Wilson Bigaud (b. 1905 – 2010) / Chicken Farmer, 1957 / Oil on board / WCA Collection
“Haitian painting challenges the magical notion of ‘authenticity’ in art. It is a community endeavor. An entire people’s discourse. The measure of its dynamism.”
- Glissant, Édouard, and J. Michael Dash (transl.). Caribbean Discourse : Selected Essays. University Press of Virginia, 1989. 157.
In the passage above, Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s reflections on Haitian painting speak to the breadth of the medium and the range of its artists. Haitian painting embodies a “cross-cultural poetics,” drawing on symbolism and the marvelous to shape a wider visual language. For Glissant, the significance of this work extends beyond questions of origin. Much like oral traditions throughout the African diaspora, Haitian art serves as a form of knowledge, offering signs, narratives, and insights rooted in both its history and its present.
The expansiveness of Haiti’s pictorial discourse is evident at the Waterloo Center for the Arts At the Waterloo Center for the Arts (WCA), paintings make up the largest share of the Haitian art collection. Painting has a long and vibrant history in Haiti, reaching back to the early 19th century. By the mid-20th century, many artists had developed distinctive personal styles that shaped the field and even gave rise to identifiable schools of art. The number of paintings at the WCA reflects the medium’s wide appeal and its growing market and audiences. Yet information about individual works is often uneven or incomplete. Through our digitization efforts, we are developing a more detailed metadata system to address these gaps. Our goal is to link artists, trace their influences, and help build an art history that follows the evolution of Haitian painting across generations.
In December 2019, an HADC team led by Fredo Rivera and three student researchers traveled through South Florida to study public collections of Haitian art.
During a visit to the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, we learned about their approach to photographing and preserving works during digitization. Director Bonnie Clearwater and Exhibitions Registrar Diana Blanco noted that the backs of canvases can hold valuable information, including stamps or labels linking a piece to specific galleries, art schools, or other organizations. Some works arrived in their original frames, while others were simply stretched canvases, boards, or even unstretched fabric. The museum had taken care to photograph the reverse side of each piece to document these differences.
Haitian paintings at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s storage facility in Davie. Note the stamps on the back of the canvas.
HADC follows a similar approach when digitizing paintings from the WCA and other collections. Our metadata schema includes fields for information found on the back of a work, allowing us to capture details that might otherwise be overlooked. By looking beyond the surface of the canvas or board, we aim to strengthen the provenance of Haitian paintings and better trace their artistic lineages.