Haiti at the Grand Palais, Paris LeGrace Benson Haïti : Deux siècles de création artistique. Exhibition, Grand Palais, Paris, November 2014– February 2015. Haïti : Deux siècles de création artistique (catalogue of the exhibition). By Mireille Pérodin-Jérôme and Régine Cuzin. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2014. ISBN 9782711861590. 231 pp. €39 cloth. This intelligently designed exposition of Haitian art and its thoughtful catalogue tell stories of Haiti missing from even the best of the history books. The illustrated catalogue should be assigned reading for any course on the history of Haiti, including those concerned with battles, economics, and politics. Curators Mireille Pérodin-Jérôme of Haiti and Régine Cuzin of Paris selected artist Édouard Duval-Carrié to design the entrance to the exhibition as well as to present one of his paintings. An astute choice it was, as this artist is exceptionally knowledgeable about the history of his country. He has garnered and read a collection of maps, documents, tracts, antique images, and objects that are literary and material evidence of the lives lived in the country, from before Columbus landed in 1492 to the immediate present. The monumental “H” he placed at the exhibit’s entryway signals “Haiti,” but it also announces “history.” Passage to the art was up the grand stairway to the exhibition hall and through Duval-Carrié’s fancy illuminated portal, reminiscent of Haiti’s fanals. (These are miniature houses children make of cardboard and colored tissues, lit from within by candles, as special gifts at Christmas. Fanals are said to hark back to ancient West African lantern feasts closing and beginning the years, like the solstice, recast into a symbol of the Nativity of Jesus.) Visitors entered a path leading through the complicated [End Page 147] story of a nation that remarkably—some say magically—freed itself from French dominion in 1804. This, like all the recent flowering of art biennales, expos, fairs, and special exhibitions, is both mise-en-scène and performance, with spectators unavoidably participants in the drama. Sometimes the spectator-actors leave instructed, sometimes only entertained an hour or two. Either way there is some gain. A passive visitor to “Haïti” would have found delight in the variety, bemused by mysteries and amazed at extravagances of scintillations, color, and scale. A more attentive spectator would depart from this exhibition with a significantly revised knowledge concerning a people presented in today’s media as beset with extreme poverty, governments that turn away from the needs of citizens, yearly hurricanes and floods, and periodic earthquakes along two major tectonic fault lines. In contrast, this exhibition presents real people who live in ti kay (little homes stacked up against hillsides), put in and harvest crops, buy and sell food in the markets, kiss, fight heroic battles, come together in Masonic lodges, worship in Christian churches and Vodou temples, lead the nation, and make fun of politicians. The Haitian artists present the lives of their compatriots, who laugh today knowing that tomorrow they will weep over the dead. Above all, the exhibit informs a viewer that despite all the writings about “naïve” or “primitive” art from a “small” nation, there is not one image here from any artist that could be described in those words, nor is Haiti’s import as a nation small; rather, its people and its art are of inherent international consequence. The enjoyable beauties of the show arrived in Paris after several years of discussions with cultural attachés and museum directors, fundraising efforts, and cordial agreements at the level of national presidents. All of this is implicit in the grandeur of the setting and on the first pages of the catalogue. The initial pages themselves serve as historic documentation of necessary international relations. The art works had been harvested from a diaspora of private collections and museums. In a few cases works were done especially for this showing. Although they have all by now returned into that diaspora, from November of 2014 to February of 2015 they were gathered in the Grand Palais simultaneously as didactic scenery and guests in the participatory drama of...