour presides over a multigenerational crowd for eat-in or take out. 7957 NE2nd Ave.; chefcreole.com
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Leela’s Restaurant Come here for an updated version of Chef Creole’s old school take-out. The Kréyol Stew gets boffo reviews from Miami’s adventurous foodie set. 5650 NE 2nd Ave.; leelarestaurant.wordpress.com
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WHAT TO SEE
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Statue of General Toussaint L’Ouverture: The father of Haitian independence stands at NE 2nd Avenue and 62nd Street.
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Little Haiti Cultural Center: For dance performances and contemporary art exhibits by Caribbean painters and photographers. 212 NE 59th Terrace; miamigov.com/LHCulturalcenter
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The Haitian Heritage Museum: This Design District venue is the only Haitian museum in the world outside of Haiti and a good place to start your tour. Curator, Eveline Pierre, shows off a small but significant collection of both historic artifacts and contemporary art. 4141 NE 2nd Ave.; haitianheritagemuseum.org
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Notre Dame d’Haiti: The church is undergoing a renovation, but it’s still possible to attend service and view Haitian history on its walls. 110 NE 62nd St.; notredamedhaiti.org
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WHERE TO PARTY
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Big Night in Little Haiti rocks the neighbourhood every third Friday. The April 19 show includes Montreal-based Haitian poet Jean Claude “Koralen” Martineau, award-winning novelist Edwige Danticat and singer Emeline Michel. BigNightLittleHaiti.com
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MOCA Café: Just north of Little Haiti, upscale Haitian dishes and late night performances of compas and rara music. 738 NE 125th St.; facebook.com/MocaCafeLounge
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WHERE TO SHOP
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The best place for high end traditional Haitian craft is the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance. It’s 21st century design sensibility includes jewellery collaborations with Donna Karan. You’ll find museum-quality arts at museum-quality prices. 225 NE 59th St; haitianartsalliance.org
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At Sonny’s Sound and Record Shop you’ll find CD’s from hot Haitian groups like New Look and DJACOUT and from Nemour Jean-Baptiste, the reputed originator of compas. 5903 NE 2nd Ave.; 305-759-9518
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Looking for something unusual? Tipa Tipa Botanica has plaster saints, candles to solve legal troubles, perfumes to win back lost love and the eerie advice of proprietor Mammie Toyee. 5857 NE 2nd Ave.; 786-326-0365
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At Libreri Mapou, find the best collection of Creole books outside of Haiti and the best chance of meeting artists and intellectuals of the Haitian diaspora. 5919 NE 2nd Ave.; librerimapou.com
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GUIDES
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Miami Cultural Tours. Customized itineraries for individuals or groups (from $30 a person). 305-416-6868; miamiculturaltours.com

2/19/2013
AlterPresse
By Robert Shaw
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Jerry slip-sides deftly under the night sky lighting up the broken walls of Haiti´s capital. His rapid-fire hands spray paint this buzzing Caribbean city with images of love and hope side-by-side with pictures of prostitution and political destruction. Jerry Rosembert Moise, a humble yet immensely driven 30-year-old who grew up in the ghettos of Port-au-Prince, plys his trade as a graffiti artist covering the walls of downtown Port-au-Prince and the suburbs of Petionville and Delmas. After the massive earthquake that rocked Haiti on 12 January three years ago, Jerry – who the US-based writer Pooja Bhatia has called the Graffiti Prophet of Bois Verna - began working more and more in the provincial areas of Miragoane and Leogane to “re-build my country through artistic inspiration”. From Aristide to Martelly, he’s never voted as many of his street murals depict a deep sense of dismay with political life and he feels an increasing need to try to export his work to the nearby galleries of Santo Domingo and the lucrative Miami markets. “Here in Haiti there´s just not enough jobs, desperation is everywhere and it´s simply hard to get money,” he explains. “About a year after the earthquake I broke into painting water colors on canvas and pitched a few paintings at an exhibition in Paco, Port au Prince”. “But even though I sold over 100 copies I could only scrape together anything from $50 to $100 USD a piece”. “It´s true that since the earthquake, we’ve seen a new trend of street artists emerging,” Myriam Nader, the Owner/President of Nader Haitian Art, told AlterPresse.
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Nader lives in New Jersey in the US and has worked for many years exporting Haitian art around the region for the family-owned Nader Art Gallery. “We’ve continued to push sales in the US and the Caribbean,” she stresses. “We lost thousands of irreplaceable objects of art including masterpieces by great artists like Hector Hypolite and Castra Basile,” she says. “Our art is uniquely joyful and vibrant,” she continues. “However, the past decade has been sadly marked by a lack of art promotion and in more recent years tourism in Haiti has plummeted”. “If we export our paintings to the US or the Caribbean we could fetch up to $150,000 USD, which is very reasonable,” says Nader. “Haitian art is now about diversity, mixing the modern and abstract with traditional works full of color and life”. “We have the best art in the Caribbean at a reasonable price”. While Jerry´s graffiti also abounds in color and life, his work is sometimes humorous and often cartoonish. But it always has a deeper meaning. “As we move into 2013 there are still thousands stuck in the tents and those who leave still have no work and need money,” says Jerry. “Quick and easy robberies and killings are part of a new trend of “motorcycle violence”, which is on the rise as new gangs rebuild in the slums of Martissant and Cite de Soleil”.
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“These troubles have inspired much of my latest drawings,” says Jerry. He talks of a gigantic mural he recently painted depicting a “Haiti girl” suffering in need of rest yearning for a beautiful former era and now lost in an upside-down-world where everything is slipping away”. While Jerry’s paintings have changed over the last decade, his fight for social justice continues. But this fight is a difficult one for all Haitians including the artists and Jerry believes that Haiti has to find new ways to reconnect with its Caribbean neighbors. In July last year, Jerry travelled with twenty graffiti artists from Guyana to Puerto Rico, including the famous graffiti artist Ske, to the neighboring island of Guadeloupe to take part in a graffiti competition and hip-hop festival. “It was great to be able to connect with other artists from the Caribbean,” he says. “Haitian artists need more exposure now more than ever to bring our beautiful country back to life together with our island friends”. Nader agrees with this need to connect with foreign markets saying, “While we still export to countries like Barbados and Martinique in the Caribbean and the US, our sales are moving toward the European countries where they are more valued for their quality and affordable prices”. Following the earthquake and after many years out of the exhibition game, Galerie Nader participated in the first exhibit of Haitian art at the Louvre exhibition in Paris.
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Later in April 2011, naderhaitianart.com was involved in another exhibit – Art for Education - with more than 200 attendees at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. The Consortium for Haitian Empowerment and the Lisa Left-Eye Lopes Foundation organized the exhibition, giving ten percent of the sale proceeds to scholarships for underprivileged youth from Haiti and Honduras. “Over the last year or two in particular, we’ve been able to raise awareness about Haitian art and culture to promote our beautiful and world-class art across the region”. “Primitive board works by Jean Leonidas, impressionist canvas pieces by Louizor Ernst and more traditional vibrant works by Pierre Louis Prosper are opening new doors both here in the US and across the Atlantic,” details Nader. Nader explains that they have more exhibitions coming up in New York including a show with a variety of Haitian artists at the Rockland Community College in New York during the entire month of April 2013 for the Haitian Heritage Month. Be it graffiti ties between Haitian Jerry and Puerto Rican Ske or new exhibitions and sales for the Nader family in the US, it’s clear that Haiti’s art community is once again starting to find its feet.

Associated Press
By Trenton Daniel, Matha Mendoza
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The sharp tang of varnish hangs in the air as a dozen women and a few men cut and scrape logs into bowls destined for U.S. department stores. In other Haitian workshops, vases sparkle with sequins of pink, green and blue, and dragonflies leap from picture frames cut from recycled steel drums. Three years after a devastating earthquake, there's still not much economic traction in this long impoverished Caribbean country, but one small niche has taken off: arts and crafts. The artisan industry is enjoying a boost from advocacy groups that are helping organize workers and improve quality. Big retailers Macy's and Anthropologie and three high-end designers are among those working with at least five artisan groups to export Haitian arts and crafts. "We saw an increase in (our) purchases soon after the disaster," said Michele Loeper, a spokeswoman for Ten Thousand Villages, one of the few U.S. retailers to purchase Haitian handicrafts before the quake. "In a way, it was our way to provide much-needed assistance."
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The number of artisans has increased and more workshops have opened across Haiti, thanks in part to an injection of more than $3 million from outside groups like the Inter-American Development Bank and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a pro-business nonprofit set up by former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The number of regularly employed artisans jumped from 450 in September 2011 to 2,100 as of July this year, says the Artisan Business Network, a newly formed advocacy group based in Port-au-Prince. But in all, an estimated 400,000 Haitians engage in at least some craft work, with roughly 1 million people directly supported by artisan producers, according to a 2010 report financed by the Canadian artisan advocacy group BRANDAID Project and CHF International, a U.S. group now known as Global Communities that helps foster sustainable development. "We want people to come buy from Haiti not because they have pity for the Haitians but because the product is well-made, it's well-priced and it's something they can use," said Nathalie Tancrede, co-founder of the Artisans Business Network. Macy's is the biggest U.S. retailer selling handmade Haitian goods, followed by the West Elm and Anthropologie chains, along with stores such as MI OSSA in Charlottesville, Virginia, and online boutique shops like Noonday Collection and Maiden Nation. Designers including Rachel Roy, Chan Luu and Donna Karan have also become big post-quake boosters, purchasing and selling jewelry designed by Haitian women. At an Anthropologie store in New York, papier-mache busts of zebras and rhinos pop out on a wall display. Children relish the animals made of old books, cement bags and French-language newspapers. "A lot of customers like them for their kids' rooms or for the living room," manager Megan Hovey said by telephone. "It's an item customers come in for specifically. They're unique." The gains by Haiti's artisans fit in a larger trend called "ethical fashion," in which small businesses employ women craftsmen in developing countries to produce one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted designs for "socially conscious" consumers. Willa Shalit, CEO of Fairwinds Trading Inc., a for-profit company that works with developing world artisans and entrepreneurs, says the 2010 earthquake generated interest in all things Haitian. "All of sudden Haiti was on everyone's minds," said Shalit, whose company received a three-year loan of $174,832 from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. "The brand of Haiti became instantly recognizable." There are no solid figures on how much Haiti's arts and crafts contribute to its exports, but they rank far behind clothing. The garment sector accounted for 93 percent of Haiti's $768 million in exports last year, which were up from $563 million the year of the quake, according to Haiti's Central Bank.
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Haitian crafts had peaked in the early 1980s, when thousands of artisans were employed. But the industry, and the rest of Haiti's economy, collapsed following a United Nations-imposed embargo in 1993 that sought to restore constitutional rule after a military junta ousted then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Artisans are again seeing their crafts compete on the international market and create jobs in a country where steady employment is elusive. There are no official figures on unemployment since the quake but the jobless rate was around 60 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to the World Bank. The money made at Haiti's end can seem far removed from what the crafts bring at a U.S. retailer, where the final price is pushed up by shipping, stocking, marketing and other costs. Craftsman Felix Calixte said he earns $6.50 for a metal picture frame in a style similar to one selling at Macy's for about $40. Still, Calixte can make three in a day, and the total income of nearly $20 is five times Haiti's daily minimum wage. In the densely packed district of Carrefour, an entrepreneur curiously named Einstein Albert leans over workers as he walks through a courtyard and inspects the latest order of wooden bowls. "When we look at Cuba, they have their cigars. Colombia has coffee," said Albert. "If Haiti has an image to sell and can compete in the Caribbean, offer something or create more jobs, it is through the handicraft sector." His bowls are made from logs harvested from the forest of 25,000 trees he grows in southern Haiti — ochebe, a hardwood prized for its lack of splinters and resin. Each bowl takes six weeks of carving, sanding and sealing with 13 coats of lead-free varnish. They've been sold at select Macy's stores for $75 each and by U.S.-based crafts websites, along with Port-au-Prince's few high-end hotels frequented by aid workers, diplomats and contractors. The artisans themselves make significantly less. They're paid by the piece or the hour, but prolific workers earn more than Haiti's minimum wage — 200 gourdes a day, which is less than $5. Albert said some of his workers take home twice that amount. Albert said the family business he inherited has benefited from the new demand for Haitian crafts. It now brings in $60,000 to $80,000 a year, twice the amount before the earthquake, and he invests part of the proceeds in a school he runs to train craft workers. "People say that my family was right to call me Einstein because we provide quality," he said.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/12/145037002/in-haiti-where-does-art-fit-in?s...
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There's no doubt that art can help us cope with troubled times. It's a way to process the inexplicable, express the unutterable. But with tens of thousands of Haitians still displaced and living in tent cities, some might consider art a luxury few can afford. Diane Ford Dessables, though, founder of Ayitian Arts Project, says that in addition to the obvious emotional benefits, there are real economic reasons for supporting Haiti's arts. "What we're doing here is focusing on art and using art as a means of spurring community development," she tells NPR's Michel Martin. She's the person behind 3 Pent Ayisyen (Three Haitian Painters), a small exhibition at a Washington, D.C., restaurant that focuses on the works of artists who live and work around the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. "We're actually trying to increase the income artists receive — and that residual income permeates throughout the Haitian economy," Dessables says. While small in scope, the aim behind the exhibit is to generate enough funds through the sale of paintings to repair an arts school in Jacmel that was left damaged by the earthquake that devastated the country two years ago. The exhibition features works by artists Augustin Mona, Michelet "Najee" Calice and Henry Robert Derazin. It will be on display at Washington's Busboys and Poets restaurant through Feb. 17.

11/13/2011
The Miami Herald
By Jacqueline Charles
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PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Sketch pad in hand and an oversized papier-mâché handbag hanging off her shoulder, fashion icon Donna Karan walked the workshop floor, checking on samples while giving creative feedback to workers on their handiwork. Far from the couture runways of New York’s Fifth Avenue, Karan was in earthquake-battered Haiti in August, picking up the last samples for an exhibit in Berlin, Germany that was to showcase Haiti’s artisans. It is the craftspeoples’ skill and talent that’s helping to drive the country’s reconstruction after last year’s devastating earthquake. “This place is amazingly creative,” said Karan, standing amid dozens of Caribbean Craft employees quietly at work making Christmas wall décor with paper, water and glue made from locally grown yucca. “It really is inspirational.” After years of watching their once-thriving sector slowly die as U.S. buyers and others pulled out and turned their sights to China, Haiti’s artisans are enjoying a resurgence as high-profile supporters like Karan champion their creative talents while helping them develop new products and attract potential new buyers. The endeavor is part of a broader effort taking shape in post-quake Haiti to make foreign aid less about handouts and more about empowering Haitians by creating jobs. “When I work as the co-chair with the prime minister of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, we have to focus on the problems to be solved,” former U.S. President Bill Clinton said during a recent visit, highlighting the sector’s economic possibilities. “But over the long run, the answer for Haiti is for each and every Haitian to be able to make a decent living doing something he or she is good at.” Clinton, a supporter of Haiti’s artisans long before the quake brought greater attention to their plight, believes the sector has the potential to help Haiti build a modern economy. That belief has led his foundation and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, formed after the quake at the request of President Barack Obama, to invest in the sector by providing grants and loans to small and medium-size businesses. The money is being used to expand and boost jobs to meet the growing demands for intricate metal works, papier-mâché ornaments and vibrant beading designs. While some of the money have gone to help individual companies replace workshops destroyed in the quake, others have gone to help strengthen the sector as a whole. For instance, a grant from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund is helping to set up several artisans’ networking depots throughout the country. Operated by Haitian entrepreneurs, the depots will offer artisans help with everything from product development to export forms to the packaging and shipment of orders. Meanwhile, a new factory by philanthropist and Diesel Jeans Canada CEO Joey Adler in Croix des Bouquet will put profits back in the community. It will feature an intricately designed fence — a work of art itself — made by local metal workers in the area. The factory will also have a showroom where the artisans can exhibit their work for prospective buyers. These are part of the effort to add value to the artisans’ work and ensure that investments have a lasting effect, say supporters.
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We’re hoping that Haiti as a brand will rise,” said Willa Shalit, chief executive and founder of Fairwinds Trading, a consultant on the depot project who has spent the last year connecting U.S. retailers and designers with Haitian artisans. “There is creativity in Haiti that is incredibly magic and very powerful. Yes, eventually it can be imitated in China but it won’t be the same, any more than if they try to imitate French wine.” Aware of the ongoing challenges of Haitian artisans — from sub-par workshops to a reliance on mother nature to dry the paint on their handcrafts — Shalit and her team have been working on building up artisan’s ability to supply, and strengthening their relationships with buyers, “so that over time those relationships will endure and there will be a sustainable market.” Last year, the Fairwinds Trading and Brandaid Project teamed up to collaborate with Haitian artisans on behalf of home décor handcrafts for Macy’s Heart of Haiti collection. The retailer remains the largest buyer of handcrafts from Haiti to date, and this summer its chairman and CEO, Terry Lundgren visited /the country along with lifestyle guru Martha Stewart and fashion designer Rachel Roy. “[Macy’s is] committed for the long-term to work with the artisans and sell their product,’’ said Shalit, adding that, “Roy has been doing stunning jewelry out of Haiti and Martha is developing products.” Karan first visited Haiti after the quake with Adler, a friend and fellow philanthropist who has been working in Haiti for several years. Karan now travels to the country frequently for several days at a time to collaborate with artists, and through her Urban Zen Foundation, she’s trying to help artisans add value to their work. “Right now, what we are tying to do is get an opportunity for the people to scale-up to the level where they can work with other designers,” she said. Said Adler of Karan’s efforts: “She has really opened my eyes to a Haiti I had never seen. I always saw the heartache. Now I see the artistry, the beauty.” On this particular day, the Caribbean Craft workers were not only working on Karan’s commissioned samples but also finishing up a huge order from Anthropologie, the Philadelphia-based retail-store chain.The company requested 55,000 pieces that included papier-mâché Christmas ornaments and wall-hanging elephants. The company began featuring Caribbean Craft’s products even before the quake after seeing the wall décor line during a New York trade fair. Anthropologie made an an initial purchase of $60,000 at that trade fair and has continued its relationship since, even after Caribbean Craft owner Magalie Dresse was working out of her house because the quake had destroyed her workshop. The commitment, subsequent market exposure and orders from other buyers has allowed Caribbean Craft to double its employees and add artisans groups from across the country. They’ve also added unskilled workers from a tent city across the street in Port-au-Prince. “It’s not complicated. It comes to me very naturally,” Widlene Noze, 24, who lives in a tent, said as she covered an elephant’s head with paper. And that, says Dresse, is the real power of the artisan sector — the ability to train workers within days and give them the opportunity to earn a living. “Each and every Haitian is an artisan,” she said. After 11 years of working to give Haiti’s vibrant and unique handcrafts an outlet beyond the country’s hidden workshops and few tourists shops, Dresse said she is, for the first time, hopeful and confident that “the artisans will know brighter days.” “Not only do I think it’s possible I know it’s possible,” she said. “The sector is moving. We have new products, new designers are coming in and we have buyers committed to placing purchase orders. I won’t be surprised if similar companies like mine begin emerging.”

9/28/2011
The Miami Herald
By Ina Paiva Cordle
icordle@MiamiHerald.com
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Donna Karan is a designer by trade but a philanthropist at heart. Now, she is combining those interests, focusing on helping build Haitian commerce by bringing local artisans’ work to a larger audience through her Urban Zen Foundation. “Working with these people has been the most enlightening year of my life — going there and learning I can make a difference in a person’s life,” said Karan, speaking to 1,200 women Wednesday at the 11th annual United Way Women’s Leadership Breakfast at the BankUnited Center at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. “It’s not giving them money; it’s giving them a job,” Karan said. Accessorizing her Urban Zen black dress with horn bracelets and a papier-mâché handbag made by Haitian artisans, Karan highlighted the foundation’s work since the devastating 2010 earthquake. “Every single person in Haiti is creative,” she said. “They have a soul and a spirit, and that is what is going to make them survive.” Karan was chosen as keynote speaker by the breakfast’s co-chairs Susan Miller and her daughter Leslie Miller Saiontz. Susan Miller had first met Karan, the chief designer of Donna Karan New York, five months ago at a Neiman Marcus event. Karan, 62, is no stranger to Miami. She first visited as a 16-year-old and stayed at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, she said in an interview following the breakfast, which is held annually for women in Miami-Dade who contribute $1,000 or more a year. Karan continues to visit South Florida regularly, often making designer appearances. Her latest trip coincides with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that began Wednesday night. Karan planned to celebrate at a Kabbalah gathering in Hollywood. As a mother of three and grandmother of seven, Karan’s speech touched on the critical role women play, and the importance of spirituality and philanthropy.
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Born into fashion as the daughter of a tailor and a showroom model, Karan studied at Parson’s School of Design. After her second year, she was hired by Anne Klein for a summer job, and following three years as an associate designer, she was named successor when Klein passed away in 1974. She branched out on her own and launched her first Donna Karan New York collection in 1985. Always focused on “heart, body and soul,” Karan founded the Urban Zen Foundation in 2007, “to create a community of consciousness and change.” Now, much of her energy is channeled into the foundation, which focuses on healthcare, education and preserving cultures. Her passion is merging commerce with philanthropy, and Haiti, in particular has captured her heart. Her Donna Karan spring collection was inspired by Haiti, and Karan said she travels there at least once a month, to collaborate with artisans. “I had a vision. That is usually what happens to designers — we get a vision,” she said. “I decided we could create a model.” With the help of other designers and business leaders, her dream is to build a town. Her goal is to support artisans and bring their work to more potential buyers, boosting jobs, which will lead to education and improved healthcare. She doesn’t expect it all to happen during her lifetime, but she is “planting a seed.” Already such Haitian-produced items as jewelry, purses, tobacco leaf vases, metal candelabras and other home décor objects are being sold at Urban Zen stores in New York, Sag Harbor and soon to open, West Hollywood. Items are also sold at exhibitions, including ones recently in the Hamptons, New York and Berlin. Karan said she is hoping to hold a major exhibition of Haitian works in Miami soon, as well as open an Urban Zen center and retail store here. “The people of Haiti are the most creative people I’ve seen,” she said. “I look at Haiti as potential and possibility ... to be a self-sustaining and lucrative place.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/haiti-aid/

Marin Independent Journal
By Jessica Bernstein-Wax
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A GROUP OF MARIN teenagers helped inspire an arts therapy program for Haitian girls and young women, many of whom were displaced by the massive earthquake that devastated the Caribbean nation last year. About 10 volunteers from Girls United — a collaboration among San Rafael-based nonprofit the Meridian Health Foundation, the United Nations Foundation and Full-Circle Learning — spent some four weeks in Haiti in June and July teaching girls and young women photography, printmaking, drama and creative writing. "We divided them into groups so they all were able to experience all of the four different levels of art," said Deanne LaRue, Meridian's executive director. "Some of them photography spoke to them, and others it was the drama and others it was the writing.
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"Another important part of this is that we were working with girls who have demonstrated leadership qualities — we were actually training them to become peer to peer counselors," LaRue said. The approximately 80 Haitian girls and women who went through the program were between 12 and 24 years old and living at Sean Penn's J/P HRO camp and the YWCA, LaRue said. Artists, writers and actors — including Rainn Wilson who plays Dwight Schrute on the U.S. version of "The Office" — traveled with the group and worked directly with the girls. The idea was to provide the young women a creative outlet to express and their feelings and also train them to pass on the skills to their peers, LaRue said. A group of about 60 Marin teenagers has been working with Meridian to raise money for various projects benefitting Haiti, and a small number of girls hoped to travel with Girls United but couldn't because of a cholera outbreak. Students raised about $700 last year to transport 10 medical domes to Haiti that Meridian estimates have saved 2,000 lives by putting on a dance and holding bake sales, LaRue said. A $10,000 grant from the United Nations Foundation and $12,000 in individual donations made this summer's trip possible.
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Even though the Marin girls couldn't travel to Haiti this summer, they made friendship cards for their Haitian counterparts. The Haitian girls then made reply cards as part of the art projects, LaRue said. Teenage girls in Haiti are "one of the hardest groups hit by the earthquake, yet they have the most potential," LaRue said. "With the loss of structures and homes, of dwellings, they have no privacy so they're targeted by abuse of all kinds." Young girls also often provide essential support to their mothers in child rearing and housework and many have put aside their own goals to ensure the family's survival, said Elisabeth Guilbaud-Cox, a spokeswoman for the United Nations who grew up in Haiti. "Haiti historically is known through its art — through our music, our dance, our paintings," Guilbaud-Cox said. "Reviving if you will the artistic sense within the Haitian community ... is something that gives us hope because this is a survival tool. "Art is probably one of the most powerful tools that brings people together regardless of ethnicity, creed, race, religion and so on," she added. "Art brings beauty. Art brings truth. Art brings life."
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Layla Aberi, a 17-year-old Tiburon resident who graduated from San Francisco University High School this year, said she and a classmate raised about $200 selling Haiti T-shirts and baked goods at her school to help fund the project. "I didn't do it to make myself feel better — I did it to make them feel better," Aberi said of the Haitian girls. "I can do a lot of things to improve my life, but there's not a lot of things I can do to make their life better. Just because I sent them a postcard doesn't meant that tomorrow they'll be OK. We need to keep it going so they can have this constant source of education and happiness and art." Lauren Grieve, a junior at the Branson School who lives in San Rafael, said she and other students helped organize the benefit dance last year. "I wanted to get involved as soon as I heard about it," said Grieve, 16. "I thought that it would be a really great thing to do, and I thought that we could relate to a lot of teenagers there." After sending her postcard with the Girls United group, Grieve got a pink card back with fuzzy decorations. "Dear sisters, did you know that white was the color of purity?" the card from her Haitian pen pal said. "Wherever you are, know that purity of the heart is the most wonderful gift you can have."

Repeating Islands
By Lisa Paravasini
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http://repeatingislands.com/2011/07/29/haitian-houngan-and-flagmaker-sil...
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Silva Joseph, a highly regarded Vodou flag maker, died yesterday morning of health complications following a stroke a year ago. The artist, who had been partly paralyzed by the stroke but had continued to work on his flags, had been hospitalized since his conditioned worsened about two weeks ago. Joseph was born in Leogane, Haiti in 1930. He was initiated into vodou in 1955. After becoming a houngan (or Vodou priest) in 1970 he worked out of his peristil (temple) in the Bel Air neighborhood of Poert-au-Prince. His initiation and priesthood were the path to his art, as the sequined flags are used as altarpieces and are “danced” at the beginning of Vodou ceremonies. He created his first vodou flag in 1972 and works in the tradition of BelAir’s famous flag artists, such as Tibout, Joseph Fortine and Luc Daniel Cedor.

VOA
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In the southern town of Jacmel, Haiti its all about art. Last year’s earthquake changed the way Jacmel’s artists view their craft In Haiti, the southern town of Jacmel, one of the country's creative centers, is all about art. Last year’s earthquake changed the way Jacmel’s artists view their craft. The quake inspired them to tell stories - but not in the usual way. A pretty beach in Jacmel. And a good place to remember the dead. Phoenix Junior is honoring the lost souls of the earthquake by drawing on the rocks that crushed them. It's called rubble art says rubble artist Phoenix Junior. “Sometimes I use like people breaking arm or people crying. But you always feel sadness in my art. After the earthquake, all my art has become sad,” he said. Jacmel too has become sad. It was hit hard in last year’s earthquake. But its artists are striking back.
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At the art center that almost collapsed, artists are using rubble to do something that, to them, makes sense. Rubble art has become popular here like the town's other artistic productions, such as its famous paper mache creatures at carnival time. Children are learning to be the paper mache masters of the future. But they also want to be rubble artists. George Metellus directs the Art Creation Foundation for Children. “They say ‘let’s do something to let people know that Haiti will not perish, that we will survive after the earthquake,’” said Metellus. And that's what they did, by making a mosaic wall beside the sea. It's made partly from the fragments of a destroyed city. Rochmond Domond, a young artist who helped build the wall, had to relive dreadful memories. “People were with me at four when the earthquake happened - and then they were dead,” he stated. Joseph Stevenson is Phoenix Junior’s friend. Rubble art is about dealing with memories, but he doesn’t go to the beach to remember the dead. He comes here, to where a school once stood. “The first rubble art rock I sold, I took from here,” he said. It’s a tragic place but inspiring for some. Jacmel’s artists have turned these rocks into very powerful things. They’ve been used to remember lost friends - or to say a last goodbye to them. They’ve been used to store Haitian hope and Haitian pride. And in this way, they’re helping to rebuild a country.

Ben Stiller is getting some of the biggest names in contemporary art to help Haitian children affected by last year's earthquake. The actor and comedian is partnering with New York art dealer David Zwirner on a benefit auction called "Artists for Haiti." It's scheduled for Sept. 22 at Christie's auction house. Some of the artists who've already donated works include Chuck Close, Paul McCarthy, Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Jeff Koons. Christie's says the proceeds will support nonprofit organizations such as Architecture for Humanity. The artworks will be shown at Zwirner's gallery in early September. Stiller announced the auction Wednesday on the "Today" show. Stiller established the Stiller Foundation in 2010 to help promote the education and well-being of Haitian children. It is rebuilding four earthquake-damaged schools in Haiti.

3/31/2011
Journal Arts
By Bill Van Siclen
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This untitled artwork by Prospere Pierre-Louis is from the Iowa-based Waterloo Center for the Arts collection. Don’t let the stuffy- sounding title fool you. “Reframing Haiti: Art, History and Performativity,” a vibrant celebration of Haitian art and culture co-organized by Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Iowa-based Waterloo Center for the Arts, is more than just a chance to trot out some fancy academic buzzwords. Indeed, the show, which opened last week at several locations around College Hill, is one of the most straightforwardly engaging, even joyous exhibits you’re ever likely to see. Partly, that’s a matter of context. For many Americans, Haiti is Paradise Lost with palm trees — a country whose proud history (it was the site of the New World’s first successful slave rebellion) and stunning natural beauty have been overwhelmed by an ongoing series of disasters, both natural and manmade. That, of course, includes the deadly earthquake that struck near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince last year, killing an estimated 300,000 people and leaving more than one million homeless.
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Yet the show, which includes works by some of Haiti’s best known contemporary artists, paints a very different portrait of the country than the one most of us are used to seeing. Rather than a poster child for disaster and dysfunction, this Haiti hums with energy and variety. It’s a place where the rituals of daily life take place against lush tropical forests, where historical figures such as the revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture are still venerated and where mystical visions featuring everything from Catholic saints to flying mermaids are commonplace. At the same time, this is not a show for the faint of heart (or at least the tender of foot). While most of the exhibit venues are within easy walking distance of each other, only one — the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology annex in Brown’s Manning Hall — is open on weekends. The rest of the sites — the Cogut Center for the Humanities (172 Meeting St.), the George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space (155 Angell St.) and the Perry and Martin Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (154 Angell St.), all on the Brown campus, and the RISD-owned Ewing Multicultural Center (41 Waterman St.) — are generally accessible to the public only on weekdays.
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That’s a shame, especially since one of the highlights of the exhibit — a selection of the sequin-studded “flags” created for Haiti’s voodoo temples — is housed in one of the weekday-only buildings (the Bass Performing Arts Space). Nevertheless, the display is worth seeking out. If one art form can be said to capture the unique blend of earthy exuberance and deep spirituality that permeates Haitian life it’s here, in these colorful works created for voodoo religious ceremonies. Contrary to the zombie-crazed cult popularized by Hollywood, voodoo (or “vodou,” as it’s spelled at Brown) is actually a centuries-old religion that incorporates elements of African and Caribbean nature worship with borrowings from Christian (mainly Roman Catholic) religious traditions. That complex heritage is reflected in the flags, which depict everything from traditional Christian images (a sparkling Virgin and Child, an emerald-caped Saint Patrick) to the Haitian mermaid goddess known as La Sirene. Another must-see site is the Cogut Center, which is hosting a wonderful mini-exhibit devoted to the work of Edouard Duval-Carrie. Considered one of Haiti’s foremost contemporary artists, Duval-Carrie freely blends Haitian artistic traditions with those of the wider international art world.
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One work, the marvelous “Paysage Argente (Silver Landscape),” is especially good — a kind of modern-day Garden of Eden rendered in the unlikely medium of silver glitter on black paper. Other highlights include a selection of paintings depicting scenes from Haitian history (on loan from the Iowa-based Waterloo Center for the Arts and on display on the Cogut Center’s second floor) and a floor-to-ceiling display of contemporary Haitian paintings in Brown’s new Granoff Creative Arts Center.
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Finally, for readers who may be wondering what the word “performativity” means, here’s a definition from the friendly folks at Wikipedia: “Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events.” The entry also includes a warning that it may be “unclear or confusing to readers.” “Reframing Haiti: Art, History and Performativity” runs through April 21 at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Most exhibit venues are open 10-4 weekdays, except for the Haffenreffer Museum, which is open Tues.-Sun. 10-4. For a complete listing of events and exhibits, including artist talks and workshops, visit http:// brown.edu/web/reframing-haiti.

3/28/2011
Huffington Post
By Carine Fabius
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So the thing is that Haiti is a difficult place right now; but "Haitian art" -- as the entire range of styles, genres and artists has often been reduced to -- is thought of by the uninformed as happy, colorful canvases depicting village scenes, landscapes and jungle animals. There is much more, of course; and the contemporary artist's inclination is to make work, which reflects the landscape that is now. Enter the age-old conundrum: should artists allow the "sale" potential of a piece to influence their art? You know, just add a dog in the background, and someone will buy it.
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It's easy enough to say no, no, no. Never let the reality of empty pockets affect your work! That's selling out. You are not a real artist. But how do you know that that whacked out installation you once saw at the Whitney, the one which included fake vomit on the floor, wasn't created with a certain market in mind; the one that would always scorn a figurative work, never mind consider buying a landscape. We'll never know for sure what lies in the artist's psyche; the smart ones won't tell. However, I would venture to guess that most artists just do their thing and worry about whether it sells later.
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Which brings us back to Haiti, and the three artists whose works I will be showing next month (opening on Saturday, April 2nd) at Galerie Lakaye, my Los Angeles gallery of 20 years, which specializes in Haitian art. The artist known as Cheby, a Port-au-Prince-based sculptor currently sojourning in Long Beach, is part of an artist collective known as Atis Rezistans or the artists of the Grand Rue (Main Street). As anyone who knows will tell you, this work is made of recycled debris found in the city's neighborhoods and junkyards. As Anthony Bourdain found when he visited their studios, it does not attempt to present a glossed up version of Haiti. And yet, the small sculptures that the artist brought with him, most no taller than 16" and powdered with yellow, green, red and blue pigment, seem to me like veritable gems. The monotypes and paintings of the artist known as Killy don't make you want to smile -- the artist says he paints only the everyday reality of Haiti -- but they do make you stare. In fact, it's hard to look away. It is strong, evocative stuff, and it takes your breath away. Karl Jean-Guerly Petion's mixed media pieces are patently political but with a whimsical and lyrical quality which moves most people to seek out the artist in order to ask the time-worn question: what were you thinking when you did this?
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At its best, art doesn't seek to satisfy, it tries to inspire. And regardless of whether it moves one to feel joy or sadness, a rippling of energy up the spine, or engenders a dialogue about the likelihood of resulting sales, the most important factor is whether it makes you feel. And judging from the outpouring of support for the people of Haiti, which followed the 2010 earthquake, Haiti inspires deep emotions in people from all over the world. Just ask her artists.
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New Works by Cheby, Killy and Petion opens Saturday, April 2, 2011 at Galerie Lakaye in Hollywood, CA. 7:00-10:00PM. Exhibit runs through May 2nd. 323-460-7333. www.galerielakaye.com.
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The gallery is also launching its Artist Tool Drive on April 2nd. Everyone is asked to bring a tool for artists in Haiti. Old or new, manual or electric, all tools are welcome. They will be put to good use by the artists! Tool collection will continue until November 1, 2011. Sponsors for transportation costs to Haiti are welcome! For more information please visit the galerie Lakaye website.

NOLA.COM
By Linda Dautreuil
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There are few places in the Western Hemisphere where endurance of the human spirit is so rigorously and regularly tested as Haiti. Political upheaval and oppression, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and extreme poverty lead to a constant and unrelenting struggle for survival. The human tragedy cannot be ignored and resonates in Louisiana on many levels. A little research into the time period between 1790 and 1803 refreshes the memory of how Haitian culture entered Louisiana and the role of Haiti in the Louisiana Purchase. The whole is difficult to understand in just a few words, but it is possible to understand some aspects of the culture and character of the people in stories of Haiti seen through the eyes of Louisiana residents whose recollections of Haitian life reveal small details that hint at the complex history and astonishing challenges facing the island country.
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Two women, Jane Brown and Nancy Forrest, share the experience of living in Haiti for many years but at different times in their lives; Jay Conner has traveled there often on a mission after a compelling desire to make a difference, particularly after the 2010 earthquake that left millions homeless and 300,000 people dead; Robert Dutruch was part of a humanitarian medical mission to Haiti immediately after the earthquake and his photographs documenting images of people in the aftermath tell a unique visual story of their own. An exhibition of Dutruch’s photographs will be on display at the St. Tammany Art Association, opening on March 12. These four St. Tammany residents recount personal narratives, family histories, spiritual awakenings, and present images of an enduring will to survive under horrific circumstances. Jane Brown’s story is one of twists and turns, difficult to relate on a purely linear timeline, much like the history of Haiti itself. Her memories are of a time before the Duvaliers, Francois “Papa Doc” and his son, Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” took hold of government.
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Brown’s grandparents lived in Cape Haitian, on the northern end of the island of Haiti which was a more secure area during violent hurricanes. Her father moved to Haiti in 1918 at the age of 9. Brown’s immediate family lived in the capitol, Port-au-Prince, on top of Canape Vert Hill, which overlooked the city and the bay, an idyllic setting, quite different from the images we most often see of Haiti today. The house she lived in was built by her grandfather and father in 1936. It was the home her mother moved into as a young bride in 1937. When her grandfather retired in 1954, the house was sold and eventually it became the Presidential Residence. The fate of her first home was revealed to her when the president of Haiti announced to the world after the earthquake last year that both his palace and his residence were destroyed. According to Brown, “Like the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house constructed of poured concrete that it was, it did not bend.”
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Brown was born in Baton Rouge while her mother was home with her family. Her mother brought her young baby when she returned in 1945 and Jane grew up in Haiti until 1958, when she was 13. Her father worked for the United States Agency for International Development. His job involved traveling with a mobile clinic on a humanitarian mission to cure yaws with the miracle drug, penicillin. The Haitian physician working this detail was “Papa Doc” Duvalier and the political upheaval that would prompt Brown’s family to leave Haiti had not yet begun. The rest of the story opens a window to the relationship that existed at that time between many Haitians and the Americans who lived among them. Brown recalls, “The Haitians who worked for us lived with us and became extensions of our family. They were important to me, and I saw them every day of my young life. It was terribly sad to leave them as the political climate became unstable and it was not safe for us to stay.
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“In the mid-1950s when Dr. Larimer Mellon began looking for a place to build the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, my father recommended the site of our former banana plantation at Deschappelles, where the hospital is still be operating today. There was no monetary gain for our family, since the land had been leased from the Haitian government.” It was common in the 1950s for families to be committed to the welfare of the staff of Haitians working for them. Brown recalls her father’s concern for those who cooked and washed and watched over the children. “My parents trusted them with our lives,” she said. “They were generous people who enjoyed singing, dancing, and made homemade treats to delight us.” Brown was particularly attached to Margie, her Nanny. When Mellon expressed interest in hiring Margie, who was fluent in English, as a translator in the new hospital, Brown was devastated, but her father knew that they would soon have to leave the island. He agreed to ask Margie if she wished to take the position on the condition that Mellon would make provisions for her at the hospital for as long as she lived. Mellon’s agreement was Brown’s only consolation on the journey to Surinam in 1958 as the political climate worsened.
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Brown is an artist today. She recalls the Haiti of her youth as a magical place that influences her watercolors and drawings. Though young while she lived in Haiti, Brown saw many Haitian paintings. She concluded that artists made special things in spite of adversity, sometimes from the most meager material resources. This was art of the spirit. Nancy Forrest lived in Haiti for 18 years, from 1971-1989. Her story is that of a young woman moving to Haiti a year after graduating from Smith College in Massachussetts. She was married to a Haitian, Georges Roumain, whose uncle was a well-known writer and the founder of the communist party in Haiti at the time.
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She spoke French before she arrived, so she quickly became fluent in Creole. She describes it as a “spectacularly expressive” language, a reflection of an exotic culture, both mysterious, and intriguing. Forrest made friends when she moved to Haiti. Many were Haitians, others came from other countries, and many were artists. By this time, Papa Doc had died and Jean-Claude Duvalier was President. Forrest says, “These were good times for foreigners in Haiti because there was no violent crime. However, there were secret police, Tonton Macoute, who lurked about. Everyone was fearful of criticizing Jean-Claude. It was a repressive society, but the lack of violence made possible trips by motorcycle to other parts of the island that were wild and lovely. We went to the beach every weekend, and we visited night clubs to dance the merinque.” Forrest possessed a talent for enterprise and she opened a leather factory, which manufactured leather belts for import to the United States. She loved Haitian art and she put together a small private collection. By late 1989, the political situation had become difficult.
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She sold her share of the leather business and moved to the United States, determined to maintain her close relationship with Haiti by dealing in Haitian-made items. She also designed decorative accessories and developed an extensive line of her own using recycled materials inspired by the Haitian culture. She had a close relationship with a Haitian art collector who became her business partner, selling one-of-a-kind Haitian art to galleries and museums. She knew many of the artists personally since she traveled to Haiti extensively over the years and she wished to help them to find buyers since they had no other source of income in a terribly impoverished country. After leaving the business for awhile, the earthquake prompted Forrest to make a change. She re-established her connections with her friends and colleagues in Haiti, and she dedicated a portion of her profits on each sale she made to a volunteer non-profit organization that had been serving the people of Haiti for 11 years in the most basic ways, providing clean water among other life sustaining essentials. At this point, Nancy Forrest’s story intersects with that of Jay Connor, a man who felt a calling to help the Haitian people.
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In the weeks leading up to an exhibition at the St. Tammany Art Association of photographs from Haiti by Robert Dutruch, (March 12 - April 2, 2011) and a collection of paintings, sculptures, and fiber art assembled by Nancy Forrest of Oh-La-La!, this column will continue with recollections from Jay Conner, Robert Dutruch, and the humanitarian efforts which intersect with the cultural arts of Louisiana and Haiti.

NOLA.COM
By Linda Dautreuil
.
There are few places in the Western Hemisphere where endurance of the human spirit is so rigorously and regularly tested as Haiti. Political upheaval and oppression, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and extreme poverty lead to a constant and unrelenting struggle for survival. The human tragedy cannot be ignored and resonates in Louisiana on many levels. A little research into the time period between 1790 and 1803 refreshes the memory of how Haitian culture entered Louisiana and the role of Haiti in the Louisiana Purchase. The whole is difficult to understand in just a few words, but it is possible to understand some aspects of the culture and character of the people in stories of Haiti seen through the eyes of Louisiana residents whose recollections of Haitian life reveal small details that hint at the complex history and astonishing challenges facing the island country.
.
Two women, Jane Brown and Nancy Forrest, share the experience of living in Haiti for many years but at different times in their lives; Jay Conner has traveled there often on a mission after a compelling desire to make a difference, particularly after the 2010 earthquake that left millions homeless and 300,000 people dead; Robert Dutruch was part of a humanitarian medical mission to Haiti immediately after the earthquake and his photographs documenting images of people in the aftermath tell a unique visual story of their own. An exhibition of Dutruch’s photographs will be on display at the St. Tammany Art Association, opening on March 12. These four St. Tammany residents recount personal narratives, family histories, spiritual awakenings, and present images of an enduring will to survive under horrific circumstances. Jane Brown’s story is one of twists and turns, difficult to relate on a purely linear timeline, much like the history of Haiti itself. Her memories are of a time before the Duvaliers, Francois “Papa Doc” and his son, Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” took hold of government.
.
Brown’s grandparents lived in Cape Haitian, on the northern end of the island of Haiti which was a more secure area during violent hurricanes. Her father moved to Haiti in 1918 at the age of 9. Brown’s immediate family lived in the capitol, Port-au-Prince, on top of Canape Vert Hill, which overlooked the city and the bay, an idyllic setting, quite different from the images we most often see of Haiti today. The house she lived in was built by her grandfather and father in 1936. It was the home her mother moved into as a young bride in 1937. When her grandfather retired in 1954, the house was sold and eventually it became the Presidential Residence. The fate of her first home was revealed to her when the president of Haiti announced to the world after the earthquake last year that both his palace and his residence were destroyed. According to Brown, “Like the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house constructed of poured concrete that it was, it did not bend.”
.
Brown was born in Baton Rouge while her mother was home with her family. Her mother brought her young baby when she returned in 1945 and Jane grew up in Haiti until 1958, when she was 13. Her father worked for the United States Agency for International Development. His job involved traveling with a mobile clinic on a humanitarian mission to cure yaws with the miracle drug, penicillin. The Haitian physician working this detail was “Papa Doc” Duvalier and the political upheaval that would prompt Brown’s family to leave Haiti had not yet begun. The rest of the story opens a window to the relationship that existed at that time between many Haitians and the Americans who lived among them. Brown recalls, “The Haitians who worked for us lived with us and became extensions of our family. They were important to me, and I saw them every day of my young life. It was terribly sad to leave them as the political climate became unstable and it was not safe for us to stay.
.
“In the mid-1950s when Dr. Larimer Mellon began looking for a place to build the Albert Schweitzer Hospital, my father recommended the site of our former banana plantation at Deschappelles, where the hospital is still be operating today. There was no monetary gain for our family, since the land had been leased from the Haitian government.” It was common in the 1950s for families to be committed to the welfare of the staff of Haitians working for them. Brown recalls her father’s concern for those who cooked and washed and watched over the children. “My parents trusted them with our lives,” she said. “They were generous people who enjoyed singing, dancing, and made homemade treats to delight us.” Brown was particularly attached to Margie, her Nanny. When Mellon expressed interest in hiring Margie, who was fluent in English, as a translator in the new hospital, Brown was devastated, but her father knew that they would soon have to leave the island. He agreed to ask Margie if she wished to take the position on the condition that Mellon would make provisions for her at the hospital for as long as she lived. Mellon’s agreement was Brown’s only consolation on the journey to Surinam in 1958 as the political climate worsened.
.
Brown is an artist today. She recalls the Haiti of her youth as a magical place that influences her watercolors and drawings. Though young while she lived in Haiti, Brown saw many Haitian paintings. She concluded that artists made special things in spite of adversity, sometimes from the most meager material resources. This was art of the spirit. Nancy Forrest lived in Haiti for 18 years, from 1971-1989. Her story is that of a young woman moving to Haiti a year after graduating from Smith College in Massachussetts. She was married to a Haitian, Georges Roumain, whose uncle was a well-known writer and the founder of the communist party in Haiti at the time.
.
She spoke French before she arrived, so she quickly became fluent in Creole. She describes it as a “spectacularly expressive” language, a reflection of an exotic culture, both mysterious, and intriguing. Forrest made friends when she moved to Haiti. Many were Haitians, others came from other countries, and many were artists. By this time, Papa Doc had died and Jean-Claude Duvalier was President. Forrest says, “These were good times for foreigners in Haiti because there was no violent crime. However, there were secret police, Tonton Macoute, who lurked about. Everyone was fearful of criticizing Jean-Claude. It was a repressive society, but the lack of violence made possible trips by motorcycle to other parts of the island that were wild and lovely. We went to the beach every weekend, and we visited night clubs to dance the merinque.” Forrest possessed a talent for enterprise and she opened a leather factory, which manufactured leather belts for import to the United States. She loved Haitian art and she put together a small private collection. By late 1989, the political situation had become difficult.
.
She sold her share of the leather business and moved to the United States, determined to maintain her close relationship with Haiti by dealing in Haitian-made items. She also designed decorative accessories and developed an extensive line of her own using recycled materials inspired by the Haitian culture. She had a close relationship with a Haitian art collector who became her business partner, selling one-of-a-kind Haitian art to galleries and museums. She knew many of the artists personally since she traveled to Haiti extensively over the years and she wished to help them to find buyers since they had no other source of income in a terribly impoverished country. After leaving the business for awhile, the earthquake prompted Forrest to make a change. She re-established her connections with her friends and colleagues in Haiti, and she dedicated a portion of her profits on each sale she made to a volunteer non-profit organization that had been serving the people of Haiti for 11 years in the most basic ways, providing clean water among other life sustaining essentials. At this point, Nancy Forrest’s story intersects with that of Jay Connor, a man who felt a calling to help the Haitian people.
.
In the weeks leading up to an exhibition at the St. Tammany Art Association of photographs from Haiti by Robert Dutruch, (March 12 - April 2, 2011) and a collection of paintings, sculptures, and fiber art assembled by Nancy Forrest of Oh-La-La!, this column will continue with recollections from Jay Conner, Robert Dutruch, and the humanitarian efforts which intersect with the cultural arts of Louisiana and Haiti.

New York Times
Port-au-Prince Journal
By DAMIEN CAVE
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Colorful and sad, beautiful but cracked, the three remaining murals of the Episcopal Trinity Cathedral received the soft afternoon sun after last year’s earthquake only because the rest of the church had collapsed. Haitians walking by looked heartbroken. All 14 murals had been internationally treasured. Painted in the early 1950s during an artistic renaissance here, they depicted biblical scenes from a proud, local point of view: with Jesus carrying a Haitian flag as he ascended to heaven; and a last supper that, unlike some famous depictions, does not portray Judas with darker skin than the other disciples. “All of this was painted from a Haitian perspective,” said the Rev. David César, the church’s main priest and its music school director. He marveled at the image miraculously still standing: Judas, with the white beard and wavy white hair often assigned to God himself. It was his favorite mural, he said, and now, it is being saved. In a partnership between the Episcopal Church and the Smithsonian, all three surviving murals are being stabilized and carefully taken to a climate-controlled warehouse in Haiti where they will be protected until they can be redisplayed in a new home.
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The painstaking 18-month project began in the fall, with conservators analyzing how the paintings were bound to the walls (weak mortar) and the materials that were used to paint them (egg tempera). It was clear that they were fragile. A portion of one painting near the former altar faded to abstraction during the rainy season. The other collapsed murals seemed to disappear. Perhaps portions were pulverized by the earthquake; perhaps some were stolen. But when conservators and Haitian art students separated the fragments from the rubble, they found only tiny pieces, usually the size of a hand or smaller, that could not be reassembled. “We have only about 10 percent of the 11 murals that fell,” said Stephanie Hornbeck, the chief conservator with the Smithsonian, whose master’s degree focused on Haitian art. “When you have that little left, there’s nothing you can do.” For the murals still standing, she said experts had higher hopes and immediate plans. For the past several weeks, Haitian workers in what was once the sanctuary have been carefully constructing scaffolding. A web of wooden beams now holds up tin and vinyl to protect the paintings, supporting both the art and the workers trying to carefully chisel it away. Simply hearing hammers and seeing scaffolding — what smiles they bring here in a city where reconstruction is practically non-existent. No less soothing is the classical music — the high wail of trumpets, the smooth pull of violins — that frequently comes from behind the church, where Mr. César teaches outside. He is one of the many in Haiti who learned his first bars of music at the church’s music school. “My whole identity is here,” he said, and on this campus at least, reconstruction means more than architecture: a full artistic life is also being rebuilt.
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The effort to save the murals is a visible extension of a little-known cross-border bond. The Episcopal Church of Haiti was founded by an African-American named James Theodore Holly, who led about 2,000 black Americans to Haiti in 1861 as part of a wider emigration movement. He and his sons played prominent roles as professionals and scholars after founding “what was actually Haiti’s first national church, and the first Episcopal church founded outside of the Anglophone world,” said Laurent Dubois, a historian at Duke University. The eight muralists, while Haitian from their toes to the tips of their paintbrushes, also had American ties. Many trained at an academy founded by an American artist, DeWitt Peters, who came to Haiti in 1943. Credit for the work, though, must also be shared by the Haitian bishops and priests who “gave them the liberty they needed,” said Mr. César. Some of the unconventional images would later become controversial for Christians who saw links to voodoo, but for many Haitians and art historians, they represented one of this country’s proudest cultural moments.
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The earthquake ruined much of that. Only The Last Supper, Native Procession and The Baptism of Christ survived — and each work bears the wounds of the vicious tremor that killed 300,000 people. The paintings’ winding cracks, running through legs, through torsos, and through the neck of a dark-skinned woman in the baptism scene who seems to be screaming, are violent and painful. Ms. Hornbeck said that conservators and the church are still discussing which damaged elements must be fixed. But Mr. César, standing near the church’s former entrance, said he had little doubt about whether the paintings would be fully restored, or left how they appeared after the quake. He said that instead of rebuilding the church, religious leaders are planning to create a garden for the murals, in which they can reside in nature, earthquake scars and all. He said it was the only way to remember, the only way to move on. “We have to live with it,” he said, staring at the roofless sanctuary and piles of rubble. “We have to learn how to live with it.”

Episcopal News Service
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
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Work being done now to remove the three remaining murals from the earthquake-damaged walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is aimed at seeing those works of art return to the site one day. But the work between now and that point is painstakingly complex. Rosa Lowinger and Viviana Dominguez, two art conservators working under the auspices of the of Smithsonian Institution and the Haitian Cultural Recovery Project, told Episcopal News Service by phone Feb. 15 that the work is what is known in their trade as "extreme conservation." Lowinger jokingly called it "the Hail Mary pass of conservation." Lowinger, who specializes in sculpture and architecture conservation and has experience of removing mosaic and terrazzo murals from stone, said that while she and Dominguez often work on complicated conservation projects, the cathedral work is different because the artwork "is in such a fragile state of disrepair [because of the earthquake and located] in a country where it's so hard to get materials." Current plans call for the present cathedral site to become a memorial with most of the walls that are still standing left in place, albeit with reinforcement. The conserved murals would be re-installed on their original walls. A new cathedral would be built adjacent to the memorial. "It's going to have a power for those murals to go back on their original walls," Lowinger said, adding that planners are "going to have to figure out how to protect those murals because the original walls are presently outdoors and the paintings were designed to be indoors."
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Dominguez, a paintings conservator with many years of experience working on murals, noted that conservators "say that we conserve the integrity of the piece and that means that one works on the material itself, but also one preserves the history of the piece. The earthquake is also part of the history of the piece itself, so the fact that it is going to go to the same site where it was makes sense." The 14 murals paintings, completed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, portrayed biblical stories in Haitian motifs and were crafted by some of the best-known Haitian painters of the 20th century. It is said that they gave Haitians of all faiths a vision of their place in the stories of the Bible. The three surviving murals are Philomé Obin's three-walled The Last Supper and Castera Bazile's The Baptism of Christ, both in what was the north transept, and, in the south transept, Préfète Duffaut's Nativity Procession (others have referred to this mural as depicting a Corpus Christi procession). Obin is considered to be the most important Haitian artist of all time, according to Lowinger. While some have referred to the murals as folk art, Lowinger said that "to call it folk art somehow belittles" the artists' work because the work is "done in a vernacular style that is local in imagery. These are sophisticated renderings."
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The three walls with Obin's murals were structurally unstable after the quake, large fissures are present across the murals and sections are vulnerable to collapse, according to a summary of the work of the cultural recovery project. While the Obin and Bazile murals are somewhat sheltered by the remains of the cathedral, the Duffaut mural was completely exposed after the roof above it collapsed. Dominguez and Lowinger lead a team of young Haitian artists who in January began removing the murals from the cathedral's remaining unstable walls. They expect this part of the work will take three months. They began the project in July and predicted it will be eight to 10 months before the mural fragments are in a state where they can be stored until it is possible to display them again. The Haitian artists working with the conservators range in age from 22 to 32. One is a student and two are professionals who are "very prolific artists," according to Dominguez. They were chosen from among those who participated in introductory art conservation workshops held in Port-au-Prince, and Dominguez said they are working as artists respecting the work of their peers. Training is part of their job on the site. "As artists, they are excited by process and they are very clearly engaged in what they're doing -- the new methodologies that they're learning, the tools," Lowinger said. "You can see the wheel turning as they work." The Nativity Procession mural was been removed from its wall and work is underway to do the same with the other two murals, the conservators said. "Usually we are against removing things from the original site unless the original site puts the piece in real danger, which is the case" at the cathedral because of its exposure to the elements, Dominguez said.
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Holy Trinity was established in Port-au-Prince on Pentecost, May 25, 1863. Its church building has since been destroyed six times, often by fire and once by an earthquake in the 1920s. The current building was, as Lowinger characterized it, a "limestone rubble wall set in mortar with cinder-block corners," which is a typical, regional vernacular style of architecture from the Caribbean. She said she’d seen older versions of this style from the 18th and 19th centuries in southern Cuba in which bricks were used to reinforce the corners because cinder blocks were not yet invented. The cathedral is still operating on the site, albeit without walls, in what Episcopal Diocese of Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin calls the "open-air cathedral." A structure to shelter worshippers, once made of plastic tarping over lumber supports, now has a more solid roof. On weekdays, the cathedral ruins echo with the sounds of Holy Trinity Music School students taking classes under and around the shelter. The work to preserve the surviving murals began soon after the quake when Haitian architect Patrick Vilaire led a group that built temporary wooden scaffolding to shore up the walls and roof of the transept area with the Obin and Bazile murals, and placed a plastic tarp over the Duffaut mural.
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That work was followed with more substantial scaffolding in the transept containing the Obin and Bazile works, as well as platforms for conservators to use. Lowinger and Dominguez began their work in mid-July by visiting the site and developing a plan to stabilize the murals, clean their surfaces, remove, consolidate and repair them, according to the project summary. Each mural was photographed so that conservators could see how the fragments fit together. They also are using full-size drawings and small ones with a grid system to aid in the murals' eventual reassembly. Carpenters built wooden frames to hold the fragments, and filled them with cushioning foam. The murals' surfaces were dry cleaned and a liquid was applied to fix the egg tempura pigment to the surface, according to the summary. A facing material similar to cheesecloth was applied to the murals to hold them together, and the fragments were removed with the artists working along existing cracks but sometimes having to cut the murals. Often the artists are using tools especially designed for the project. Because the mortar on which the mural was painted is very crumbly, the back of the fragments must be repaired before the facing can be removed. If the facing is not removed before the fragments are stored, mold will grow on the fragments, Lowinger explained.
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The Duffaut mural was taken down first, they said, because it was the smallest of the three and "seemed to be the most easily removed," according to Lowinger. The other two are much taller and might require the workers to modify their scaffolding in order to remove the fragments from the wall, Dominguez said. On other sites, Lowinger said, conservators can "routinely stop what we're doing and go to the Home Depot" to buy material or equipment. "The thing about this one that makes it so difficult is that we have to 'pre-think' everything before we get there and bring everything with us on the plane," she said. "If we want to make a modification [on site in Port-au-Prince], we have to really get creative about how to make that modification because we're just not going to find what we need there." In a country with so many needs even before the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, some have questioned the decision to spend so much money on art conservation. On their first visit to the site, Lowinger said, she and Dominguez "asked that very same question" of Magdalena Carmelita Douby, one of the architects working on the project. "She was unequivocal about it. She said 'We have lost everything except our culture. We have to protect what is left.'"
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Dominguez said "culture is the people's identity and they treasure that … museums and galleries and art institutions exist because people want to save their history and their culture." The Smithsonian Haiti Cultural Recovery Project is being conducted in partnership with the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities with assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, the Hillman Foundation, the Haitian FOKAL foundation, UNESCO, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, and the Broadway League. The project operates out of a 7,500-square-foot, three-story air-conditioned building that once housed the United Nations Development Programme in Bourdon in the hills above Port-au-Prince. It is a place where objects retrieved from the rubble can be assessed, conserved and stored.
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-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service.

By Beverly Bell
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“Everyone expects there to be a new problem daily in Haiti. I can’t concentrate on problems each day,” said Roseanne Auguste, coordinator of a youth art program in the sprawling, under-resourced Port-au-Prince section of Carrefour-Feuilles. The program is run through the community clinic Association for the Promotion of Family Integrated Health (APROSIFA). Roseanne swept her hand across hundreds of paintings and drawings waiting to be packed up for an upcoming art show. “And people come and say Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I hate to hear that. There’s so much richness in this country.” Roseanne, who is director of APROSIFA as well as a nurse and community organizer, held up one painting. It featured two hands nurturing a brilliantly colored women’s head; the hands seemed to be helping the woman open her mouth. “They’re envisioning all this despite the earthquake,” Roseanne said. “These kids hear about violence every day,” Roseanne said. “We have to concentrate on what another country could be. That’s what interests me. If we had cultural centers in each shantytown, imagine what we could do. Culture and citizenship… if youth came and talked about this every day, found different ways to express their views on the matters, we could have a different country.”
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“Other countries want to control us, giving us a little money for elections, a little money for development, while keeping the country as it is. But if we really had the chance to do for ourselves, if we had the means, you’d see what we could do.” APROSIFA’s youth art program began in 2009 in a couple of cement-block rooms in the back of the clinic. A few professional artists donated their time to teach. Today, 68 youth from ages 8 to early 20s are painting and sculpting. A few of the youth who began learning two years ago are now teaching the others. The artwork represents the daily stuff of Haitian life, like forms of labor, scenes inside village huts, vodou imagery, and landscapes. The work also feature historical heroes, maps of Haiti, and Escher-like clocks ticking away the country’s past.When the young painters have canvas and paints, the images are bold, the colors brilliant. Often they have only sheets of typing paper and a pencil or a Bic pen. APROSIFA raises money to subsidize the supplies. “We give them string to fish with,” Roseanne said. In late January, APROSIFA sponsored the Haitian Renaissance show at a hotel in downtown Port-au-Prince. On opening night, hundreds of people – journalists, artists, advocates for women, dignitaries, and especially youth from Carrefour-Feuilles - squeezed into several rooms whose walls were covered with art. The theme of the art was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979 and took effect in 1981. Haiti ratified the convention in 1981 (unlike the U.S., which never has), though it has never been applied. Roseanne had given copies of the document to the young artists and had asked them to express their opinions creatively.
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One youth whose work was featured is 22-year-old Islande Henry. She spoke in front of one of her paintings, of two women talking in front of their home, inspired by Article 16 of CEDAW which protects women and children’s rights in family relations. Islande said, “To me, CEDAW is a beautiful thing. It speaks to the restavèk [child slavery] system and how those kids have no rights. It speaks to violence against women, and how women are mistreated in society, and how there are so many things they can’t do from serving in Parliament to playing ball. “Our artwork says, ‘No! Women can do anything. Women must have access to everything this society offers.’” Islande said, “I have a lot of capacity and I always knew I could paint, but I didn’t have any support. You know, sometimes your family can’t really step up and help with resources. But I found APROSIFA in 1999. I feel proud as a woman to sit with a canvas, with all my pride, and create paintings. We young artists come with our imagination, our inspiration, our understandings. We can paint anything.” “What I’ve gotten from APROSIFA, I want to pass along to other youth so this country can have another future.” When asked what her hope is, Islande replied, “My hope is that I can be a great painter so the entire world can know my work and can know that Haitians need solidarity, unity, patience, love, and peace. I have a lot of hope for that.”
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*Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy
Studies*.

By MICHAEL BONESTEEL
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The great Haitian Old Masters are gone, but are not forgotten. I am speaking of the amazing first generation of Haitian visionary artists: Hector Hyppolite, Andre Pierre, Philome Obin, Joseph Jasmin and Georges Liautaud, among others. Many were voodoo priests who depicted in their lush artwork a mythic, mystical world populated by supernatural beings of both saintly and demonic persuasions. The works of these artist-priests were -- as were the creators themselves -- possessed, literally, by the spirits of their religion. Thus many of their paintings, sculptures and other works may truly be termed "religious art." Although you won't find any of those elder artists the in "Art Works from Ridge Art," a modest display of 15 objects on view at the Oak Park Village Hall, second generation Haitian master Murat Brierre and third generation artist Damien Paul, both deceased, have several steel drum pieces in the show.
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Most of the other artists exhibiting hanging sculptures made from industrial steel drums, sequined flags, carved wood masks and one painting are contemporary practitioners. Laurie Beasley, who closed her 12-year-old Oak Park gallery in August, represents all of them. She now operates Ridge Art on-line at www.ridgeart.com. "There is only one painting [by Roger Francios] because that's all I had room for," explained Beasley. "Most people are unaware that many of the painters began in another medium. François is a good example. He began as a mask carver and then became a painter." Beasley has been making trips to Haiti, sometimes two or three times a year, since 1996. "I'm still in contact with the same artists, although some have died, not necessarily because of the earthquake," she added. The disasters that have befallen the general Haitian population in the past year also have taken their toll on the arts community. The destruction of historic art housed in the Centre d'Art at Port-au-Prince was certainly tragic, but Beasley pointed out that probably the greatest loss was the murals at Holy Trinity Church by likes of Obin, Wilson Bigaud, Caster Bazile and Rigaud Benoit.
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"The artists in Haiti are struggling like everyone else, some more affected by the crisis than others," she said. "For example, the metal sculptors in Croix-des-Bouquets are almost unaffected by the earthquake. But the Artists of the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince who call themselves Artistes de Resistance lost everything, including comrades. "However, foreign supporters are helping by arranging shows for them abroad. The artists in Jacmel, a small colonial city on the other side of the island from Port-au-Prince, who are grouped around the Foundation d'Art Jacmel, lost their director and their building and are really struggling, but are producing work. The problem most face is selling the work because relief workers don't buy art."
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Camille Wilson White, executive director of the Oak Park Area Arts Council, said that is this show latest in an annual tradition at the Village Hall. "Every year we feature an African American artist to exhibit and have a reception with the West Town Chapter of the LINKS [an African American women's organization]," recalled White. "We thought it would be really nice to ask Laurie Beasley to exhibit since it is the one-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. We saw it as a wonderful way to showcase the art that she has brought back from Haiti over the years."
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Oak Park Village Hall, 123 Madison St. 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday. A reception will be held 6:30-8 p.m. Feb. 18. Call (708) 358-5693; www.OakParkAreaArtsCouncil.org.

1/10/2011
Miami Herald
BY AUDRA D.S. BURCH
aburch@MiamiHerald.com
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The walls of Little Haiti speak. They mourn the souls lost in last year's earthquake. They celebrate the cultural resilience and spirit of a wounded homeland. A mural has emerged on the outside of an otherwise nondescript building at Northeast Second Avenue and 79th Street, its images juxtaposing the first anniversary of Haiti's devastating earthquake with the island nation's vibrant history. Pedestrians stare. Drivers brake. And artist Serge Toussaint, standing atop a 25-foot ladder, paints tears. ``We needed a way to express all the hurt and loss that the earthquake brought so that anyone who ever passes here never, ever forgets,'' says Toussaint, who was born in Carrefour, Haiti and has lived in Miami since 1994. ``I painted tears on the faces of Haiti's three biggest freedom fighters who gave their lives for our country. The tears show they are not happy with the troubles the country has had and with all of the lives lost in the earthquake.'' For the last week, Toussaint, other artists and some students have labored over the mural, in shifts up to 14 hours a day, painting an elaborate, vivid narrative about the promise and despair of Haiti. In one scene, a woman celebrates Carnival. In another, Haitian students attend Sunday school. Haitian leaders Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines are depicted with tears streaming down their faces.
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That tragic afternoon last Jan. 12 is marked by images of cracks in the earth, God's hand reaching down, a group of survivors pleading for help and a little boy in an arm sling -- inspired by a real-life photograph. The images are bound by waves, painted in the red and blue hues of the Haitian flag. To commemorate the first anniversary, the mural will be unveiled and a candlelight ceremony Wednesday in a lot behind the building at 7925 NE Second Ave. The Haiti Earthquake Remembrance program begins at 5:30 p.m. The 5,000-square-foot mural, wrapping around a corner between a food market and a shoe-repair shop, is a project of the Little Haiti Optimist Club and the MLK Community Mural Project, a national collaboration of artists and students which has produced more than 100 murals across the country. The organization has also created a mural at a hospital in Haiti. The Optimist Club, a nonprofit founded last April by a group of civic, community and business leaders, works with Little Haiti youth through education, cultural and sports programs.
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``We were looking for a way to make a difference and we decided the best way was to help the children and families,'' said Marie Louissaint, the group's president. ``For the anniversary, we wanted to remember all the victims and survivors of the earthquake. A statue would have been too expensive so we went with a mural that would capture Haiti's past, present and future.'' The artists painted their first strokes of color on Jan. 3, slowed last week only by time, creativity and a winter rain shower. They will paint by spotlight until the earliest hours of Tuesday to finish. Nearly 50 gallons of primer and paint, as well as other supplies, were donated by the Miami Dolphins. The owner of the building, Ron Volk, donated the space for the mural. Many of Little Haiti's walls and storefronts serve as the canvas of expressive street art, but this mural is different, its reach wider, its mission broader. The artists see the mural as an enduring gift to the community. ``What was most important was to make sure we captured the spirit of the people,'' artist Kevin Morris said. ``We wanted to make sure there were also happy cultural scenes, historical figures -- and lots of color to make it pop.''

http://www.france24.com/en/20110112-haiti-artists-culture-en

12/19/2010
By Trenton Daniel
The Miami Herald
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For 10 years, Edme Herold has used the holidays and a skilled hand to fill his pockets with cash -- a few gourdes here, a few gourdes there. His colorful handiwork: fanals, which are miniature, lantern-like homes that are part of Haiti's Christmas tradition. A candle placed inside illuminates the fragile craft and creates a stained-glass effect. The size of either a shoe box or as small as a camera, fanals are often placed in windows to light the way. ``I make them because I can earn a little more money,'' said Herold, 32, a mason the rest of year. ``It's not much, but it's something.'' The fanals -- a centuries-old Christmastime tradition some say originated in West Africa and others say was used to light worshipers' way to church -- come with a small irony this first Christmas since Haiti's devastating earthquake last January.
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The little tissue-paper houses are still standing while many Haitians' homes are in rubble. Herold crafts these items to brighten up a holiday home yet lives under a tarp this year. ``They are a sign that Christmas is coming,'' Lori Manuel Steed, a Haitian artist and art promoter, said about the first sight of fanals on the streets. ``Amid the violence and anger, there is a softness.'' Many fanals emulate Haiti's yesteryear -- chiefly, the gingerbread homes, an architectural style prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which largely survived the 7.0-magnitude quake. Some feel little joy this holiday because of the disaster that claimed up to 300,000 lives, a subsequent cholera outbreak, and a volatile presidential election. But there are small signs the season won't go ignored. Restaurant workers don Santa hats. A nurse in a neo-natal ward pastes stickers on the beds of newborns. They read: ``Joyeux Noel.'' Making fanals -- long the domain of children -- is a distinctly Haitian tradition, like eating pumpkin soup on New Year's Eve.
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Finely crafted fanals have received recognition in exhibits in Port-au-Prince museums and even the Miami-Dade Public Library, which held a fanals exposition in 2004, the year of Haiti's bicentennial. Come October or November, Edme Herold heads to the store. He purchases his supplies: tissue paper and cardboard. Sliced pieces of colorful tissue paper are used to create the stained glass-like windows. ``Vive Noel'' is cut on the front facade of the churches. The more elaborate ones come with stairwells and balconies. Herold's bigger, more intricate fanals can take up to two days to make, he said. They sell for about 1,000 gourdes, or $25, though there's room for negotiation. The smaller churches and houses sell for about $6. Once they're built, Herold displays the fanals on a wire from his coveted spot on the side of Route de Bourdon, a busy thoroughfare that connects downtown Port-au-Prince to the relatively upscale suburb of Pétionville. It's where many of the other artisans gather, along with merchants of traditional paintings and iron work.
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Herold said they sell here because of the ``tourists'' that pass by. The Montana, a sprawling hotel known for its mahogany furniture and patio overlooking Port-au-Prince, used to be on a nearby side road but it pancaked in the earthquake. Today, most of the ``tourists'' are relief workers and members of the Haitian diaspora who've come to help or visit family. Herold said he has earned as much as 20,000 gourdes, or about $500, in years past, but business has been slow this year. So far he has had only 10 buyers. ``Life is expensive, and the country's in a crisis,'' he said as he used a ruler to draw the contour of a new design. Still, Herold holds out hope that a ``big shot,'' a ``tourist,'' or a member of Haiti's monied class will stop and hand over a few gourdes -- he'll also take dollars -- for a miniature house or church. ``I have hope that I can sell,'' Herold said. ``I need this hope that I will sell.''

Maine Today
By Emma Bouthillette
ebouthillette@mainetoday.com
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PORTLAND - The holiday season is bustling with weekend craft fairs, but one art sale Saturday served a special purpose. Erica Burkhart and Matiss Duhon, both of Portland, look over oil drum art pieces made The Konbit Sante Art Sale had three goals -- raise money for the organization, raise awareness of Haiti's plight and promote the work of Haitian artists. The idea for the art sale was born when Skeek Frazee of South Portland, a member of the Konbit Sante Board of Directors, asked her women friends in the community for help in raising money. "Women see it as a win-win," said Karin Anderson, a principal of the Dala Consulting Group in Portland. In addition to buying art, "You learn through the art and conversations they have (about the art)." Anderson, who volunteered for Saturday's art sale, decided to get involved to get a better understanding of issues that Haitians face today.
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Konbit Sante is a Maine-based volunteer partnership that has been working to save lives and improve health care in northern Haiti for 10 years. The situation became desperate in January when an earthquake struck the island nation, triggering numerous relief efforts. In recent months, however, the nonprofit organization has seen interest in helping the country wane as news coverage of the natural disaster faded, Frazee said. "We have people on the ground down there right now," Frazee said, continuing aid efforts made especially critical in light of the recent cholera outbreak. Two Maine members of Konbit Sante are in Cap-Haitien with a water engineer who has volunteered to work on water quality problems. With 6,300 cases of cholera reported and 260 deaths in the north where Konbit Sante operates, the organization is trying to raise awareness and prevent further spread of the disease. As people filtered into Saturday's art sale, Frazee was handing out yellow flyers with information about the outbreak.
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She was also providing information about the art for sale, which was crafted by Haitians, purchased by Konbit Sante and brought back to Maine to sell and raise funds for the organization. "Haiti is a poor country, but they create art with what they have," she said. The metal pieces resting on tables and hung on the walls of the arts center were crafted from recycled oil drums. Each piece had a unique design featuring intricately detailed figures such as angels, birds, fish, butterflies and mermaids. "Look at this one," one woman said pointing at a piece of two women carrying baskets on their heads. "Oh, I didn't even notice. Look there's a fish on her head. That's so cool." She selected the piece for purchase, musing at all the intricate detail.
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Teresa Valliere of Portland, an area mental health professional, came to the art sale to learn more about the organization and purchase a piece for herself. She said the art reminded her of work she bought during a trip to South Africa. "I love the ingenuity and creativity. Everything can be made into something," she said. Judith Parker, owner of Tavecchia, was inspired by the art. She offered to dedicate a wall in her Exchange Street boutique to sell the art for Konbit Sante. "It's so decorative," she said. "I'd like to do something more to help." Faith Sheehan of Portland, who also volunteered to work at the art sale, was thrilled with the outcome. A number of people not only purchased art, but also offered to volunteer in the future, she said. "It's bringing people in contact (with the organization)," Sheehan said. "This gives people something to do, even if it's something little."
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Staff Writer Emma Bouthillette can be contacted at 791-6325 or at: ebouthillette@pressherald.com

12/6/2010
Associated Press
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Buried alive for four days after January’s devastating earthquake hit Haiti, Kesner “Salvi” Salvent didn’t know whether he would live to walk, see the sun or ride his motorcycle — or pick up his brush to create more colorful paintings showing the landscape and people of his native country. When rescuers retrieved his crumpled body from under a pile of rubble in Port-au-Prince, Salvent had a severe spinal cord injury. Unable to move, he was shuttled from hospital to hospital until he was taken to a U.S. Navy hospital ship, where he underwent surgery. He was then taken to a rehabilitation hospital in Atlanta, but it wasn’t only his legs that needed work. His hands had trouble even holding a fork, let alone a paintbrush. His cervical injury damaged the motor functions in his hands and wrists.
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But he’s back painting now, after months of additional rehabilitation in Maine that has included conventional therapy in a hospital, as well as occupational and physical therapy at a horse farm that has helped strengthen his hands and fingers by carriage driving. Salvent, 26, grew up in Cap-Haitien in northern Haiti and earned money selling his paintings. He moved to Port-au-Prince three years ago, where he worked construction for his daily job while creating his colorful acrylics on the side. But his life took an abrupt turn Jan. 12, when the earthquake struck. He was in downtown Port-au-Prince, where a building tumbled on top of him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see. He could hear movement now and again above him, but when he tried to scream for help, nothing came out. He later came to Maine at the urging of one of his best friends, who is married to a woman from Maine and now lives in Kennebunkport. Salvent is staying with his friend’s wife’s parents. “When he first came here, he had trouble holding utensils, and he couldn’t hold a pen,” said Sue Grant, a physical therapist who has been working with Salvent. Salvent now can offer a firm handshake and has no problem holding things. But his hands’ fine motor skills need work, and his painting isn’t back to where he’d like it to be. Still, he feels the need to paint. At Shepherd Center, Dr. Donald Leslie, the medical director, got Salvent an easel and canvasses so he could paint while undergoing rehab there. The hospital staff fit his hand and wrist with a special brace and made custom attachments for his paintbrushes so he could apply paint to canvas. Today, one of Salvent’s works hangs on Leslie’s office wall showing a beach in Haiti with two boats, blue skies and a palm tree front and center. “He was very passionate about his painting. And he’s talented,” Leslie said in a phone interview from Atlanta.

Associated Press
By JENNIFER KAY
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A young boy reaching toward a glimmer of light took shape as Haitian graffiti artist Jerry Rosembert Moise sprayed paint on the wall of an impoverished neighborhood's youth center. It's the kind of clearly hopeful image Moise developed after a catastrophic earthquake leveled his hometown of Port-au-Prince in January. "I used to do caricatures, but now I try to be more realistic to get more attention for helping the country," Moise said during a break from his painting Thursday night. Moise, who gained international attention for his images after the earthquake, is among the artists taking advantage of the art fair crowds in Miami this week to highlight Haiti's ongoing struggles and raise funds for earthquake victims. Thousands of collectors are in Miami for the annual Art Basel Miami Beach international art fair, and for other contemporary art fairs and museum exhibits. Haitian artists and advocates hope they can gain influence and money for projects to improve the lives of more than 1.5 million people still homeless nearly a year after the earthquake, amid a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 1,900 since October. The Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami scheduled an exhibit of portraits of Miami's Haitian community by fashion photographer Bruce Weber specifically for the Art Basel crowds. Some of the images in "Bruce Weber: Haiti/Little Haiti" were shot in the same streets where Weber has photographed fashion magazine spreads.
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The faces Weber has captured on film in Little Haiti since 2003 show the long-reaching effects of the earthquake and U.S. foreign policy. A young girl detained for six months by U.S. immigration authorities won't smile and fixes her eyes on the ground. A plumber with an intravenous tube running from his nose spreads his scarred hands on his hospital bed to show he can still work. Women cradling small children in their laps crowd shoulder to shoulder in church pews. A young couple in wheelchairs tentatively hold hands. The Haiti Art Expo is selling new paintings by contemporary artist Philippe Dodard, along with artwork by other Haitian artists, to benefit earthquake relief efforts. At its opening Thursday night, Haitian voodoo drumming rivaled a DJ's electronic beats in the next gallery. Meanwhile, outside a downtown hotel, a cluster of large, colorful tents isn't just for show. In the words of Antuan, the artist who organized the Base Paint Tents project with Fundacion Manos del Sur and the Step by Step Foundation, it is a "utilitarian art installation." The 10 heavy-duty tents will become classrooms for children living near the Port-au-Prince airport in a camp managed by Haitian soccer star Bobby Duval. While Haiti desperately needs new housing and schools, reconstruction efforts have stalled with just a trickle of pledged international aid delivered to the Caribbean country. These tents were chosen for their mobility and ability to withstand harsh conditions for years. "We see the reality of almost a year (since the quake) and the rubble is still there," Antuan said. "The tents are going to be there for a long time."
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Duval's brother, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval Carrie, is among the 10 artists who painted the tents. Duval Carrie also organized a separate, two-part show at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, "The Global Caribbean II: Caribbean Trilogy." Along with works by Duval Carrie, Cuban artist Jose Bedia and Dominican artist Jose Garcia Cordero, it includes new textiles commissioned from three Haitian artists after the quake. Jean Joseph Jean-Baptiste stitched Voodoo-inspired fantasies into beaded and sequined flags, while deities emerge from layers of buttons and found objects sewn together by a pair who sign their work as Kongo Laroze. Duval Carrie said he commissioned textiles instead of paintings because textile artists will employ more earthquake survivors. "They're like ateliers. They have 15 families working for them," Duval Carrie said. None of the textile artists could secure a visa to travel to Miami for the exhibit's opening Friday. Ira Lowenthal of Men Nou Gallery, which represents Jean-Baptiste, blamed U.S. bureaucracy and said he planned to return to Port-au-Prince to argue on the artists' behalf. "The U.S. should be trying to promote what's positive in Haiti, what makes Haiti special and why we should be helping Haiti," Lowenthal said.
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Base Paint Tents: http://www.basepaint.org/
Haiti Art Expo: http://tinyurl.com/25t572y

Philippe Dodard couldn't pick up a paint brush in the month following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Many of his friends perished as a result of the disaster, and he found himself having no reaction when he would get calls about a new death."It’s only when I started painting, all of my emotions that were buried inside started coming out," he said. Dodard, a prominent, internationally recognized Haitian artist who works in Port-au-Prince, is participating in Haiti Art Expo 2010, an event taking place this weekend in Miami, Florida. The collection features works by Dodard and many other Haitian artists, as well as American artists. All of the proceeds from the sales of these works will go toward refugees and artists who have lost their homes because of the earthquake. Dodard sees art as a way of dealing with and healing from catastrophe. He helped create a program for thousands of children called Plas Timoun, meaning "place for the children," which allows kids to express themselves through artistic activities such as painting, music, and theater, in addition to sports and games. The classrooms are converted buses at two locations in Port-au-Prince and serve children ages 6 to 10. "I spend most of my time working with the children so that they recover from the disaster using art," he said. The young artists at Plas Timoun have some of their work displayed at the Smithsonian African Art Museum in Washington, running through January 16. It has been so successful that it will become a traveling exhibit, Dodard said.
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Dodard completed the painting above, called "Inner Force," before the earthquake, but its message is highly relevant: finding one's "inner force" - the power or strength that we have inside - that helps us develop spiritually, emotionally and physically, he said. "After the earthquake, there was so much problems, so much to carry, and still keep on living and still keep on doing your work. And without that force, I don’t believe that I could do all that I’ve done this year," he said. The work blends spiritual references from Japanese, Haitian, and Indian cultures, and includes Dodard's interests in the traditions of samurai and yoga. The color red represents the spirit of fire, Dodard said, and the texture of the painting gives a "feeling of something vibrating," he said, "the silent vibration of the drum." He tried to capture something magical that goes beyond the shapes themselves, he said. "It’s a kind of communication between the form and my inner self," he said. Haiti Art Expo 2010 opens at 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Miami's Mosaic Building, and is hosted by Venus Williams (tennis superstar), Andrea Berto (Haitian-born World Welterweight championship boxer), Fabrice and Patrick Tardieu (of the clothing line Bogosse) and Jerry Powers (of PlumTV). It was produced and organized by Michael Capponi and Jeff Feldman, who have both been active in helping relief efforts in Haiti.

By Keith Lane
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http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2010/1013/Art-lifts-hope-in-Haiti?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+feeds%2Fworld+%28Christian+Science+Monitor+|+World%29
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Nine months after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti’s capital, physical and emotional healing is still a long way off. Billions of dollars in promised aid have yet to arrive. But within the art community here, people are beginning to find unity and hope once again. Longstanding community art programs like Port-au-Prince’s Aprosifa (Association for the Promotion of Integral Family Health Care) provide places of respite and healing for youths and adults who use art as therapy. (The charity also provides care for families in need.) In nearby Jacmel, art students of all ages at the nonprofit Fanal Otantik Sant D’A Jakmel (FOSAJ) have joined to create individual and collaborative works in response to the quake. Students at the Ciné Institute, Jacmel’s tuition-free film school, attracted worldwide attention by covering the immediate aftereffects of the Jan. 12 earthquake. They recently relocated to a new campus, and are about to begin their fall semester. Internationally recognized artists of the Grand Rue neighborhood in central Port-au-Prince continue to open their studios and mentor local youths despite the vast devastation there. Students create art from the rubble both to make money and to try to turn tragedy into beauty.

By Greg Allen
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130435784&ft=1&f=2&...
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A new line of handcrafted products made by Haitian artists is the newest addition to the department store Macy's. As Haiti continues its struggle to rebuild from the earthquake, this new collection of home decor is part of an effort to help re-establish Haiti's once-thriving market in art and crafts. As part of Macy's rollout of the "Heart of Haiti" collection in Miami, a troupe of Haitian dancers swooped and twirled to music provided by singers and drums — not the usual sight in the housewares department.
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The "Heart of Haiti" collection, as shown in a display at Macy's in Miami, includes colorful trays, vases and other housewares — all created by Haitian artisans. The Heart of Haiti collection is the result of a collaboration that, along with Macy's, involves groups that work with Haitian artists and the William J. Clinton Foundation. The products were designed, crafted and delivered over the course of just three months — lightning fast in the world of retailing. With the holidays approaching, timing is everything, says Melissa Goff, Macy's vice president of media relations in the Southeast region.
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"Right now is the best time for a product to sell at retail," she says, "because we're going into a heavy gifting period. These are great gifts." Artist Pascale Faublas helped design and paint papier-mache trays, masks and other items in the collection. She also co-founded an association of artisans in Jacmel, a city on Haiti's southern coast that was hit hard by the earthquake. "We are working on rebuilding ourselves first. This action for example here today with Macy's is one step in that sense — to get the artisans back to work," Faublas says.
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At the end of June, Macy's put in an order for 20,000 products. The company says it hopes to break even or make a small profit from selling the items on its website and at 25 stores across the country. Macy's did something else unusual in retailing: It paid cash upfront for the collection, which quickly put money into the hands of the artists. The retailer was helped by two nonprofit organizations, Fair Winds Trading and the BRANDAID Project, which has long worked with Haitian artists.
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Papier-mache artist Pierre Satyr shows off his colorful tray. Before the earthquake hit Haiti, Satyr had his own workshop in the southern city of Jacmel, where he made masks and figures. Fair Winds Trading and Macy's already had success with another project. Over the past five years, with help from the nonprofit, Macy's has sold 85,000 baskets handmade by thousands of women in Rwanda. When the groups approached artists in Haiti, things quickly fell into place. "Haiti is such a deeply creative, wildly creative place," says Willa Shalit, founder and CEO of Fair Winds Trading. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund stepped in with a timely $50,000 grant that rebuilt one of the things artisans like Pierre Satyr badly needed — a place to work. Satyr is a papier-mache artist. Before the earthquake, he had his own workshop, making masks and figures based on Jacmel's Carnival tradition. With help from Fair Winds Trading's designers, he crafted bowls, trays and masks that would appeal to Macy's customers, using only, he says, "my imagination and my experience also and my savoir faire."
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Among the other Haitian artists whose work is featured in the collection is Serge Jolimeau. A star among Haitian artists, Jolimeau is a master metalworker from Croix-des-Bouquets, a town with a metalworking tradition that goes back to the 1930s. Through an interpreter, he told an audience at Macy's in Miami that his process begins with recycled metal drums that are cleaned, flattened, cut and shaped. The results are filigreed bowls, picture frames and wall hangings that draw on nature and religion, including Voodoo. "Speaking of Voodoo," Jolimeau told the audience, "whether you like it or not, if you're Haitian, Voodoo is in your blood." The artists say that if American customers respond, they are hoping to get orders from other U.S. retailers. And they are already working on ideas for a Macy's collection in the spring.

Roughly an hour before the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in January, Frantz Zephirin, one of the country’s best-known painters, was drinking beer at a bar in Port-au-Prince. After a discussion at a nearby table turned into a heated political debate, Zephirin paid his check and left with a friend. Moments later the earth shook. Walls crumbled. Houses collapsed. Sound reverberated around them. “I thought it was a bomb,” he says. After the great shaking had ceased, Zephirin looked and saw that the bar had turned to rubble. Stunned and saddened, he walked to the beach later that night and painted by candlelight. “I saw so many things I can’t explain to people, so much death and devastation,” he says. “I want to paint everything I saw.” Close to nine months after the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 in Haiti, the city of Port-au-Prince is still in ruins. Reconstruction has been slow, and more than a million people remain homeless. Yet the country’s artists—those on the island as well as their counterparts abroad—are using their limited resources to channel the nation’s suffering, hope, and anxiety into new paintings, crafts, and sculptures.
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In the process, they have created a market for post-earthquake Haitian art, particularly in the United States. Recently, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., opened an exhibit of post-earthquake paintings and drawings by Haitian children. In September, Macy’s partnered with Haitian artists on a new line of home-décor handcrafts, Smithsonian magazine commissioned a painting by Zephirin for its cover last month, and the Miami International Airport opened an exhibit featuring works created by Haitian artists in the wake of the disaster. The 4,000-square-foot gallery features voodoo flags made with beads and sequins, intricate metal carvings made from flattened oil drums, and carnival masks made from papier-mâché. “This exhibition is a testament to their optimism,” said Yolanda Sanchez, the airport’s fine-arts director.
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That optimism—long a cornerstone of Haitian art—has helped the country survive its difficult history. More than 200 years ago, Haiti was created in the aftermath of a massive slave uprising against the French. Since then, the nation has suffered a host of indignities: invasion, isolation, and poor self-governance. Yet out of this misery has grown a rich artistic tradition that draws heavily on African, Taíno, voodoo, and Catholic influences. “Haiti doesn’t have car factories. It doesn’t have steel plants,” says Richard Kurin, the undersecretary for history, art, and culture at the Smithsonian. “Culture is one of the few resources Haitians have. Art has become a way for them to preserve their dignity.” Art has also provided a way for Haitians to reckon with tragedy. Since the quake, various relief groups and nongovernmental organizations have set up dozens of art-therapy camps for children and adults in Port-au-Prince and other nearby areas. “We use art as a meditation,” says Mazen Aboulhosn, a psychologist for the International Organization for Migration. “It’s easier to talk about difficulties through…art…than talking directly,” says Patricia Landinez, a psychologist for the United Nations Children’s Fund.
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Those difficulties are evident in Zephirin’s work. In the piece commissioned by the Smithsonian entitled And Haiti Will Bloom Again, the artist paints the island as a dark mass filled with crosses. In the clouds, a watchful eye is crying. Yet there is also a sense of hope; in the center of the painting, large, colorful birds deliver flowers, money, and justice to the island in their beaks. A sense of hope also permeates Eight Days, a children’s book by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat and illustrated by Alix Delinois. Danticat wrote the story to explain to her 5-year-old daughter what happened during the earthquake. Published in September, the book follows a young boy named Junior who spends more than a week beneath the rubble. To quell his fears, Junior imagines the good parts of life on the island: singing loudly in church, playing hide-and-seek with his friends, and catching mouthfuls of rain during a storm. Then, miraculously, he is rescued. Throughout the story, Delinois’s bright, colorful drawings mirror Danticat’s message of hope and resilience. “After a tragedy, we’re always trying to get a sense of who we are,” says Danticat. “Art is proof that we’re alive beyond breathing.” For André Eugène, an artist known for making macabre sculptures from wood, scrap metal, and skulls, the earthquake has given him new inspiration. “I find myself making sculptures of pregnant women,” he says. “I’ve started to create art about giving life.”
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With Nausheen Husain and Tania Barnes in New York

AFP
By Juan Castro Olivera
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MIAMI — Grim pictures of sad faces or houses that are no longer there: Haitian children orphaned by January's devastating quake have focused lenses and taken up paintbrushes to cope with their ordeal. Miami photographer Boris Vazquez is the brains behind the effort, handing art materials to the orphans during a June trip to Haiti to produce art works on display at North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) through Sunday. The images and paintings put a human face to the suffering but also illustrate the energy and aspirations of the killer quake's most helpless survivors.
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Vazquez provided portable cameras and boxes of donated art supplies to about 500 children. Just 37 of the best photographs and nearly 100 paintings were selected for the MOCA exhibition, with the artists ranging from six to 13 years old. "We asked them to paint the Haiti of their dreams," said Ines Lozano, who traveled to the devastated country with other volunteers from the Friends of the Orphans group to teach children in the capital Port-au-Prince the basics of photography and painting. The result is the exhibition "Through the Eyes of a Haitian Child", which reflects the emotions and hopes of those who lost everything, including their parents, in the earthquake that left about 250,000 people dead and over a million homeless.
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"Despite their difficult situation, these are children who show great joy and creativity," said Lozano, who led the mission and is the principal of First Presbyterian International Christian School. "Many of the children were holding a camera for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it," said Vazquez, who taught basic photography. An estimated 300,000 Haitian children lost their parents in the earthquake and were sent to orphanages. Others were forced to live in precarious tent camps exposed to Haiti's tropical storms or to swap school books for pistols as they turned to slum gangs to survive. International groups are struggling to protect young, homeless Haitians, some of whom were illegally adopted, enslaved or captured by local crime gangs after the quake.

By Aimee Kligman
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I reported earlier on a tripartite agreement which took place a couple of days ago as an aside to the UN General Assembly meeting between Secretary of State Clinton, French Minister of Foreign Affairs Kouchner and Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive to rebuild a major hospital in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. The rebuilding and reconstitution of the island nation may take years. In the meantime, those that survived the calamitous January 2010 earthquake are eking out a living. Those that are engaged in national arts and crafts would normally need for tourists to begin arriving to Haiti once again; but the island is neither ready to welcome visitors, nor are visitors inclined to visit.
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Macy's, the "world's largest department store" has found a solution to this conundrum. It is bringing those handicrafts to its stores in the United States which will give them, most likely, more exposure than if a boatload of tourists docked at Port-au-Prince. One on the most attractive art forms from Haiti, and something that I also own, is drum art. You will be probably be able to own your own if you visit the store, or shop online. In anticipation of the Macy's event, which is called “The Heart of Haiti” will bring 20,000 vases, quilts, ceramics, wood carvings, paintings, and jewelry made by 235 of Haiti's most accomplished artists. This is a wonderful way in which the private sector can do its part in helping Haiti recover.
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A friend of mine who lives in Jacmel, considered the artistic center of Haiti, with this wife, has been living there for quite some time and has been employing native Haitian artists in turning out all sorts of beautiful arts and crafts. Moro Baruk, a quintessential designer of Jacmel, has been giving us a preview of some of the masks that his craftswomen have been turning out. There's no end to the creativity. Credit must go to the Canadian Canadian aid agency, Brandaid Foundation, which brought Macy's and the island artists together.
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As for Moro Baruk, credit must go to him for having devised a design for Haiti's artists that could have worldwide appeal and be functional at the same time. It is the face mask, reinvented to not only be exotic but practical. The wearer can have fun and be protected from the equatorial sun, which can be brutal at times.
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As reported in Home Accents Today: Haiti’s culture includes a vast diversity of traditional, handmade products such as hand-tooled serving trays and up-cycled oil drums from the blacksmith community in Croix des Bouquets, the work in papier maché from Carnival Jacmel artists, and a women’s quilting cooperative in Cité Soleil. A selection of these artworks will launch as the exclusive Macy’s “Heart of Haiti” collection, including quilts, metalwork, ceramics, wood-carvings, paintings and jewelry. The items will be available starting in October at 25 Macy's stores, but best of all, on line at macys.com!

Globe and Mail
By Jessica Leeder
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The mask is finally off – and making its way onto shelves. Macy’s, the largest department store chain in the United States, has unveiled itself as the commercial knight in shining armour responsible for giving more than 200 Haitian artisans their first full-time contracts since a historic earthquake rocked Haiti last January. In June, the retail giant quietly began investigating the purchase of a handmade line of home-decor products as a means of aiding Haitian communities affected by the quake, including the world famous metal artists of Croix-des-Bouquets and the papier-mâché masters of Jacmel.
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Within weeks of seeing custom prototypes, Macy’s buyers had reopened their fall buying season to order 20,000 products in 40 categories – the maximum number the country’s still-struggling artisans could produce. Their custom Heart of Haiti line, featuring vases, quilts, ceramics, wood carvings, paintings and jewellery, is now set to roll out in 25 select U.S. stores in October and will then also be available for purchase online. One metal artist in Croix-des-Bouquets, Jacques Rony, called the chance to sell his work at Macy’s and work with U.S.-based product designers “a huge advantage.” He and his apprentices are looking forward to the stability the Macy's relationship will bring, as well as the opportunity to work with U.S. designers who have exposure to seasonal trends. That's hard information to come by from isolated Haiti.
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Although in-store sales have yet to begin, the positive impact of the relationship with Macy’s has been increasingly evident across several artisan communities in Haiti, where 235 handicraft experts have been working for months on the product order – and getting paid. Now, the mere mention of the word “Macy’s” generates instant smiles in several artisan communities, including Jacmel, where the city’s papier-mâché artists now equate the name with the concept of sustained work. “Even in a short time, we’ve heard that parents who were incredibly stressed now have their children’s school fees. Now they can buy shoes. They have money in their pocket. Maybe they’re still living in a tent. But they know they can have some bit of security to craft a life. They know we’re not going away,” said Willa Shalit, the head of Fairwinds Trading, a New York-based company that specializes in connecting gifted artisans in “post-trauma” communities with American corporations to build sustainable economic relationships.
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Fairwinds, in partnership with the Canadian non-profit Brandaid Project was the force responsible for expeditiously opening a channel between Macy’s and artisan communities across Haiti after connecting at a May meeting in New York during which the William J. Clinton Foundation urged American businesses to pitch in on the rebuilding of Haiti’s shattered economy. Ms. Shalit’s company has a history of dealing with Macy’s – Fairwinds brokered a contract with the company five years ago on behalf of Rwandan basket weavers, whose Path to Peace products have been sold in Macy’s stores ever since.
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“The relationship with Macy’s has changed the face of rural Rwanda,” said Ms. Shalit, who recently returned from a visit there. “What you see in the rural villages is homes and communities where [people] have been making a living for five years now. It’s that steady income that makes a change,” she said. “Now they are known as the greatest weavers in the world. That’s what will happen here. They [Haitians] will be known as the greatest metal workers, the greatest papier-mâché artists in the world. They’ll be perceived as valued instead of useless and disrespected.” Already, signs are positive that the relationship will last. Designs for the spring 2011 lineup are already under way. And Macy’s has been impressed early on by the work ethic among their artists in Haiti – in spite of their austere working conditions, they were able to produce prototypes for the company in just three weeks. (The process can take up to one year.)
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“As a company, Macy’s believes very strongly in supporting communities in need – and in developing programs where we can do something together with our customer that is powerful and rewarding for the greater global good,” Terry J. Lundgren, chairman and CEO of Macy’s, Inc., said in a statement. “An effort like this provides great satisfaction to Macy's customers and associates, who care deeply about giving back,” he said. In Haiti, artists are grateful that the company did more than simply pass through.
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“I’ve seen a lot of people come through and do a lot of talking,” said Onel Bazelais, a master papier-mâché artisan who has been working at the craft for about 26 years. To supplement his income he maintains a small art shop in Jacmel’s historic district. Since the earthquake, his family has been living in a series of tents in a yard behind the shop, which doubles as a work space. “My government has no plan for us,” he said during a recent interview. “I want to put my kid through university – I have to do something for my kids.” Working on the Macy’s order has provided him and others much-needed stability. “In Haiti, a lot of people have heard of Macy’s. That makes them feel really proud,” Ms. Shalit said. “That sense of cultural pride, you can’t say enough about what that does for culture and community,” she said.

9/15/2010
The Naitonal
By James Reinl
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Composed with the childlike simplicity that is typical of Hector Hyppolite, the celebrated Haitian artist, the painting Pot de Fleurs was presumed lost under a toppled gallery when an earthquake ripped apart the Caribbean nation. Now, thanks to a conservation project that is restoring thousands of paintings, sculptures and documents damaged in January’s magnitude 7 quake, it will join 50 pieces in New York next month as a celebration of Haitian art. Hyppolite’s Pot de Fleurs is a textbook example of Haitian art naïf, characterised by untrained artists producing simple, symbolic works, and a standout piece in a poverty-racked country’s cherished artistic tradition.
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The artwork, painted by Hyppolite, a voodoo priest, directly on to cardboard in the 1940s, was buried and broken into six pieces when its home, a private gallery in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, came crashing down on January 12. The tattered oil painting was among the first beneficiaries of the recently opened Cultural Recovery Centre, where experts from the US-based Smithsonian Institution repair torn canvasses and touch up chipped paintwork.
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Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s head of arts, said: "It was like a jigsaw puzzle. One of our conservators literally put it back together. When you see the full painting, it is hard to imagine that it was in pieces.” Restoration teams working in three laboratories on the outskirts of the city have the makings of a rare success story in a chaotic nation that has yet to begin resettling the 1.6 million Haitians left homeless eight months ago in earnest.
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Hyppolite’s Pot de Fleurs/i> is among only a few dozen pieces to be repaired and retouched at the centre. Other items include Célestin Faustin’s Un Beau Rêve, figurines of the indigenous Taíno people and a document from the revolutionary leader General Alexandre Pétion. Olsen Jean Julien, a former Haitian culture minister who now runs the centre in Bourdon, says Haiti lost about 50,000 items, from paintings to pottery and manuscripts to mosaics, in less than one minute of destruction. Others say any estimate is “wild guesswork” because gallery owners rarely kept inventories of collections, meaning nobody knows exactly how much, or what, is trapped under the mountains of debris still piled up across Port-au-Prince.
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“We have lost a lot, but we’re trying to save what we can,” said Mr Julien, who describes gallery owners digging through twisted steel and concrete with bare hands to rescue buried canvases, testament to the importance Haitians place on their art. In an impoverished land that has endured decades of brutal and incompetent leadership, Haitian art tells the story of a people who defeated their French colonial masters to become the world’s first black-led republic, in the early 19th century. “Haiti is characterised by liberty and creativity,” Mr Julien said. “We were liberated from slavery and celebrate our cultural diversity. That can explain our huge creativity. Creativity is a way of life here. It is just our identity.”
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Within weeks of the levelling of much of the capital, artists began working again, narrating the tragedy in oil paints and showcasing their wares on street corners, hoping to sell pieces to the influx of foreign-aid workers. Disaster spawned a new Haitian genre, dubbed “rubble art”, in which concrete chunks and splintered carpentry from toppled homes became unlikely canvases, bearing harrowing images of an event that claimed the lives of 300,000. “Art has been a way to overcome the trauma left by the earthquake,” Mr Julien added.
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Hyppolite’s pieces were pulled from the wrecked private gallery collection of Georges Nader Sr, a Haitian tycoon, where as many as 15,000 pieces worth about US$20 million (Dh73.4m) were buried in a shower of concrete boulders. Only about 3,000 items have been salvaged. The quake also levelled the Centre d’Art in central Port-au-Prince, which was founded by an American schoolteacher, DeWitt Peters, in the 1940s and became the creative hub for Hyppolite’s contemporaries and a breeding ground for generations of Haitian artists.
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Two cargo containers filled with artworks pulled from the toppled gallery have yet to be unloaded into the recovery centre, although conservators are concerned that Caribbean humidity and mould have further damaged the quake-torn canvases. Few losses rival the importance Haitians afford the eight frescoes inside the capital’s Cathédrale Sainte Trinité, which Haiti’s best-known artists decorated with biblical murals of black characters to attract Caribbean congregations in the early 1950s.
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Vibrant frescoes, including Philomé Obin’s crucifixion scene with a mulatto Jesus, and Christ’s ascension over a scene of football-playing villagers by Castera Bazile, were lost when the cathedral collapsed. Conservators are debating how to protect the three surviving works. Restoration workers are daunted by their task and predict that unearthing, repairing and safeguarding pieces will take years. They are already facing cash shortages, and few have begun raising money to rebuild collapsed galleries and showcase art once Haiti’s reconstruction begins in earnest. For the Smithsonian’s Mr Kurin, Haiti’s art scene is among the most lively and sophisticated in the Caribbean and could lure foreign visitors and make tourism an important revenue source, once roads, hotels and other infrastructure are built.
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“Are we really going to build a car factory or a steel mill in Haiti? Artistic production could generate more money for Haiti than other industries,” he said. “Why not get people to experience Haitian culture, cuisine, art, crafts, music history and sights – employ Haitians and have people spend some money in Haiti? It could really drive the economy.” Government officials already plan to exploit Haiti’s only listing on the UN’s world heritage sites, a 19th-century citadel in the north of the country, and rebuild the historic district of the southern port town, Jacmel, which suffered extensive damage.
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While such schemes are decades away, the first green shoots of Haiti’s cultural recovery will appear on October 1, when the exhibition Saving Grace: A Celebration of Haitian Art opens at the Affirmation Arts gallery in Manhattan. The gallery director, Marla Goldwasser, describing Pot de Fleurs by Hyppolite, who began his career painting with chicken feathers on cardboard canvases, sais: "“It warms your heart on so many levels." “Just aesthetically, it’s extraordinary. But when you think of its journey, how it was left for rubble and then, with such a tender hand, put back together.”

Smithsonian Magazine
By Bill Brubaker
Photographs by Alison Wright
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Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/In-Haiti-the-Art-of-Resilian...
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Six weeks had passed since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing 230,000 people and leaving more than 1.5 million others homeless. But the ground was still shaking in the nation’s rubble-strewn capital, Port-au-Prince, and 87-year-old Préfète Duffaut wasn’t taking any chances. One of the most prominent Haitian artists of the past 50 years was sleeping in a crude tent made of plastic sheeting and salvaged wood, fearful his earthquake-damaged house would collapse at any moment. “Did you feel the tremors last night?” Duffaut asked.
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At the Gingerbread gallery in Pétionville, I was introduced to a 70-year-old sculptor who wore an expression of utter despondence. “I have no home. I have no income. And there are days when me and my family don’t eat,” Nacius Joseph told me. Looking for financial support, or at least a few words of encouragement, he was visiting the galleries that had bought and sold his work over the years.
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Joseph told gallery owner Axelle Liautaud that his days as a woodcarver, creating figures such as La Sirene, the voodoo queen of the ocean, were over. “All my tools are broken,” he said. “I can’t work. All of my apprentices, the people who helped me, have left Port-au-Prince, gone to the provinces. I’m very discouraged. I have lost everything!” “But don’t you love what you’re doing?” Liautaud asked. Joseph nodded. “Then you have to find a way to do it. This is a situation where you have to have some drive because everyone has problems.” Joseph nodded again, but looked to be near tears.
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Though the gallery owners were themselves hurting, many were handing out money and art supplies to keep the artists employed. At her gallery a few blocks away, Monnin told me that in the days following the quake she distributed $14,000 to more than 40 artists. “Right after the earthquake, they simply needed money to buy food,” she said. “You know, 90 percent of the artists I work with lost their homes.” Jean-Emmanuel “Mannu” El Saieh, whose late father, Issa, was one of the earliest promoters of Haitian art, was paying a young painter’s medical bills. “I just talked to him on the phone, and you don’t have to be a doctor to know he’s still suffering from shock,” El Saieh said at his gallery, just up a rutted road from the Oloffson hotel, which survived the quake.
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Though most of the artists I encountered had become homeless, they did not consider themselves luckless. They were alive, after all, and aware that the tremblement de terre had killed many of their friends and colleagues, such as the octogenarian owners of the Rainbow Gallery, Carmel and Cavour Delatour; Raoul Mathieu, a painter; Destimare Pierre Marie Isnel (a.k.a. Louco), a sculptor who worked with discarded objects in the downtown Grand Rue slum; and Flores “Flo” McGarrell, an American artist and film director who in 2008 moved to Jacmel (a town with splendid French colonial architecture, some of which survived the quake) to head up a foundation that supported local artists.
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The day I arrived in Port-au-Prince, I heard rumors of another possible casualty—Alix Roy, a reclusive, 79-year-old painter who had been missing since January 12. I knew Roy’s work well: he painted humorous scenes from Haitian life, often chubby kids dressed up as adults in elaborate costumes, some wearing oversize sunglasses, others balancing outrageously large fruits on their heads. Although he was a loner, Roy was an adventurous sort who had also lived in New York, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
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Impossibly poor, surviving on less than $2 a day, most Haitians have made it their life’s work to climb over, under and around obstacles, be they killer hurricanes, food riots, endemic diseases, corrupt governments or the ghastly violence that appears whenever there is political upheaval. One victim of these all too frequent calamities has been Haitian culture: even before the earthquake, this French- and Creole-speaking Caribbean island nation of nearly ten million people did not have a publicly owned art museum or even a single movie theater.
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Still, Haitian artists have proved astonishingly resilient, continuing to create, sell and survive through crisis after crisis. “The artists here have a different temperament,” Georges Nader Jr. told me in his fortress-like gallery in Pétionville, the once-affluent, hillside Port-au-Prince suburb. “When something bad happens, their imagination just seems to get better.” Nader’s family has been selling Haitian art since the 1960s. The notion of making a living by creating and selling art first came to Haiti in the 1940s, when an American watercolorist named DeWitt Peters moved to Port-au-Prince. Peters, a conscientious objector to the world war then underway, took a job teaching English and was struck by the raw artistic expression he found at every turn—even on the local buses known as tap-taps.
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He founded Centre d’Art in 1944 to organize and promote untrained artists, and within a few years, word had gone out that something special was happening in Haiti. During a visit to the center in 1945, André Breton, the French writer, poet and a leader of the cultural movement known as Surrealism, swooned over the work of a self-described houngan (voodoo priest) and womanizer named Hector Hyppolite, who often painted with chicken feathers. Hyppolite’s creations, on subjects ranging from still lifes to voodoo spirits to scantily clad women (presumed to be his mistresses), sold for a few dollars each. But, Breton wrote, “all carried the stamp of total authenticity.” Hyppolite died of a heart attack in 1948, three years after joining Centre d’Art and one year after his work was displayed at a triumphant (for Haiti as well as for him) United Nations-sponsored exhibition in Paris.
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In the years that followed, the Haitian art market relied largely on the tourists who ventured to this Maryland-size nation, 700 or so miles from Miami, to savor its heady mélange of naive art, Creole food, smooth dark rum, hypnotic (though, at times, staged) voodoo ceremonies, high-energy carnivals and riotously colored bougainvillea. (Is it any wonder Haitian artists never lacked for inspiration?) Though tourists largely shied away from Haiti in the 1960s, when self-declared president-for-life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ruled through terror enforced by his personal army of Tonton Macoutes, they returned after his death in 1971, when his playboy son, Jean-Claude (known as “Baby Doc”), took charge.
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I got my first glimpse of Haitian art when I interviewed Baby Doc in 1977. (His reign as president-for-life ended abruptly when he fled the country in 1986 for France, where he lives today at age 59 in Paris.) I was hooked the moment I bought my first painting, a $10 market scene done on a flour sack. And I was delighted that every painting, iron sculpture and sequined voodoo flag I carried home on subsequent trips gave me further insight into a culture that is a blend of West African, European, native Taíno and other homegrown influences.
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Although some nicely done Haitian paintings could be bought for a few hundred dollars, the best works by early masters such as Hyppolite and Philomé Obin (a devout Protestant who painted scenes from Haitian history, the Bible and his family’s life) eventually commanded tens of thousands of dollars. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. added Haitian primitives to their collections. And Haiti’s reputation as a tourist destination was reinforced by the eclectic parade of notables—from Barry Goldwater to Mick Jagger—who checked into the Hotel Oloffson, the creaky gingerbread retreat that is the model for the hotel in The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about Haiti.
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Much of this exuberance faded in the early 1980s amid political strife and the dawn of the AIDS pandemic. U.S. officials classified Haitians as being among the four groups at highest risk for HIV infection. (The others were homosexuals, hemophiliacs and heroin addicts.) Some Haitian doctors called this designation unwarranted, even racist, but the perception stuck that a Haitian holiday was not worth the risk. Though tourism waned, the galleries that sponsored Haitian painters and sculptors targeted sales to overseas collectors and the increasing numbers of journalists, development workers, special envoys, physicians, U.N. peacekeepers and others who found themselves in the country.
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“Haitians are not a brooding people,” said gallery owner Toni Monnin, a Texan who moved to Haiti in the boom-time ’70s and married a local art dealer. “Their attitude is: ‘Let’s get on with it! Tomorrow is another day.’” At the Gingerbread gallery in Pétionville, I was introduced to a 70-year-old sculptor who wore an expression of utter despondence. “I have no home. I have no income. And there are days when me and my family don’t eat,” Nacius Joseph told me. Looking for financial support, or at least a few words of encouragement, he was visiting the galleries that had bought and sold his work over the years.
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Though the gallery owners were themselves hurting, many were handing out money and art supplies to keep the artists employed. At her gallery a few blocks away, Monnin told me that in the days following the quake she distributed $14,000 to more than 40 artists. “Right after the earthquake, they simply needed money to buy food,” she said. “You know, 90 percent of the artists I work with lost their homes.” Jean-Emmanuel “Mannu” El Saieh, whose late father, Issa, was one of the earliest promoters of Haitian art, was paying a young painter’s medical bills. “I just talked to him on the phone, and you don’t have to be a doctor to know he’s still suffering from shock,” El Saieh said at his gallery, just up a rutted road from the Oloffson hotel, which survived the quake.
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Though most of the artists I encountered had become homeless, they did not consider themselves luckless. They were alive, after all, and aware that the tremblement de terre had killed many of their friends and colleagues, such as the octogenarian owners of the Rainbow Gallery, Carmel and Cavour Delatour; Raoul Mathieu, a painter; Destimare Pierre Marie Isnel (a.k.a. Louco), a sculptor who worked with discarded objects in the downtown Grand Rue slum; and Flores “Flo” McGarrell, an American artist and film director who in 2008 moved to Jacmel (a town with splendid French colonial architecture, some of which survived the quake) to head up a foundation that supported local artists.
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The day I arrived in Port-au-Prince, I heard rumors of another possible casualty—Alix Roy, a reclusive, 79-year-old painter who had been missing since January 12. I knew Roy’s work well: he painted humorous scenes from Haitian life, often chubby kids dressed up as adults in elaborate costumes, some wearing oversize sunglasses, others balancing outrageously large fruits on their heads. Although he was a loner, Roy was an adventurous sort who had also lived in New York, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
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A few nights later, Nader called my room at Le Plaza (one of the few hotels in the capital open for business) with some grim news. Not only had Roy died in the rubble of the gritty downtown hotel where he lived, his remains were still buried there, six weeks later. “I’m trying to find someone from the government to pick him up,” Nader said. “That’s the least the Haitian government can do for one of its best artists.” The next day, Nader introduced me to Roy’s sister, a retired kindergarten director in Pétionville. Marléne Roy Etienne, 76, told me her older brother had rented a room on the top floor of the hotel so he could look down on the street for inspiration.
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“I went to look for him after the earthquake but couldn’t even find where the hotel had been because the entire street—Rue des Césars—was rubble,” she said. “So I stood in front of the rubble where I thought Alix might be and said a prayer.” Etienne’s eyes teared when Nader assured her he would continue pressing government officials to retrieve her brother’s remains. “This is hard,” she said, reaching for a handkerchief. “This is really hard.” Nader had been through some challenging times himself. Although he had not lost any family members, and his gallery in Pétionville was intact, the 32-room house where his parents lived, and where his father, Georges S. Nader, had built a gallery that contained perhaps the largest collection of Haitian art anywhere, had crumbled.
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The son of Lebanese immigrants, the elder Nader was long considered one of Haiti’s best-known and most successful art dealers, having established relationships with hundreds of artists since he opened a gallery downtown in 1966. He moved into the mansion in the hillside Croix-Desprez neighborhood a few years later and, in addition to the gallery, built a museum that showcased many of Haiti’s finest artists, including Hyppolite, Obin, Rigaud Benoit and Castera Bazile. When he retired a few years ago, Nader turned over the gallery and museum to his son John. The elder Nader had been taking a nap with his wife when the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. “We were rescued within ten minutes because our bedroom did not collapse,” he told me. What Nader saw when he was led outside was horrifying. His collection had become a hideous pile of debris with thousands of paintings and sculptures buried under giant blocks of concrete.
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“My life’s work is gone,” Nader, 78, told me by telephone from his second home in Miami, where he has been living since the quake. Nader said he never bought insurance for his collection, which the family estimated to be worth more than $20 million. With the rainy season approaching, Nader’s sons hired a dozen men to pick, shovel and jackhammer their way through the debris, looking for anything that could be salvaged. “We had 12,000 to 15,000 paintings here,” Georges Nader Jr. told me as we stomped through the sprawling heap, which reminded me of a bombed-out village from a World War II documentary. “We’ve recovered about 3,000 paintings and about 1,800 of those are damaged. Some other paintings were taken by looters in the first days after the earthquake.”
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Back at his gallery in Pétionville, Nader showed me a Hyppolite still life he had recovered. I recognized it, having admired the painting in 2009 at a retrospective at the Organization of American States’ Art Museum of the Americas in Washington. But the 20- by 20-inch painting was now broken into eight pieces. “This will be restored by a professional,” Nader said. “We have begun restoring the most important paintings we have recovered.” I heard other echoes of cautious optimism as I visited cultural sites across Port-au-Prince. A subterranean, government-run historical museum that contained some important paintings and artifacts had survived. So did a private voodoo and Taíno museum in Mariani (near the quake’s epicenter) and an ethnographic collection in Pétionville. People associated with the destroyed Holy Trinity Cathedral and Centre d’Art, as well as the Episcopal Church’s structurally feeble Haitian Art Museum, assured me that these institutions will be rebuilt. But no one could say how or when.
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The United Nations has announced that 59 countries and international organizations have pledged $9.9 billion as “the down payment Haiti needs for wholesale national renewal.” But there’s no word on how much of that money, if any, will ever reach the cultural sector. “We deeply believe that Haitians living abroad can help us with the funds,” said Henry Jolibois, an artist and architect who is a technical consultant to the Haitian prime minister’s office. “For the rest, we must convince other entities in the world to participate, such as the museums and private collectors who have huge Haitian naive painting collections.” At the Holy Trinity Cathedral 14 murals had long offered a distinctively Haitian take on biblical events. My favorite was the Marriage at Cana by Wilson Bigaud, a painter who excelled at glimpses into everyday Haitian life—cockfights, market vendors, baptismal parties, rara band parades. While some European artists portrayed the biblical event at which Christ turned water into wine as being rather formal, Bigaud’s Cana was a decidedly casual affair with a pig, rooster and two Haitian drummers looking on. (Bigaud died this past March 22 at age 79.)
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“That Marriage at Cana mural was very controversial,” Haiti’s Episcopal bishop, Jean Zaché Duracin, told me in his Pétionville office. “In the ’40s and ’50s many Episcopalians left the church in Haiti and became Methodists because they didn’t want these murals at the cathedral. They said, ‘Why? Why is there a pig in the painting?’ They didn’t understand there was a part of Haitian culture in these murals.” Duracin told me it took him three days to gather the emotional strength to visit Holy Trinity. “This is a great loss, not only for the Episcopal church but for art worldwide,” he said. Visiting the site myself one morning, I saw two murals that were more or less intact—The Baptism of Our Lord by Castera Bazile and Philomé Obin’s Last Supper. (A third mural, Native Street Procession, by Duffaut, has survived, says former Smithsonian Institution conservator Stephanie Hornbeck, but others were destroyed.)
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At the Haitian Art Museum, chunks of concrete had fallen on some of the 100 paintings on exhibit. I spotted one of Duffaut’s oldest, largest and finest imaginary village paintings propped against a wall. A huge piece was missing from the bottom. A museum employee told me the piece had not been found. As I left, I reminded myself that although thousands of paintings had been destroyed in Haiti, thousands of others survived, and many are outside the country in private collections and institutions, including the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Iowa and the Milwaukee Art Museum, which have important collections of Haitian art. I also took comfort from conversations I had had with artists like Duffaut, who were already looking beyond the next mountain.
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No one displays Haiti’s artistic resolve more than Frantz Zéphirin, a gregarious 41-year-old painter, houngan and father of 12, whose imagination is as large as his girth. “I’m very lucky to be alive,” Zéphirin told me late one afternoon in the Monnin gallery, where he was putting the finishing touches on his tenth painting since the quake. “I was in a bar on the afternoon of the earthquake, having a beer. But I decided to leave the bar when people starting talking about politics. And I’m glad I left. The earthquake came just one minute later, and 40 people died inside that bar.”
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Zéphirin said he walked several hours, at times climbing over corpses, to get to his house. “That’s where I learned that my stepmother and five of my cousins had died,” he said. But his pregnant girlfriend was alive; so were his children. “That night, I decided I had to paint,” Zéphirin said. “So I took my candle and went to my studio on the beach. I saw a lot of death on the way. I stayed up drinking beer and painting all night. I wanted to paint something for the next generation, so they can know just what I had seen.” Zéphirin led me to the room in the gallery where his earthquake paintings were hung. One shows a rally by several fully clothed skeletons carrying a placard written in English: “We need shelters, clothes, condoms and more. Please help.”
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“I’ll do more paintings like these,” Zéphirin said. “Each day 20 ideas for paintings pass in my head, but I don’t have enough hands to make all of them.” (Smithsonian commissioned the artist to create the painting that appears on the cover of this magazine. It depicts the devastated island nation with grave markers, bags of aid money and birds of mythic dimensions delivering flowers and gifts, such as “justice” and “health.”) In March, Zéphirin accepted an invitation to show his work in Germany. And two months later, he would head to Philadelphia for a one-man show, titled “Art and Resilience,” at the Indigo Arts Gallery. A few miles up a mountain road from Pétionville, one of Haiti’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Philippe Dodard, was preparing to bring more than a dozen earthquake-inspired paintings to Arte Américas, an annual fair in Miami Beach. Dodard showed me a rather chilling black-and-white acrylic that was inspired by the memory of a friend who perished in an office building. “I’m calling this painting Trapped in the Dark,” he said.
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I have no idea how Dodard, a debonair man from Haiti’s elite class whose paintings and sculptures confirm his passion for his country’s voodoo and Taíno cultures, had found time to paint. He told me he had lost several friends and family members in the quake, as well as the headquarters of the foundation he helped create in the mid-1990s to promote culture among Haitian youth. And he was busily involved in a project to convert a fleet of school buses—donated by the neighboring Dominican Republic—into mobile classrooms for displaced students.
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Like Zéphirin, Dodard seemed determined to work through his grief with a paintbrush in hand. “How can I continue living after one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of the world? I can’t,” he wrote in the inscription that would appear next to his paintings at the Miami Beach show. “Instead I use art to express the deep change that I see around and inside me.” For the Haitian art community, more hopeful news was on the way. In May, the Smithsonian Institution launched an effort to help restore damaged Haitian treasures. Led by Richard Kurin, under secretary for history, art and culture, and working with private and other public organizations, the Institution established a “cultural recovery center” at the former headquarters of the U.N. Development Program near Port-au-Prince.
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“It’s not every day at the Smithsonian that you actually get to help save a culture,” Kurin says. “And that’s what we’re doing in Haiti.” On June 12, after months of preparation, conservators slipped on their gloves in the Haitian capital and got to work. “Today was a very exciting day for...conservators, we got objects into the lab! Woo hoo!” the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Hugh Shockey enthused on the museum’s Facebook page. Kurin sounded equally pumped. “The first paintings we brought in were painted by Hector Hyppolite. So we were restoring those on Sunday,” he told me a week later. “Then on Monday our conservator from the American Art Museum was restoring Taíno, pre-Colombian artifacts. Then on Tuesday the paper conservator was dealing with documents dating from the era of the Haitian struggle for independence. And then the next day we were literally on the scaffolding at the Episcopal cathedral, figuring out how we’re going to preserve the three murals that survived.”
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The task undertaken by the Smithsonian and a long list of partners and supporters that includes the Haitian Ministry of Culture and Communication, the International Blue Shield, the Port-au-Prince-based foundation FOKAL and the American Institute for Conservation seemed daunting; thousands of objects need restoration. Kurin said the coalition will train several dozen Haitian conservators to take over when the Smithsonian bows out in November 2011. “This will be a generation-long process in which Haitians do this themselves,” he said, adding that he hopes donations from the international community will keep the project alive.
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Across the United States, institutions such as the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, galleries such as Indigo Arts in Philadelphia and Haitian-Americans such as Miami-based artist Edouard Duval Carrié were organizing sales and fund-raisers. And more Haitian artists were on the move—some to a three-month residency program sponsored by a gallery in Kingston, Jamaica, others to a biennial exhibition in Dakar, Senegal. Préfète Duffaut stayed in Haiti. But during an afternoon we spent together he seemed energized and, though Holy Trinity was mostly a pile of rubble, he was making plans for a new mural. “And my mural in the new cathedral will be better than the old ones,” he promised.
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Meanwhile, Duffaut had just finished a painting of a star he saw while sitting outside his tent one night. “I’m calling this painting The Star of Haiti,” he said. “You see, I want all of my paintings to send a message.” The painting showed one of Duffaut’s imaginary villages inside a giant star that was hovering like a spaceship over the Haitian landscape. There were mountains in the painting. And people climbing. Before bidding the old master farewell, I asked him what message he wanted this painting to send. “My message is simple,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “Haiti will be back.”
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Bill Brubaker, formerly a Washington Post writer, has long followed Haitian art. In her photographs and books, Alison Wright focuses on cultures and humanitarian efforts.

9/9/2010
Media Global
By Leslie Pitterson
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Though their walls did not crumble on 12 January, the Men Nou Gallery in Jacmel is filled with concrete slabs and other reminders of the earthquake that shook Haiti to its core. Layering rich pigments and vibrant colors on to the remnants from the quake, the gallery’s artists have turned debris into art. Men Nou is the birthplace of “rubble art,” pieces that use rubble as their canvas. In an interview with MediaGlobal, Ira Lowenthal, co-proprietor of Men Nou explained that ‘rubble art’ was born in the aftermath of the quake when the gallery’s designer, Ruth Goldman could not find art supplies for the young artists who had taken shelter there.
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“After the quake, many of the local artists found themselves homeless, for the most part; unable to find canvases or paints and absolutely desperate to express themselves in the wake of this disaster,” Lowenthal stated. “We had nothing on hand that could help them, we thought, but upon reflection had an eureka moment.” Grabbing a dozen Sharpie pens, Goldman encouraged the young men to draw on the pieces of rubble strewn throughout Jacmel’s streets. And though rubble art began out of necessity, it has been embraced by Haiti’s artists as a form of expression.
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In the months since the quake, artists at the Men Nou gallery have used pieces of the homes and buildings the earthquake destroyed to piece their own back together. Selling their works to the visitors and the aid workers on the island, the gallery has provided an informal therapy and tangible income. UNESCO estimates that before the quake, Haitian artists brought in over $20 million in revenue to the country. Elke Selter, UNESCO’s Program Specialists for Haiti, said the revitalization of the artisans in Haiti is an essential piece of the country’s recovery.
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“There are many different ways to deal with the disaster,” Selter told MediaGlobal. “The use of rubble for canvas is an interesting way to acknowledge the events of last January and to reflect on them.” The gallery itself has been revived through the Clinton-Bush Initiatives’ renewed support for the United States Agency for International Development’s Aid To Artisans program. The program funded many of the gallery’s operations until US congressional budget cuts suspended funding in 2006. Now, as ‘rubble art’ flourishes, Men Nou is hoping that the partnership will help revive the arts in Haiti.
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“The (post-earthquake) pieces are obviously very special, not only artistically, but also historically,” noted Lowenthal. “That said, the vast majority of those who work with and through us are simply anxious to get back to normal levels of production and sales – in essence, to get on with their lives.” While the gallery has sold many of the pieces, Lowenthal says there are some Men Nou does not plan to part with. For example, a piece recently created by artist Vady Confident. “Ayiti Kraze (Haiti Shattered)” which echoes Edvard Munch’s famed masterpiece “The Scream” on a jagged piece of slab. It is the piece that Lowenthal calls “the most affecting piece of art” to come out of the quake thus far. “The piece is magnificent, obviously,” said Lowenthal. “It is actually textured with dust from the rubble; it captures both the terror and the pathos of that catastrophic 35 seconds when life in Haiti changed forever.”
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The piece is one of many harrowing images on display in the gallery. Though the scenes of havoc tell the story of the quake’s destruction, Lowenthal believes the works say more about Haitian culture. “Haitian culture is nothing if not voracious, in terms of new ideas.” The work from the Men Nou Gallery serves as a testimony to the resilience of culture in the face of devastation and pain. As Haiti seeks to rebuild its future, rubble art is a hopeful reminder that beauty can come from heaps of loss and scattered piles of despair.
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MediaGlobal is an independent international media organization, based in the United Nations, creating awareness in the global media on social justice and development issues in the world’s least developed countries. For more information, please contact us at: United Nations Secretariat, Room L-221 K, Dag Hammarskjold Library, New York, NY 10017. Telephone: 609.529.6129. Email: media@mediaglobal.org. Website: www.mediaglobal.org

9/11/2010
Huffington Post
By Jim Luce
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-luce/franketienne-haitis-first_b_71316...
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As a cultural area studies graduate, seldom do I feel over my head culturally. Standing in the home of possibly the next Nobel Prize recipient for Literature in Port-au-Prince recently, I found myself way out of my league. One ambassador had cautioned me to "have an intellectual translate" for me. Luckily, when I met the legendary Franketienne, he spoke to me in English. Several weeks later I caught up with him again at the Brooklyn Public Library for an outstanding performance and continued to learn more about this great mind.
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Franketienne was born Franck Etienne in 1936. He is an author, poet, playwright, musician, and painter. Although he speaks English, he has written exclusively in both French and Creole. As a painter, he is known for his colorful abstract works, often emphasizing the colors blue and red, as I saw first-hand in his home. As Emmanuel Duogene told me, "he's a magician - he works miracles!" Haunting imagery, surrounded often in red and blue, adorns the walls of his home. As I delved into his world, I found terrain that was at once foreign and strangely familiar. For example, Franketienne's fascination with the tragic clown. According to one scholar, the author's use of this figure creates for the reader a hybrid creature that combines the semi-tragic circus figure of Giulietta Masina's waif in La Strada, and the "lewd Voodoo (vodou) spirit, the Guede, obsessed with sex and death. In the words of another, "This larger-than-life actor refuses to be silenced." Having several friends in Haiti who are vodou priests, I have some concept of what this means.
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Franketienne himself is a larger-than-life protagonist who never stepped down from the national stage in fear of the dictator of the decade. The author likens the artist in a dictatorship to a sado-masochistic relationship in which the slave serves the master. Without the slave, the other cannot play master. A master must have a slave to exist. It is this knowledge that strengthened his resolve through the dark days of Papa and Baby Doc. He specifically did not compare the relationship to Haiti's historic slavery, however even there, masters needed slaves - but slaves were expendable due to their numbers. The author has painted or otherwise decorated every remaining surface in his home.
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Franketienne believes, as did Jacques-Stephen Alexis, that creative works should represent the daily reality of the people. One of my favorite authors in Indonesia, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, had this same thought. As one expert has said, as the Franketienne reality is closely linked to Vodou rituals and close relations with the gods of the Vodou pantheon, they must by definition be associated with the artistic process.
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As Alvina Ruprecht of Carlton University states: Transplanting into theatrical language the phantasmatic world of the artist living under the Duvalier regime, the poet/actor has produced an apocalyptic scenario where deformed creatures and power-hungry voices taunt the playwright and drive him mad, evoking an encounter with Death - the Baron Samedi, a spirit of the Vodou pantheon. Like the gangs of "good for nothings who roam the streets of Port-au-Prince." Evil spirits - the "Gran makout" - take control of the torturer, the sadistic and uncultured, and sexually-ravenous brute who wants to silence the artist.
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Franketienne visited Japan as a guest of Marcel Duret, the then Haitian Ambassador to Japan, where he witnessed Kabuki. The author seems to have absorbed Japanese theater into his later works. My father was a translator of the scatological writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, so I am unfazed by some of Franketienne's writings: "With much spitting and swearing, the actor playing the sex-crazed tyrant spreads his legs, not only to show the power in his muscular appendages, but also to show that he has enormous and powerful "balls" (grennplen), and as he spews out long lists of expressions indicating male genitals, he simultaneously swells out his chest, swivels his hips and moves forward making rhythmic motions imitating sexual thrusting (kouutfoul) as he taunts the artist who is the "un-masculine" figure with the squashed balls, he who is effeminate and fragile and overpowered by other men."
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An introduction to Franketienne, I feel, may lead to a lifetime odyssey to understand. Franketienne's Brooklyn performance was unlike any I have ever experienced. Singing with a soulful voice, alternating with dramatic narrative interspersed with humorous asides - all in French and Creole - the artist mesmerized the predominantly Haitian-American audience. I met Thomas Spear, professor of French at CUNY Graduate Center, at the event. Thomas, I discovered, was a younger colleague of my father's whose seminal French-language website, Ile en ile, features authors of French-speaking islands, and has chronicled Franketienne for years. Thomas told me:
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Not long after meeting you at the Brooklyn Public Library, before Franketienne's recent performance of Melovivi, I discovered you were the "connecting goodness" man. I was delighted to learn that you are the son of Stanford Luce, whom I had met through our mutual research on the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, another writer of explosive and highly inventive language; Franketienne is one of the few, in French language today who gives such life to the language, with energetic explosions of assonant, colorful neologisms.
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Thomas told me of listening to septuagenarian Marie Coron reciting with enthusiasm texts of Franketienne she's learned by heart. Living in Lyons, France, it's fun to see how Franketienne can connect to others. She, as I, comes from a completely different universe than the writer - yet we are mesmerized. With her declining eyesight, Marie chooses her texts for their value as diction exercises as well as for their performance value. This CUNY professor also told me about New York-based artist Beatrice Coron, her daughter, appreciates both the visual and textual creativity of Franketienne who, like she, makes much use of wordplay. Beatrice said, when first seeing Galaxie Chaos-Babel, "thank God I'm not Franketienne" (!). Beatrice's flower books include Fleurs d'insomnie, with petals containing verses of Franketienne.
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Emmelie Prophete, whose Le reste du temps will be published by Memoire d'encrier this month, says in French, "Each of Franketienne's words builds a world of which every Haitian dreams." I also met at the event Alessandra Benedicty, another professor of City College of New York. She told me after his performance: "Once I had decided to work on Franketienne for my thesis, what initially interested me in his work was his use of Vodou as an aesthetic system. What I mean by that is that at least my first association with Vodou was as a religion. In academic disciplines, Vodou is often studied in the fields of anthropology or religious studies. As someone who loves literature, my interest in Vodou grew out of Franketienne's treatment of it as an aesthetic."
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Right now, I am working with the conferences that Andre Breton gave when he spent time in Haiti in 1945-1946. Breton sees affinities between Vodou and Surrealism--and where Franketienne puts an accent on the aesthetics of Vodou, Breton talks about the "secular ideals" of "rapprochement" between peoples; he sees Vodou and Surrealism as forms that give way to "liberty and affirmation of dignity." It's been over sixty years since Breton's visit to Haiti--and Surrealism is no longer the "movement" that it had been in the earlier part of the century, yet that said, in reading Breton's conferences immediately after seeing Franketienne read and perform in New York, I was reminded of Franketienne's own words: his emphasis on the role of the youth and the importance of aligning the material reality of modern society with a respect and awareness of the human condition.
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One of the lines that I've heard Franketienne repeat over and over, and we even heard a version of it today, is "S'il arrive que tu tombes relève-toi vite, il faut savoir tomber pour apprendre à se relever. Et même s'il advient que tombes souvent, evertue-toi à chevaucher ta chute" -- "If it happens that you fall, get back up quickly, you must know how to fall in order to stand back up. And even if you fall often, try your best to sidestep your own fall." In the 2005 version of Fleurs d'insomnie--Flowers of Insomnia, Franketienne writes: "Nous escaladons d'audace les risques majeurs, les perils secrets soutenus par les piliers du silence" -- "We scale with audacity, the major risks, the secret perils sustained by pillars of silence [...]."
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It is Franketienne's audacity in his writing - his charming ability to calmly bring his interlocutor into his initially terrifying world, it is an audacity to imbue the material, whether it be his poetry, his painting or his theatre, with a sense of the urgency of humanity - which makes him such an incredible writer and persona. Dr. Rachel Douglas of the French Section, School of Cultures, Languages & Area Studies, University of Liverpool told me shortly thereafter: Melovivi or The Trap is a play which was written almost two months before the earthquake struck Haiti. It's an almost spookily premonitory play, and it ties in with what has always been a crucial strand of Franketienne's writing: his focus on natural disaster in Haiti. Environmental disaster has been a constant theme of his work which highlights the ever-worsening environmental situation.
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In this play, as in all of Franketienne's work, the landscape/the environment are represented as a dystopian, desecrated, and nightmarish apocalypse. Natural forces, such as hurricanes, landslides, and floods are always depicted as ferociously attacking the Haitian people, as wreaking destruction on Haiti. This widespread degradation is made particularly prominent in this play by the plethora of strings of words which all mean the same thing. Cumulatively, this pleonasm builds up an impression of complete and utter destruction, for example, different words for 'rubbish' are accumulated. Everything is described here as being awash with mud, filth, and excrement, and so repetition of similar words make the piles of rubbish grow even higher.
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There are no specific references in this play to a particular natural disaster -- it could refer to any of them. It's also appropriate that the speakers remain anonymous (designated only here as "Speaker A" and "Speaker B") because they represent the nameless and faceless who die every year when Haiti is hit harder than other Caribbean islands by natural disasters. I was enormously appreciative of Thomas, Alessandra and Rachel as I had missed much of what Franketienne had said in French and Creole. I will continue to write about Franketienne, and his best-known works in The Stewardship Report (JLSR). I will explore the genre he has perfected known as Chaos Theory. I will also ask Franketienne specialists such as Mary Cobb Wittrock of the University of Maryland, Seanna Sumalee Oakley of the University of Nebraska, and Kaiama L. Glover of Columbia University to share their thoughts on his works.
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I have been remiss not to mention that Franketienne's home is amazing. Three stories tall, the earthquake of January 12, 2010 knocked down most of his walls. With a child-like joie de vivre, Franketienne redecorated his home by painting all the remaining supports. He believes the home is much improved without all the walls. I must concur it was striking. Franketienne is one of Haiti's best known intellectuals and artists. He is continuously at the vanguard of artistic thought throughout the Caribbean. He is a creative and political thought leader as well as a global citizen. On The Luce Index™ he ranks 97 out of 100, along with Anwar Sadat, Ban Ki-Moon, Elie Wiesel, and Wynton Marsalis. I encourage the Nobel Prize Committee to bestow upon this great Haitian the first Nobel Prize awarded to any Haitian.

By Carine Fabius
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carine-fabius/art-thats-as-hot-as-haiti_b_...
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It's hard to find joy in Haiti today. I'm just back from a three-week trip to my native land and words will never convey the range of emotions encountered in the core of my being and among those who live the day-to-day grind that is Haiti today. People are stressed, traumatized and depressed. In a place where some 250,000 people perished, it seems everyone knows at least five people who died. The force of Mother Earth has left many in a state of shock unnoticeable at the surface level. But dig just a little and a familiar faraway look and haze steals over the face of anyone recounting what many refer to as bagay la, "the thing" in Haitian Kreyol (bagay rhymes with sky).
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For a couple of days I stayed at a tiny house just outside of Jacmel (a coastal city in the south which was reportedly destroyed by 70%, although that figure is slightly exaggerated) where the caretaker recounted what residents there saw just after the exact hour and minute forever emblazoned in his mind: 4:52 PM. He said that after the shaking stopped, they watched the ocean recede 200 feet with a terrible force, as if fueled by an enraged and giant jackhammer. Flapping fish, stunned lobsters an other sea life remained stranded on what looked like a post-apocalypse beachscape. Fears of a tsunami-force return prompted them to head for the hills, but for naught in the end; because, as he relayed in a hushed, still-bewildered tone, the ocean returned at a chilling pace--creeping back in at a strangely measured tempo over the next day and a half.
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My short visit to Jacmel was planned pre-departure from Los Angeles, because I had fixed on finding some bright spot to counter the misery and despair--because Haiti is always more than that. And it worked. Leaving Port-au-Prince is always a good idea no matter when you visit the island. (Imagine going to Thailand and only seeing Bangkok; your impression would be forever skewed.) Seeking out the ocean and bathing in those warm Caribbean waters is always balm for my soul; eating grilled fish and downing a cold beer at a modest beachfront restaurant with rickety wooden tables and chairs; hanging out with friends, old and new, telling corny jokes. Got to find joy wherever you can, and the beach is a good place to start. Next stop is the art.
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I've been tapped by a New York-based non-profit called the Haitian Cultural Foundation to curate a major traveling exhibition of Haitian art set to launch in 2012. The exhibition will travel to major cities in the United States and Europe, and feature a comprehensive look at traditional and contemporary work by Haitian artists and artists of Haitian descent living in Haiti and throughout the world. After some preliminary research on the ground, I am proud and excited to report that in highlighting the dynamic and hard-hitting work being produced by these insightful artists, the exhibition will surely play a big part in helping to fuel Haiti's second renaissance.
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Back in the forties, the groundbreaking work being done by untrained Haitian artists made headlines, and a stampede of luminaries from around the world, along with hordes of good old tourists followed. I wanna get me some of that!
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Look below for a preview of the work I encountered in Haiti. The gallerists I talked to reported brisk sales. Why wait for 2012? Got a little wealth to spread? You don't need much. It's tough in Haiti right now, but there's excellent art at fair prices to be found. There's also fantastic grilled fish, and tropical juices and ice creams to delight in, not to forget our world-renowned Rhum Barbancourt. And then there's always the beach.

Article by Sarah Kiran Mitchell
Photography by Keely Kernan
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http://www.skewedmagazine.com/2010/09/feature-anderson-ambroise/
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An artist from Jacmel, Haiti, Anderson Ambroise shares with us how he spends his time teaching and empowering his people through art after the January 2010 earthquake. His reflections embody a progressive nature. Like many others from Haiti, Ambroise knows that some of the most valuable changes need to be made now. Ambroise was working as an artist long before the earthquake. Thinking about how to show the world what he could do, he came to the conclusion that he could help by finding a way to teach people close to him, especially the children living in the nearby tent camp. For Ambroise and other Haitians, art is easily accessible. It is a big part of Haitian culture and a respected livelihood. A cultural form of expression, like anywhere else in the world, art has helped Haiti through its ups and downs.
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After the earthquake Ambroise confided in art as a means to relieving stress. The following is his answer when asked, why art is important to him: “Art is good for the world, you can build a world with art, and art is everything. You know, you can teach people easily, like the kids. You can teach more in art, art is really good for change. It is so important for Haiti now, it’s not a business, but you can make a business with that so it is the last business. Haiti can make a change with the world now because we don’t make cigars or coffee anymore, so now we need to find a way to keep Haitian art alive.”
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When the earthquake happened Ambroise was at home. As he stepped outside he saw people with blood on their bodies, immediately realizing the degree of devastation. For weeks he slept outside. “I was suffering with my friends,” he explained, “it was really an experience, we just slept on a piece of sheet.” After the earthquake Ambroise knew life had to change, and by working together, his people could make that happen. The earthquake affected everyone, it was a shared experience and, in his mind, a good experience, because the Haitian people were given an opportunity to act as one.
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French colonial influences are depicted in the architecture in the city of Jacmel. Before the earthquake, large houses with balconies and artisan shops lined the streets, today it is mostly rubble. Still, Jacmel is known as Haiti’s cultural center. There are more artists in Jacmel than in any other city in Haiti. “For a long time Jacmel has used art for everything,” says Ambroise “dancers, musicians, painters… we have to keep the subject like that because art is the identity for Jacmel, it is my identity.”
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Although Ambroise did not lose any family, he tells us, “I am an artist and I lost my architecture… if I get a son, my son is supposed to see the old architecture in my country, but Haiti lost many things.” The only art center in Jacmel was also destroyed and, sadly, its art director lost his life. For Ambroise and many other artists here, this center was a space where they could develop their work. When he found out it was destroyed he felt like he had lost something, but at the same time he felt empowered, “when you lose something, you can get more… we can have a new idea to build an art center in Jacmel.” Ambroise is now part of the newly formed Kolectif Atis Jacmel (KOLAJ), an artist-led movement focused on developing sustainable artistic livelihoods and enriching the Haitian community through creativity and art. KOLAJ’s goal over the next few months is finding funding to construct a new center using sustainable building materials, where artists like Ambroise can have this positive and creative space exist as a constant in their lives.
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With this space Ambroise wants to not only reach other artists in Jacmel, but artists all over the world. It’s a house for artists, a space for exhibition, a space to run workshops and to work on the Internet. He spoke about the importance of forming an art collective in Jacmel as being an opportunity for people to work together in art, sharing experience, mindset, and a dream, “it’s important for artists to have a space to work in, because we can make an exchange”. When asked what KOLAJ is, Ambroise explained it like we know it. “I can build things with paper, and that can be one piece of art and I call it a collage”. For him, however, the imagery of this description stretches beyond the simple processes of cut and paste. It represents all the artists from different nations working together to make one goal possible. “Different vibrations can be one vibration, and that is KOLAJ for me”.
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In Ambroise’s opinion, KOLAJ will help Jacmel’s artists by giving them the opportunity to help themselves through art. Building a center for art allows artists access to resources and materials to make exhibitions, set up websites and gain support through other artists and the local and global community. At KOLAJ the artists draw, paint, and make sculptures out of the materials that are available to them. Inevitably, rubble and natural objects are used in their art, reflecting the context behind what they create. The artists at KOLAJ also run workshops for children where they make paintings out of rubble. “Art is important for children because it is education… you are supposed to [teach] your kids art… its important because kids have a flying mind… their minds are fresh and they can find many better things in art” says Ambroise. These workshops are valuable to the people of Haiti, because they provide an environment where the youth are given confidence and initiatives to build on.
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So much of today’s media reflects badly on the Haitian situation, with obvious reason, as there is still much work to be done. However, it is encouraging to know that organizations such as KOLAJ exist because they give children, aspiring artists and the people of Haiti a space to express themselves artistically and to learn skills to take them forward in their lives. They also provide a bridge between Haiti and the rest of the world, a bridge created on a common idea that art can be used to make a difference.
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You can find more information about Anderson Ambroise and the art community in Jacmel by visiting KOLAJ’s website: www.atisjakmel.org. This article could not have been possible without the help of Keely Kernan, an American artist working directly with KOLAJ to make its goal of creating a new center possible. She helped organize and translate the interview. www.keelykernan.com

Art News
By Stevenson Swanson
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This summer, amid the rubble still left from the January earthquake that devastated Haiti, a new conservation center opened in Port-au-Prince where American specialists have started the laborious task of repairing thousands of artworks damaged in the disaster. The effort, led by the Smithsonian Institution and funded by a mix of public and private money, is believed to be the most ambitious attempt by the American cultural community to respond to an international disaster.
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"The highest priority of the Haitian government and the international humanitarian communities has rightly been to save lives and provide food, water, medical care, and shelter," said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s undersecretary for history, art, and culture, when the Haitian Cultural Recovery Project was announced in May. "However, Haiti's rich culture, which goes back five centuries, is also in danger, and we have the expertise to help preserve that heritage." Although Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, it has one of the Caribbean's richest artistic traditions, in part an outgrowth of the country's voodoo culture. The earthquake exacted a heavy toll on Haiti's art, ripping holes and gashes in paintings, reducing sculptures to fragments, and exposing fragile artworks to rain and sun.
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Among the hardest-hit cultural institutions was the Musée d'Art Nader, a private museum owned by longtime Haitian-art dealer Georges Nader. Many of the museum's 12,000 artworks were destroyed or damaged when the 35-room mansion that houses the collection collapsed. At the Centre d'Art, a workshop and cultural hub founded in the '40s by California artist DeWitt Peters, employees sifted through debris to pull artworks from the building's ruins. Now some 2,000 paintings from the center are being stored in shipping containers, which become overheated under the Caribbean sun. The earthquake also leveled parts of the city's Episcopal cathedral. What remains of a highly regarded series of murals painted by a number of Haitian artists was left open to the elements.
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News of the disaster moved Corine Wegener, associate curator of architecture, design, decorative arts, craft, and sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, to take action. Wegener, a retired army major, had witnessed firsthand the effects of a disaster—albeit a man-made one—on a country's cultural heritage when she served as a liaison between the U.S. military and Iraqi officials at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad following the museum's looting in 2003. She was frustrated by the international cultural community's lack of response to the crisis.
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"You have to help the people first," says Wegener, who founded and now heads the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a nonprofit formed in 2006 with the goal of protecting cultural artifacts affected by armed conflict. "But often culture doesn't come second, third, or fourth. It doesn't come at all."
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In February, Wegener met with other art professionals in Washington, D.C., including the Smithsonian's Kurin, who had contacts in the Haitian government and arts community. With the approval of the Haitian government, plans for setting up a conservation center were soon under way. Initial funding came from three federal agencies—the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—contributing $30,000 each. But the largest amount by far was given by one seemingly unlikely private source: the Broadway League, which represents Broadway theaters and producers.
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The league donated $276,000 in funds it had raised from its members in the weeks following the earthquake. At first it planned to give the money to a humanitarian relief organization, but the league learned of the conservation effort through Margo Lion, a producer whose credits include the musical Hairspray. Lion serves on the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which has become a clearinghouse to raise funds for the project. Although the conservation effort is not directly related to the theater world, "it's art and culture, and that's part of our world," says the league's executive director, Charlotte St. Martin. "At the end of the day, art is art, so we thought it would be great to help Haiti preserve something that is so critical to its culture."
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The league's donation is being used to rent a former United Nations building to serve as the headquarters of the conservation project. The 7,500-square-foot structure is large enough to provide lab space for painting, object, and paper conservators as well as climate-controlled storage areas for artwork. Stephanie Hornbeck, a Miami conservator who speaks French, is overseeing operations at the conservation center for the Smithsonian, and volunteer conservators are being recruited by the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. The goal is to have at least two conservators at the center at all times, according to institute executive director Eryl Wentworth, who notes that, although the organization has an emergency team to respond to domestic disasters, this is the first time it has taken part in an international operation.
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Finding local sources for some of the synthetic materials and specialized solvents that conservators use has been a challenge. On one early trip to Haiti, a team of museum officials and conservators loaded up their suitcases with art supplies. Among the items in their luggage were several vacuums with variable suction, used to gently clean delicate surfaces. "Everything—everything—is just covered with concrete dust," says Hugh Shockey, objects conservator at the Smithsonian, who made several trips to Haiti to help set up the center.
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Among the first objects to be repaired after the conservation office opened in June were a colorful painting by Celestin Faustin, two small sculptures by the indigenous Taino people, and a 19th-century military document that once belonged to Alexandre Pétion, a leader of the revolution that resulted in the country's independence from France in 1804. The recovery project is expected to cost at least $3 million and last until the end of 2011. But it has been designed to leave a more enduring legacy, too. As part of the project's mission, American conservators will be training Haitians to take over when they leave. "Eventually, everyone will have to come home," Shockey says. "But we hope to leave an enhanced ability for Haitians to care for their heritage going forward."
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Stevenson Swanson is a New York–based writer who covers culture and the arts.

http://microsite.smithsonianmag.com/content/Haitian-Art-Auction/index.ht...

8/10
Globe and Mail
By Jessica Leeder
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After more than six months of working to produce their trademark art in ruined backyard workshops, the struggling papier mâché artists of Jacmel have finally won a boon: a $50,000 (U.S.) infusion from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. Although not a massive sum, the grant will fund the rebuilding of 10 ateliers destroyed in January’s earthquake and literally put new roofs over the heads of a team of artists. The artists need work space now more than ever they have been working frantically to fill a massive order for a major U.S. retailer with plans to launch a Haitian-made home decor line. (The retailer refuses to be named until the official product launch in September.) If the products are well received, the artisans have a shot at a long-term relationship with the store, which could revitalize their entire community.
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Until now, the artists, whose work has made Jacmel one of Haiti’s most renowned art destinations, have been working in unsheltered spaces amid the ruins, where they are exposed to the rains that soak Jacmel every day. “They’re making this product in horrible conditions,” said Cameron Brohman, a development expert and co-founder of the Brandaid Project, a non-governmental marketing and development organization that aims to revive Haiti’s arts and crafts industry and connect it with North American retail distributors.
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It is through the work of Mr. Brohman and the Brandaid Project that the Jacmel artisans were able to secure both the retail connection, cemented earlier this summer, and the Clinton Bush grant, which Mr. Brohman says will raise help legitimize his organization’s work in Jacmel, perhaps helping to attract new donors. “Big names get big notice,” he said. “It’s a serious vetting process we have to go through to get that money and to get their trust. It validates what we’re doing.” Brandaid’s goal, even before the earthquake, was to help raise the profile of Haitian and other foreign artists in the world marketplace. Since January, their focus has sharpened into a mission to get artists back into their workshops and help them create a lasting economy. Brandaid representatives have been doggedly pursuing connections with high-profile retailers interested in long-term relationships with the Haitian crafts sector.
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“What we want out of this is to be able to create in Jacmel a world brand from this papier mâché product, something that becomes famous around the world, like Wedgwood China,” Mr. Brohman said. In pursuing that goal, Brandaid is slowly reorienting Jacmel’s arts sector, which relied too heavily on a dwindling flow of tourists even before the earthquake. While some artists exported occasional orders for knick-knacks to foreign countries – hotels in the Dominican Republic, Italy and France, for example – connections to major North American retailers were elusive. Then the earthquake wreaked havoc on an already fragile community – nearly 50 ramshackle workshops near the Jacmel’s heritage district were destroyed.
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“We’ve lost just about all our clients,” said Herbie Marshall, a don of papier mâché sculptors who specializes in roosters and parrots. “I’m not living off art right now. I’m not organized for production. The clients are gone. Life is a mess,” he said in a recent interview. As Brandaid’s investment in Jacmel begins to pay off, the outlook for Mr. Marshall and his colleagues is brightening. Soon the artists will have access to a warehouse Brandaid rented with donated funds to store their finished products, protecting them from the weather. The organization also has plans to build two covered work pavilions at the site, which will provide work space for up to 80 artists. There will also be an on-site system to treat water, which Brandaid intends for the artists to sell for additional revenue. “These donations are rebuilding artisan infrastructure so artisans can fill orders and rebuild their lives and businesses,” Mr. Brohman said, adding: “We’re planning for success.”

According to Bill Bollendorf, the 2010 Haitian Art Society Conference will be in Pittsburgh October 14-16. More information available at the link below.
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http://www.artshaitian.com/Pages/haitianarthasmeeting2010.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8815775.stm

6/23/2010
Washington Post
By Jacqueline Trescott
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When Richard Kurin heard about the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti last January, he was heartbroken. As point man for decades for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, he knew the Smithsonian had to do something. In 2004 about 100 Haitian artists came to the Mall as an official centerpiece of the festival, marking Haiti's 200 years of independence from the French. So, Kurin said, "we knew the cultural workers." His immediate concern for the safety of individual artists morphed into worries about the condition of the nation's paintings, musical instruments and art galleries.
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Once he started hearing from artists who had survived and he saw televised images of injured people pulling art from the rubble, Kurin developed a plan to get the Smithsonian involved in the recovery. "Culture is important as a basic part of people's survival. The Smithsonian had the context there and we had the tools," he said. When the Folklife Festival opens Thursday, the Smithsonian will showcase one aspect of its Haiti initiative. It has expanded the core programs by inviting Boukman Eksperyans, a Grammy-nominated group, to perform its Haitian-Caribbean fusion sound Saturday.
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Two Haitian visual artists, Mireille Delisme and Levoy Exil, will also participate in the festival. Delisme will show how she incorporates voodoo designs into sequined flags. Exil will discuss how the Saint Soleil school of painting emerged from a mountain community. In the tented festival marketplace, paintings, metalwork, baskets and statues representing the crafts of 77 Haitian artists will be sold, with all proceeds helping the island's artists and art cooperatives. This year, at the 10-day, 44th annual Folklife Festival on the Mall, the focus will be on the cultures of Mexico and Asian Pacific Americans and on Smithsonian workers, such as the keepers of the fossils. The outdoor festival runs Thursday through Monday and then resumes July 1-5. Though most activities end at 5:30, the Smithsonian and the National Park Service sponsor evening concerts and dance parties.
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The festival's programs are selected by curators doing research on a topic or country, or on a particular anniversary. This allows the coordinators to dig deep into cultures and present a diversity of languages, music, food, dance and crafts. This year, in the tented areas, the small businesses of Mexico, celebrating the nation's 200th year of independence, will be represented by a candymaker from Xochimilco, instrument makers from Nayarit and Veracruz, and beekeepers from Campeche. The Asian Pacific Americans section, representing the roughly 30 Asian American and 24 Pacific Island American groups, will emphasize traditional dances and songs, including fusion styles. A local women's performance group, the Veiyasana Dance Troupe, will feature Fijian and Indian dances and island songs.
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In a second push to help Haiti, the Smithsonian is leading an international effort to preserve thousands of artworks that were rescued from collapsed structures. The Smithsonian has secured a 7,500-square-foot, three-story building, which formerly belonged to the U.N. Development Program, and is equipping it with generators, imported from Canada, and the supplies needed to repair broken frames, tears in canvases and water damage. Machines will also be used to rid the artworks of dust.
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"The conservators went down with three suitcases of supplies. These are art and cultural humanitarians. They are caring, living under harsh conditions," Kurin said during an interview in his office in the Smithsonian Castle. "We are essentially setting up a base, like we do in Antarctica." A folklorist and author, Kurin has been an official at the Smithsonian for 25 years and oversees the complex's art museums, among other divisions. Officially, he's the Smithsonian undersecretary for history, art and culture. Unofficially, he's a champion for world cultures. A tall man with salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache and beard, Kurin is a rapid, robust talker.
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He said he was shocked when he got to Haiti in early March. "It was almost overwhelming. I went to the Catholic cathedral, which had these beautiful stained-glass windows, and I'm Jewish, and I just had to cry. The earthquake has taken the guts out of people," Kurin, 59, said. The Musée d'Art Nader in Port-au-Prince, which had 9,000 to 10,000 paintings, was flattened. Kurin knew that Haiti's organizational resources were few, and that the infrastructure had collapsed, but he also understood that the local art community would tackle, and even survive, the most horrific hurdle. "The Haitian people have this resilience. It is not easy, but people have a lot of pride, and they have always had to look inward to get strength," Kurin said. "From the earliest time, [their] art expressed many feelings. It was a way of decoding nationhood and freedom."
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Liberation from the French in 18o4 and scenes of everyday life have been themes of a bold, colorful and intricate art style that stretches back five centuries. Since the earthquake, artists have created works out of twisted metal. In addition to Haiti's presence on the Mall, nearly 100 works of art created by the children of Haiti after the quake are on display at the S. Dillon Ripley Center until Oct. 17, under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
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Collaborating with the Smithsonian in the Haiti recovery project are the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Broadway League, UNESCO and the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a non-governmental organization. The Broadway League has donated $276,000 for rent and other costs. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have each donated $30,000. The project is being coordinated with Haiti's Ministry of Culture and Communication and the country's reconstruction commission. That partnership is key, Kurin said, because the longer goals of the recovery program include training Haitians in conservation methods and museum skills. The outreach, Kurin said, will show that Haiti has not been defeated, and "this is a lively, ongoing, living tradition."

6/23/2010
Washington Post
By Jacqueline Trescott
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When Richard Kurin heard about the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti last January, he was heartbroken. As point man for decades for the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, he knew the Smithsonian had to do something. In 2004 about 100 Haitian artists came to the Mall as an official centerpiece of the festival, marking Haiti's 200 years of independence from the French. So, Kurin said, "we knew the cultural workers." His immediate concern for the safety of individual artists morphed into worries about the condition of the nation's paintings, musical instruments and art galleries.
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Once he started hearing from artists who had survived and he saw televised images of injured people pulling art from the rubble, Kurin developed a plan to get the Smithsonian involved in the recovery. "Culture is important as a basic part of people's survival. The Smithsonian had the context there and we had the tools," he said. When the Folklife Festival opens Thursday, the Smithsonian will showcase one aspect of its Haiti initiative. It has expanded the core programs by inviting Boukman Eksperyans, a Grammy-nominated group, to perform its Haitian-Caribbean fusion sound Saturday.
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Two Haitian visual artists, Mireille Delisme and Levoy Exil, will also participate in the festival. Delisme will show how she incorporates voodoo designs into sequined flags. Exil will discuss how the Saint Soleil school of painting emerged from a mountain community. In the tented festival marketplace, paintings, metalwork, baskets and statues representing the crafts of 77 Haitian artists will be sold, with all proceeds helping the island's artists and art cooperatives.
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This year, at the 10-day, 44th annual Folklife Festival on the Mall, the focus will be on the cultures of Mexico and Asian Pacific Americans and on Smithsonian workers, such as the keepers of the fossils. The outdoor festival runs Thursday through Monday and then resumes July 1-5. Though most activities end at 5:30, the Smithsonian and the National Park Service sponsor evening concerts and dance parties.
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The festival's programs are selected by curators doing research on a topic or country, or on a particular anniversary. This allows the coordinators to dig deep into cultures and present a diversity of languages, music, food, dance and crafts. This year, in the tented areas, the small businesses of Mexico, celebrating the nation's 200th year of independence, will be represented by a candymaker from Xochimilco, instrument makers from Nayarit and Veracruz, and beekeepers from Campeche. The Asian Pacific Americans section, representing the roughly 30 Asian American and 24 Pacific Island American groups, will emphasize traditional dances and songs, including fusion styles. A local women's performance group, the Veiyasana Dance Troupe, will feature Fijian and Indian dances and island songs.
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In a second push to help Haiti, the Smithsonian is leading an international effort to preserve thousands of artworks that were rescued from collapsed structures. The Smithsonian has secured a 7,500-square-foot, three-story building, which formerly belonged to the U.N. Development Program, and is equipping it with generators, imported from Canada, and the supplies needed to repair broken frames, tears in canvases and water damage. Machines will also be used to rid the artworks of dust.
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"The conservators went down with three suitcases of supplies. These are art and cultural humanitarians. They are caring, living under harsh conditions," Kurin said during an interview in his office in the Smithsonian Castle. "We are essentially setting up a base, like we do in Antarctica." A folklorist and author, Kurin has been an official at the Smithsonian for 25 years and oversees the complex's art museums, among other divisions. Officially, he's the Smithsonian undersecretary for history, art and culture. Unofficially, he's a champion for world cultures. A tall man with salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache and beard, Kurin is a rapid, robust talker.
.
He said he was shocked when he got to Haiti in early March. "It was almost overwhelming. I went to the Catholic cathedral, which had these beautiful stained-glass windows, and I'm Jewish, and I just had to cry. The earthquake has taken the guts out of people," Kurin, 59, said. The Musée d'Art Nader in Port-au-Prince, which had 9,000 to 10,000 paintings, was flattened. Kurin knew that Haiti's organizational resources were few, and that the infrastructure had collapsed, but he also understood that the local art community would tackle, and even survive, the most horrific hurdle. "The Haitian people have this resilience. It is not easy, but people have a lot of pride, and they have always had to look inward to get strength," Kurin said. "From the earliest time, [their] art expressed many feelings. It was a way of decoding nationhood and freedom."
.
Liberation from the French in 18o4 and scenes of everyday life have been themes of a bold, colorful and intricate art style that stretches back five centuries. Since the earthquake, artists have created works out of twisted metal. In addition to Haiti's presence on the Mall, nearly 100 works of art created by the children of Haiti after the quake are on display at the S. Dillon Ripley Center until Oct. 17, under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.
.
Collaborating with the Smithsonian in the Haiti recovery project are the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the Broadway League, UNESCO and the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a non-governmental organization. The Broadway League has donated $276,000 for rent and other costs. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services have each donated $30,000. The project is being coordinated with Haiti's Ministry of Culture and Communication and the country's reconstruction commission. That partnership is key, Kurin said, because the longer goals of the recovery program include training Haitians in conservation methods and museum skills. The outreach, Kurin said, will show that Haiti has not been defeated, and "this is a lively, ongoing, living tradition."

Associated Press
By BRETT ZONGKER

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Haiti's recovery from the devastating earthquake in January requires more than rebuilding structures, but also repairing tattered paintings and cultural objects still buried in the rubble, the island nation's first lady Elisabeth Preval said Thursday.
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She visited the Smithsonian Institution to open an exhibit of children's artwork created after the earthquake, calling it a reminder that Haiti still needs help. The paintings and drawings will be on view through the summer. She also discussed the importance of an effort by the U.S. museum complex to lead a cultural recovery effort in Port-au-Prince, where there are few, if any, professionally trained art conservators.
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"This is fundamental for our nation," Preval told The Associated Press during her Washington visit. "This is our cultural heritage. This is us." The Smithsonian leased a building in Haiti's capital that once housed the United Nations Development Programme to create a conservation center where experts from U.S. museums can repair artworks and train Haitians to perform the intricate restoration work.
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The first paintings were taken to the center last week. Experts carefully began vacuuming destructive dust from the paintings, repairing tears and "inpainting" damaged areas so it appears nothing happened, Smithsonian conservator Hugh Shockey wrote on his blog. As many as 10,000 paintings and sculptures by Haitian masters were buried when the Musee d'Art Nader collapsed in the earthquake, said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art and culture. Thousands of other objects are buried elsewhere, tracing Haiti's struggle for independence, its abolition of slavery and other cultural milestones.
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"Imagine in the United States ... if every Smithsonian museum collapsed, the Nat Archives, the Library of Congress, the White House, the U.S. Congress all collapsed," Kurin said. "At some point we'd probably say it's worth pulling out the Star-Spangled Banner, the Declaration of Independence." The oldest objects to be recovered date back to Haiti's indigenous people from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
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Some artifacts have been recovered by hand. Others will require sophisticated engineering and heavy equipment. Murals painted on the walls of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral that depict scenes from the Bible have been a central focus. They date to prominent artists from the 1950s and are cherished as part of Haiti's cultural heritage. Some crumbled with the church but at least four remain mostly intact and can be saved, Kurin said. Experts are still trying to determine how.
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The effort has been primarily funded with private dollars. The Broadway League trade association made the largest gift of $276,000, while the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences contributed $30,000 each. Smithsonian officials are working to raise more money to sustain the effort, Kurin said.
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The involvement of U.S. cultural agencies also is a response to the looting of Iraqi treasures in 2003. Broadway producer Margo Lion, who co-chairs the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, said cultural recovery is a priority after Americans were accused of neglecting cultural preservation during the invasion of Iraq. Conservators plan to turn over most of the work to Haitian professionals by November 2011. During her visit to Washington, Preval helped open an exhibit of 100 paintings and drawings by Haitian children after the earthquake with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. They will be on view through October.
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Art has provided healing for children as a way for them to express their emotions, Preval said. "My dream and my hope is to make sure the world does not forget Haiti," Preval said of the exhibit. She hopes it can help draw more support to overhaul Haiti's schools, beginning with early childhood education, she said. The display includes paintings by U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, from their April visit to Port-au-Prince. At the direction of a 5-year-old boy, Obama painted a colorful fish and Biden painted a house.
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The Smithsonian Folklife Festival beginning June 24 on the National Mall also will feature artists from Haiti. Some of their work will be sold to benefit Haiti's cultural revival.

6/11/2010
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www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2int_new=38046
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WASHINGTON, DC. - The Smithsonian is leading a team of cultural organizations to help the Haitian government assess, recover and restore Haiti's cultural materials damaged by the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. A building in Port-au-Prince that once housed the United Nations Development Programme will be leased by the Smithsonian. The 7,500-square-foot, three-story building will serve as a temporary conservation site where objects retrieved from the rubble can be assessed, conserved and stored. It will also be the training center for Haitians who will be taking over this conservation effort in the future.
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Haiti's Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Haitian President's Commission for Reconstruction will lead the effort for Haiti. The "Smithsonian Institution-Haiti Cultural Recovery Project" is conducted in partnership with the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities with assistance from several other federal agencies-National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project is also supported by contributions from The Broadway League, the international trade association for Broadway and the Broadway community.
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The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection of cultural property affected by conflict or natural disasters, is involved in the project as is the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. Local Haitian cultural organizations and a number of international organizations will also be involved in the effort.
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The rainy season in Haiti has already begun, and the hurricane season is on its way. Much of Haiti's endangered cultural heritage is in destroyed buildings and is at risk of permanent destruction.
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"The highest priority of the Haitian government and the international humanitarian communities has rightly been to save lives and provide food, water, medical care and shelter," said Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian. "However, Haiti's rich culture, which goes back five centuries, is also in danger and we have the expertise to help preserve that heritage."
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The long-term goal, according to Kurin, is to "rescue, recover and help restore Haitian art work, artifacts and archives damaged by the earthquake." Last week, six engineers from the Smithsonian and a conservator from the Smithsonian American Art Museum spent four days in Port-au-Prince checking the leased building that will be used for conservation in the coming months. Conservators from the American Institute for Conservation and the president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield joined them.
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The artifacts recovered and eventually conserved may include building features such as stained glass and historic murals as well as paper documents, photographs, artifacts and some of the 9,000 paintings from the Nader Museum, now in ruins from the quake. "With this unprecedented inter-agency effort involving the major federal cultural institutions and the private sector, we express our collective belief that in times of great tragedy it is essential to help a country preserve and protect its cultural legacy for future generations," said Rachel Goslins, executive director of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
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In 2004, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, under the direction of Kurin, highlighted the country in the program Haiti: Freedom and Creativity from the Mountains to the Sea, which featured more than 100 traditional Haitian artists and crafts people, performers, cooks, writers, researchers and cultural experts in performances, demonstrations, workshops and concerts. That collaboration with Haitian cultural leaders resulted in an ongoing relationship with the Smithsonian.

Montgomery news
By Julie Owsik Ackerman
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Frantz Zephirin, one of Haiti’s leading contemporary painters, escaped death in the January earthquake by an unlikely action — leaving a pub early. That afternoon, Zephirin sat in one of his haunts, having a few drinks with a friend when a group of men came in, loudly discussing politics. “I say, ‘I’m not going to stay and listen,’” he recalled, “I just came to drink my beer.” So he asked for the check, told his usual waitress that no, he wouldn’t be staying for dinner that night, and left with his friend.
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Fifteen seconds later, the ground began to shake violently.“I thought it was a bomb,” he said. “I saw the street open, then close.” Black sand filled the air, making it impossible to see. He fought his way to a lamppost and clung to it until the shaking stopped. “I heard the cry of the people dying but you don’t see nothing, only dark sand. I walked back to the bar. I say, ‘Where is the bar?’ But only the sign remained. Every building was like a sandwich. The bar where I was, all the people died inside. Every day I pass to look at the place where I was supposed to die.”
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What can anyone do after witnessing such horror? Zephirin said, “The only thing I could imagine was to paint.” And so he did. “Frantz Zephirin, Art and Resilience,” his first U.S. exhibit since the earthquake, is currently running at Indigo Arts Gallery in Philadelphia, through June 19. The show includes 30 paintings, most of which he completed after the earthquake.
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This exhibit comes to Philadelphia through an unlikely friendship that developed between the exuberant Haitian painter and reserved art dealer and Merion resident Frank Giannetta, who traveled to Haiti in 1989 after his art gallery burned down. On that trip Giannetta met Zephirin at a gallery in Port-au-Prince and purchased eight or nine of his paintings.
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Giannetta said, “I didn’t speak Creole, he didn’t speak English, but between three different languages, somehow we communicated.” Zephirin contacted Giannetta the next year about having an art show in the U.S., and the two have been friends ever since. Zephirin began painting when he was 5 years old and had his first taste of success at the age of 8 when he gave two paintings to a tour guide who sold them for $40. From that day, he was hooked, using school time to think of ideas and sketch, and weekends to sit at the elbow of his uncle, Philome Obin, considered by many to be one of the greatest Haitian artists of all time. When I asked if his uncle taught him or looked at his work, Zephirin laughed.
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“I was a child. He did not think to look at my work.” But young Frantz studied which brushes his uncle used, how he applied paint to canvases, and took leftover materials to use for his own paintings.
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When he moved to Port-au-Prince at 15, Zephirin took two paintings around to the galleries there, but no one was interested in buying them. They said his work looked too much like the Cap Haitien style of his uncle, known for realistic depictions of everyday life. Frustrated after a long day of many rejections, Zephirin met a tour guide who offered him $20 for the two paintings. In anger, the artist threw his work into the ocean. “I say, ‘You are a dog, a pig, a monkey,’” he recalled, “and in my mind, the animals come. I think, now I go to paint you like an animal, like you are.”
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This was a turning point for Zephirin, who, inspired by his vision of people as animals, began to create works that depicted fantastical human/animal creatures, spirits, gods and goddesses. Giannetta said, “Rather than painting what he saw around him, he began to paint the mystical creatures coming out of his own mind.”
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After a year of working with this style, and some success in selling his work, Zephirin ventured off to the Galerie Monnin, in spite of naysayers who told him that Monnin only sold the best Haitian art. He carefully prepared a painting and brought it to Roger Monnin, the owner, who said to his son, “Michel, this guy bring something new; we need to keep this guy.” Customers snapped up paintings as quickly as Zephirin could make them, even though he worked night and day.
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Since then, Zephirin’s work has been shown in many cities of the United States and Europe. One of his paintings appeared on the cover of The New Yorker on Jan. 25, 2010, the week after the earthquake. In the current exhibit at Indigo Arts Gallery, one of the most haunting paintings is rather simple, at least for a Zephirin piece. On a tan background, swirling around a small depiction of a graveyard at the center, single eyes peer out at the viewer. Looking at the painting, Zephirin said, “It’s the eye that’s here,” pointing to the middle of his forehead. He added, “On the day of the earthquake, the people were so confused. One moment they’re here, the next moment they’re not. They were swept up,” he said, making a sound and motion of water quickly going down a drain. “The other eye is looking, saying ‘What happened?’”
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Tony Fisher, director of the Indigo Arts Gallery, observed that many of the paintings in this exhibit “show an opening from one world into another, but the dominant one is what we would call ‘the spirit world.’” An example of this is “Rara ti boujwa,” a 48 x 48 inch canvas, covered by three large rainbow-colored spirits. At the center is a small circle depicting a street party with white bourgeois people, because, according to Zephirin, “Before, the carnival was for the blacks, the poor. Now we’re all the same.”
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Sitting in a café in Wynnewood, Zephirin’s gratitude for his life was palpable. He radiated the kind of joy one finds in spite of darkness, in spite of living through the goudou goudou, the phrase Haitians use to refer to the January earthquake.
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“We are supposed to live every moment and enjoy the moment,” he said, “because you don’t know. You can lose everything in a second — your business, your house, your children — everything.” He dreams now of starting a foundation to help rebuild his country, address deforestation and assist street children.
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When asked why art matters, in the face of such tragedy and suffering, Zephirin said, “The artist is the witness of everything that’s happened. Cameras can’t give you what you have inside. They see what you have outside, but you need the vision of the artist to paint what’s inside.” The night of the earthquake, with great difficulty, without any standing landmarks, through the chaos and devastation, Zephirin found his way home. Blessed to have his life, and even a house still standing, he lit a candle, and did the only thing he could — he painted.
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Julie Owsik Ackerman writes essays on creativity, travel, surfing and other topics at AnythingforMaterial.blogspot.com.

5/17/2010
Art Knowledge News
By Wendell MacGivens
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WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian is leading a team of cultural organizations to help the Haitian government assess, recover and restore Haiti’s cultural materials damaged by the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. A building in Port-au-Prince that once housed the United Nations Development Programme will be leased by the Smithsonian. The 7,500-square-foot, three-story building will serve as a temporary conservation site where objects retrieved from the rubble can be assessed, conserved and stored. It will also be the training center for Haitians who will be taking over this conservation effort in the future.
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Haiti’s Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Haitian President’s Commission for Reconstruction will lead the effort for Haiti. The “Smithsonian Institution–Haiti Cultural Recovery Project” is conducted in partnership with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities with assistance from several other federal agencies—National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project is also supported by contributions from The Broadway League, the international trade association for Broadway and the Broadway community.
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The U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a nonprofit, non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection of cultural property affected by conflict or natural disasters, is involved in the project as is the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. Local Haitian cultural organizations and a number of international organizations will also be involved in the effort.
.
The rainy season in Haiti has already begun, and the hurricane season is on its way. Much of Haiti’s endangered cultural heritage is in destroyed buildings and is at risk of permanent destruction.
.
“The highest priority of the Haitian government and the international humanitarian communities has rightly been to save lives and provide food, water, medical care and shelter,” said Richard Kurin, Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian. “However, Haiti’s rich culture, which goes back five centuries, is also in danger and we have the expertise to help preserve that heritage.”
.
The long-term goal, according to Kurin, is to “rescue, recover and help restore Haitian art work, artifacts and archives damaged by the earthquake.” Last week, six engineers from the Smithsonian and a conservator from the Smithsonian American Art Museum spent four days in Port-au-Prince checking the leased building that will be used for conservation in the coming months. Conservators from the American Institute for Conservation and the president of the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield joined them.
.
The artifacts recovered and eventually conserved may include building features such as stained glass and historic murals as well as paper documents, photographs, artifacts and some of the 9,000 paintings from the Nader Museum, now in ruins from the quake. “With this unprecedented inter-agency effort involving the major federal cultural institutions and the private sector, we express our collective belief that in times of great tragedy it is essential to help a country preserve and protect its cultural legacy for future generations,” said Rachel Goslins, executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
.
In 2004, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, under the direction of Kurin, highlighted the country in the program Haiti: Freedom and Creativity from the Mountains to the Sea, which featured more than 100 traditional Haitian artists and crafts people, performers, cooks, writers, researchers and cultural experts in performances, demonstrations, workshops and concerts. That collaboration with Haitian cultural leaders resulted in an ongoing relationship with the Smithsonian.

5/12/2010
USA Today
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For days, Hugues Larose lay quietly in his bunk aboard the Navy hospital ship Comfort, asking little of his doctors and nurses, a peaceful soul aboard a vessel echoing with the cries of shattered, tormented people. Larose was one of the first patients brought aboard the Comfort when it reached Port-au-Prince eight days after the Jan. 12 earthquake. After a few days on board, he asked for a pencil and paper "to give birth to my thoughts." Using the aluminum clipboard hanging beside his bed, he began to sketch a woman crushed by a telephone pole, a survivor sitting dazed in the street, limbs jutting from pancaked buildings, frantic people pouring into the streets, and ships, including the Comfort, anchored offshore.
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"My fingers are influenced by the earthquake, all collapsed houses and dead," Larose says. "Survivors look so different." In an instant, the simple black-and-white sketch carried the Comfort's doctors and nurses ashore to witness the immediate aftermath of letremblement de terre— "the trembling of the earth" — that in a few minutes flattened Haiti's densely populated capital, killing 250,000 people and injuring more. It allowed them to experience the tragedy, not through a camera lens, but through the eyes of a survivor who happened to be an artist.
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"We had no idea that he was an artist of that caliber. Nor did we have any idea of the visions in his head," says Lt. Sam Harris, one of his nurses.
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Larose's visions, and those of other artists caught up in the quake, represent the first tremor of a cultural aftershock that will influence Haitian art for generations, says Duke University professor Laurent Dubois. In Haiti, a country with so many illiterate people, visual art is an urgent and potent form of communication, Dubois says, layered with symbols of slavery, the fight for independence, poverty, the entwined spiritual traditions of Haitian voodoo and Catholicism — and now the earthquake.
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Artists will inevitably play a critical role in rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake, too, he says. "Artists remind people they have common connections and roots. They remind people that Haiti's still there, even though its buildings are gone."
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When the earthquake struck, Larose was working on a canvas. "I was ending a painting in the yard of my house, sheltered from a wall, when suddenly I heard a heavy noise and everything was shaking," he says. "I knew it was an earthquake. I was going to move when the wall collapsed ... my leg was broken and so was my clavicle. I saw my little son Steven and Jefferson (a cousin "I consider as my son") under cinder bricks. I saw a white cloud."
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Fortunately, Larose says, his wife, Foufoune, their son Stanley and Jefferson's mother, Junia, were wedged in a doorway and were uninjured. Jefferson and Steven suffered head injuries; both survived and are back in school. A friend suggested Larose try to make his way to the Comfort. "Since my childhood, I wanted to get in a helicopter, but not in that way. Not as a patient," he says.
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Time passed slowly as he waited in Ward 3 Forward for surgery on his broken right leg. Dozens of patients with catastrophic injuries went first. He didn't complain, Harris says. "I did not say a word," Larose says. "I concentrated on myself." After Larose revealed himself as an artist, a special relationship blossomed between Larose and members of the Comfort's crew, according to interviews with doctors and nurses and Larose himself, who is reunited with his family and was able to answer questions for this story via e-mail.
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Doctors and nurses accustomed to tragedy began visiting Larose, to talk to him and to watch him work, says Lt. Cmdr. Mark Lynch. "People sought him out and wanted to be near him," he says. "At some point, we had to begin turning away visitors. That's how much he affected people." Even Capt. James Ware, the hospital's commanding officer, moved by the sketches, went to see him. He likens the pictures to those drawn by children who survived the Hiroshima bomb. "I knew immediately they would speak of the Haiti tragedy to Haitian children for generations to come."
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Larose left the Comfort 17 days after he arrived. His right leg has healed. His collarbone is another story, the fracture still visible under his skin. He's struggling to eke out a living by painting, propping his easel near the family's cramped quarters in a battered van parked in the district of Carrefour.
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His work draws praise from experts in Haitian art. Bill Bollendorf, owner of Galerie Macondo in Pittsburgh, says Larose's paintings are "original and emotional, and his technique is very good." For Lynch, Larose's drawings remain a vivid link to Haiti's earthquake and his experience of caring for survivors. "He's one of the folks from the Comfort who stay on my mind," he says. "I open up his drawings frequently. For some reason, it gives me comfort to look at them. It lets me know he's OK."