For almost a week now I have been trying to write about the devastating earthquake in Haiti from the point of view of art and culture, but it didn't seem right—or, at least, not the right time. With so many lives lost or destroyed, and with people still missing, what could I possibly say about paintings and sculpture that would be up to the task? But of course, paintings and sculptures come from painters and sculptors. What about the people who made the works of art? Where are their stories?
The New York Times recently published an article on artists in Haiti who were hurt or who lost their lives and their work in the earthquake. Institutions crumbled. One artist, Paul Jude Camelot, a student at the École Nationale des Arts, was shown with bandaged hands, weeping over one of his sculptures. "That's all I had left," he told the reporter from the Times. "We had so much despite the fact that we're so poor," said Axelle Liautaud, an art dealer from Port au Prince who was trying to save murals in the Holy Trinity Cathedral that were badly damaged.
I thought of the work of Loïs Mailou Jones—well represented in the collection of American Art—who taught at Howard University for nearly forty years, but who also had a long-standing relationship with Haiti, beginning in 1953, when she married Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel. When I look at her painting of Eglise Saint Joseph, I marvel at her technique, her use of color, the translation of a Cezanne land- and skyscape onto the shacks of Port-au-Prince circa 1954. You can see her influences, from training at the School of Fine Arts, Boston, to her time in Paris, to her African-inspired works—including the highly regarded Les Fetiches from 1938, also in the collection of American Art. But for now, I keep staring at the image of Eglise Saint Joseph. I enter that name into the Google search engine, then add the words Haiti and earthquake as I try to figure out if the church is still standing, as the world tallies its many losses.
