Edwidge Danticat: prediction

Transcript context

…If I think of the Haitian arts today, I think of painting possibly as having peaked between the ’40s and the ’70s. The most interesting work today tends to be in Vodou sculpture. Why has that shift come about? Those are very large pieces. They’re like installations. They are hard to buy. They’re hard to transport. I think if you stayed there, you would be reducing your possible level of enjoyment because what’s most in that early period, the Centre d’Art period in the ’40s, like the early period, when the tourism that you were talking about, when people went to Haiti, what they bought the most was what they call naif, primitif art, which is super colorful, really beautiful figures, often market scenes. That’s traveled very well. But there was always, at that same time, artists who were a little bit more adventurous, artists who were somewhat abstract. At the same time, there were these artists who were like, “This is what the tourists want. That’s what I’m going to produce.” Throughout the Caribbean, even if you went to other islands, you would see these paintings, and they became almost a little bit mass-produced, but they’re gorgeous. I have some. The sculptures you’re talking about — those were started actually by . . . I used to work for Jonathan Demme, the filmmaker, who was a huge collector of Haitian art. In the office, whenever we acquired those sculptures . . . I traveled a lot to Haiti with him. He called them Liautauds because the original artist was Liautaud. When I was growing up, in cemeteries, often we had metal flowers, really, because you would do a wreath of metal. It would be metal from oil drums because that lasted longer, as opposed to if you have a wreath of just roses — that dies quickly, so people would make these beautiful wreaths. Liautaud was from St. Mark, which is really the home of these sculptures. Now, there’s a whole industry in those sculptures for sure. I have to say, they’re very hard, I agree. You can’t just put that in your suitcase, often, like you would the paintings. People used to roll them. But they’re gorgeous, and now they’re almost three dimensional. One Christmas, we bought one that was a nativity scene that was 3D. But there are a lot of wonderful young artists now. Some of them are moving away from the more primitive, naive Lionel St-Eloi. There’re so many whose names are escaping me, but there are just wonderful artists worth exploring. You mentioned Duval-Carrié, who is outside of Haiti, but there are quite a few other young artists, too, who are inside Haiti, who would use both that style of sculpture but also do painting, who do installations or doing really, really exciting things. I own a Zobop by Liautaud, by the way. Great work. It’s by the fireplace. Why is it you think that Black African Americans have not evolved as natural collectors of Haitian art? It seems to be much more the nerdy White guys who buy it, or well-to-do families.…

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